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by Todd Daigneault

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In Bush's "war against terror", the Guantanamo Bay detainess have less rights than the Japanese-American internee's did during a world war that devastated Europe and Asia. Even then, subsequent supreme court rulings eventually decreed that the Japanese-American internment was "unconstituional". With the 9/11 attacks hitting the US homeland, and the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan, many suspects ended up being transferred to the US Gitmo facility on that chunk of Cuba that the US has a hundred year lease on from former Cuban president Batista.

It was decided to transfer many of these prisoners there, since technically it was not part of the US homeland, and therefore technically not bound by the US laws governing the arrest, detention and "due process" of prisoners facing criminal charges. Also, helping this process, the vast majority of these prisoners were not US citizens and therefore not protected by the US constituion. The US government in its well justified war on terror had the legal loopholes to hold as they described "enemy combatants" for years without charge and to basically hold trials that could lead to the death penalty in courts that would be considered a joke on US shores.

There would be some justification to this if these detainees were high-valued and could provide profitable intelligence. In the years since the detainees have been at Gitmo, little or no useful intelligence has come out of these men, and the dreaded al-Qaeda has rebuilt its infrastructure in a tribal border region of Pakistan with Afghanistan. There have been mmany false alarms leading (thank God) to nothing, as any intelligence gleaned is likely woefully dated in a flexible and dynamic terror organization. Therefore, it is to be assumed that most of these detainees were nothing more than "foot soldiers", roughly the equivalent of corporals and sergeants in a regular military-with a few officers thrown in for good measure. The high-value targets are in hiding, dead, or re-established with new commanders (or ones from the past operating freely in the lawless region).

Global pressure has already led to the release of many of these suspects to their home countries. For many of these remaining Guantanamo Bay detainees to have proper rights, they should be tried in American courts and receive stiff American sentences, including the death penalty (if justified). This will strengthen the war on terror by offering these detainees legitimate democractic freedoms-something that was taken away from the thousands of Americans who were ruthlessly and cold-bloodely murdered on the morning of 9/11.

Learn more about this author, Todd Daigneault.

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