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In some ways they are. The detainees have not been convicted, and the corner that the US has painted itself into means they never will be. America has not been consistent in its prosecution of its "war" on terror, and Guantanamo Bay is the focus point of the consequences. The problem is this: if you treat them as criminals then it is only a law and order question, you are not fighting a war. But if you are fighting a war then these are enemy soldiers, which means you cannot try them as criminals. What we get is people being held as criminals but being prepared for a military tribunal. If they ever get to that point they will be able to say "thank you for admitting that I am a soldier".
We end up with a situation where people are effectively being indefinitely detained with no legal rights whatever, under brutal conditions in which torture is the order of the day. We all know that torture does not get you reliable intelligence, it just gets you information that the captive thinks you want to hear with no way to verify it. Even an innocent captive will incriminate themselves and spin a wild tale of intrigue and manoeuvres to make the pain go away, and with enough such experiences may actually come to believe their own fabrications. Of course, without trials we have no idea if there are innocent people in there are we are not allowed to find out.
Ultimately we have people holding a great deal of power over other individuals and breaking both national and international law to which they are signatories and we have only their word that it is justified and absolutely nothing preventing any one of us from being put in their ourselves.
I think that maybe those who claim to be on our side in this are worse because we hold them to a higher standard and they deliberately fail to meet it. And I doubt there are many crimes that those detained are accused of that our own militaries have no themselves committed by some means in the prosecution of their various wars, and as we have seen, those on our side who expose such crimes are quickly silences and imprisoned themselves.
Honestly, I'd not feel safe in the company of either faction. But only one faction already has power over my life.
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Mmmm. Slightly hyperbolic, but not much.
To say that torture
never gets reliable information is very wrong. It gives you a mixture. Pretty much like any type of interrogation. Tons of useful information has been gotten out of these people by torturing them. That doesn't make it right, but let's not pretend like nothing good has happened because of it. Attacks have been stopped.
Look at it this way. We learned a great deal about hypothermia from the German experiments on Jews (Haha Godwin's Law, bitches!) If you were to say that there was no useful information gotten from those experiments, you would be wrong. They were sick, and they were disgusting, and those who performed are irredeemable. But, you can't say that information wasn't received. Because it was. We want to say that, because it was wrong. But the truth is the truth, regardless of morality, or ethics.
So, you shouldn't ignore the parts of my posts where I say that what the U.S. is doing is wrong, and should be stopped, and should have never happened in the first place, just because I mention that the vast majority of the people having it done to them are terrible, disgusting murderers, or that the reason for doing it is stop more terrible, disgusting murders. Because, again, the truth is the truth, regardless of morality.