Presuming terrorists are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law is suicidal.

Terrorists have no rights. They are pirates. Those taken in arms on the battlefield by U.S. forces, upon out-living their intelligence value should receive 112 grains of copper jacketed lead to the back of the neck and their families billed for the cost of the ammunition.

Terrorists acquired from other sources who have outlived their usefulness to American intelligence should be micro-chipped and extradited to the country that rendered them to the Americans.

That is one of the questions that i think most current candidates have not been asked, particularly those who want to close it: If you believe we should close the facility at Guantanamo Bay, what should replace it, and how would you implement this change?

Given Europe’s criticism of us, I think we should push for a site near the ICC, and under NATO supervision.

In a post I wrote in 2006, I quoted Dr. Emile Nakhehl, who was the Director of the Political Islam Strategic Analysis Program at the CIA. I cited him as stating “Some of the detainees participated in jihad in Afghanistan, mostly against the Northern Alliance; others did not but were caught in the dragnet—having been at the wrong place and at the wrong time. Even the command down there knew that probably one-third of the prisoners were neither terrorists nor jihadists, and wouldn’t have been there if we weren’t paying a bounty to Pakistani security forces for every Middle Eastern-looking person they handed over to us. Almost every detainee I spoke to claimed that we paid $5,000 per person. Unfortunately, we treated everyone the same, which led the non-jihadists at Guantanamo to hate us as much as the rest, becoming more hardened in their attitudes toward the US and more disappointed in the American sense of fairness and justice.”

This more than anything, to me, argues against keeping Gitmo open. Enough time has passed that we should have had a new system, that we do not, is no one’s fault but our own.

Gitmo is packed with detainees who have never attacked America or had anything to do with terrorism. You mention the tribal rewards, but what about the general incompetence of foreign police and counter-intelligence services in Yemen, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, etc? What about sheer malice (i.e. pinning a dissident as a terrorist or a local troublemaker as one just to get rid of him)?

Worse is the disturbingly trivial and nearly non-existent evidence against most of these detainees. The government literally is standing on breaking thin ice with most of these cases.

If the US military’s own estimates that only 12-15% of the detainees are truly terrorists, what is the real purpose of holding the other 85% who are either low-level troublemakers or simply innocent people trapped in a bizarre legal system only Stalin could appreciate?

If I was a Pakistani or Yemeni falsely held in Gitmo, I would consider joining the Islamic resistance after finally being released too. You’re not going to deny my freedom and then expect me to take it lying down. We’re creating more terrorists with Gitmo, quite akin to how we mutate low-level drug offenders into hardened criminals by sending them to prison. It doesn’t fill a market gap, it creates a problem.

We dillute our values (if we have any left) by arresting a Pakistani in Afghanistan who we have little direct evidence about, then handing him over to a corrupt legal system to face trial with that sliver of weak evidence (perhaps after engaging in some enhanced interrogation tactics that would make his trial in America impossible) and have his likely false imprisonment or execution on our hands.

The real way forward would be to stop trusting the bullshit assertions of foreigners who have alterior agendas and far different standards of innocence and guilt and move on to a more intelligent policy of catching and/or killing our enemies in the shadows by ourselves and with limited foreign assistance that stays within that nation’s borders without resorting to the false pretenses of justice for all and human rights we obviously don’t believe in anymore for non-Americans.

Catch them in Pakistan. Interrogate them in Pakistan. Release or try them in Pakistan.