Word: gitmo
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...Earlier this week came the release of a former detainee, Ethiopian native Binyam Mohamed, in Britain, an event that came with the by now familiar alleged horror stories of rendition and torture. For the anti-Gitmo crowd, this was proof positive that the prison is an abomination and that many, if not most, detainees should be released...
...Next came a Washington Post investigation into the life and death of Abdallah Saleh al-Ajmi. Upon his release in November 2005 after four years at Gitmo, al-Ajmi became a suicide bomber, eventually driving an explosive-laden truck into an Iraqi army base near Mosul last March, killing 13 Iraqi soldiers and injuring many more. This, exclaimed the pro-Gitmo group, was proof positive that detainees should not be released. (See pictures of prison life inside Baghdad's Camp Cropper...
...Then an appeals court in Paris overturned convictions against five former detainees who had been handed over to France in 2007 and then tried and jailed on terrorism-related charges. The court ruled that the men had been convicted on the basis of intelligence gathered during interrogations at Gitmo - and that such intelligence failed to meet French standards for permissible evidence. The court said there was no other proof that the men had conspired to commit terrorist acts...
...That one could cut both ways, says Vijay Padmanabhan, a visiting professor at the Cardozo School of Law and former counsel to the State Department on detainee issues. On one hand, it suggests that releasing dangerous people from Gitmo "poses some threat they could return to terrorist activity." On the other hand, the French court demonstrated that "other countries are unable to use evidence procured in Guantánamo, which may hamper, not help, our ability to detain people in the long run." Padmanabhan believes that "ultimately, the big picture here is Guantánamo is an unsustainable model...
...Nonetheless, the French court's judgment points to a key difficulty the Obama Administration will face as it wrestles with how to deal with Gitmo's 245 remaining detainees. The plan is to try the hard-core terrorists in federal courts, but the Bush Administration's authorization of legally questionable interrogation techniques at the prison now gives many detainees a get-out-of-jail card. "Anytime you try to use criminal courts to prosecute, there's a good chance they're going to be acquitted," says Padmanabhan...