let us have a serious, careful, realistic discussion

fear-mongering aside, I genuinely would like to know what the plan is for all the current detainees.

Do we pack them into our prisons here?
Do we release them?
Do we have try each of them in court here?
Do we extradite them (which is basically releasing them, but w/ a free ticket home)?

I'm all for closing Guantanamo, but I know it's a lot more complicated than just shutting the lights off & locking the doors.
I just wonder what the full scale plan actually is.

I don't think there are any answers for these questions and that's why it'll take a year to close the prison.

My brother is one of the military defense lawyers for the detainees. There never were hundreds of terrorists. The actual number of detainees who had any part in planning or executing terrorist attacks is somewhere between 10 and 20. The rest were innocent of anything, were completely peripheral players like message couriers or were caught fighting against our troops. The last group are POWs according to the laws of everyone except the Bush administration which invented its own label of Unlawful Enemy Combatant for them.

That's why they've already released 2/3rds of the detainees. Even the Bushies said they were only going to try around 1/4 of the remaining detainees.
what do you do with the ones that are left? It's really fucking simple, you review everyone's case and

a) the innocent - release those you deem innocent or non-dangerous to their home country or third-party country that will take them. If no one will take them, then you find sponsors and release them in the US. The 17 Uighurs at Gitmo are perfect examples of this, they have been determined to be completely innocent of anything against the US, cannot be safely returned to China and have willing sponsors in the US. We should let them come here as political asylees. We are responsible for this mess, so we should do what we can to ameliorate it.

b) the guilty - try those you have a legitimate cases against. US courts are perfectly capable of trying terrorist cases, including handling any classified information that may be involved. It's not like they haven't done it before. It's also the only thing that will give some legitimacy to our claims. Nothing will convince the street rabble that these guys will get a fair trial here, but it will allow their governments cover to improve relations with the US. And it will immensely help our standing with our allies.

c) those you can't try for some reason (i.e., the only hard evidence against them is tortured confessions which can't be used in court) but you have legit reasons to suspect may be dangerous - reclassify this group as POWs in the Afghan or Iraq war and put them in a detention camp in the US with all the rights and privileges of a POW according to the Geneva Convention. Periodically review their cases to determine if they are still a danger to the US, if not send them home.

That is a good summary. I would modify it to say that at this point we cannot try any of them -- that well is poisoned beyond all hope. If there are dangerous terrorists in there (and surely after all this time we've created some if they weren't there already) then they should be released without qualification to some country with a pretense of independence from the US. I believe switzerland volunteered to take them...

Not of course that anything like that would ever happen.

Thanks.

Speaking of new administrations and torture (OK we weren't, but I'm trying to slide this past the no OT rule), can I please give myself a public pat on the back for my 3/1/07 call on 24's help in preparing America for a black(ish) president.

Well, then by that same logic...

A woman will be elected in 2012.