Eschaton

I'm sure they're bad people..

The soldiers moving swiftly through Afghanistan a year ago swept up thousands of suspected terrorists, members of the Taliban or Al Qaeda who had reigned cruelly over Afghans and launched attacks against U.S. targets. Hundreds of suspects were flown to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where they remain. But as often happens in the initial confusion of military assaults, some of those arrested were innocent. It's long past time for the Pentagon to determine which were guilty only of being in the wrong place at the wrong time and to free them.

Military sources told Times reporter Greg Miller that dozens of prisoners in the jail at the U.S. Navy base in Guantanamo have no meaningful links to Al Qaeda or the Taliban. In many cases, intelligence officers in Afghanistan recommended that the prisoners not be sent there in the first place. Their superiors overruled them.

The sources said operatives extensively questioned at least 59 detainees who they determined were of no further intelligence value. Questioners recommended that those prisoners be freed in Afghanistan or sent to their homes in Pakistan. The U.S. shipped them to Cuba.

Keeping innocent men in jail intensifies anti-Americanism in the prisoners' home countries. It also can push the guiltless into the arms of terrorists at Guantanamo. The problem is made worse by the Bush administration's decision to classify the prisoners as enemy combatants who can be held indefinitely without hearings or lawyers. Representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross monitor jail conditions, and the organization said in February that the captives were entitled under the Geneva Conventions to have a hearing before "a competent tribunal."

In March, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said some prisoners might be transferred to other countries and some might be released. Yet, nine months later, the U.S. has freed only five, including two men who appeared to be in their 70s and said they never helped the Taliban. Military sources suggest that many of the remaining 600 prisoners are caught up in a bureaucracy that is afraid to free them lest someone later prove they were terrorists after all.