"The Worst of the Worst"

The fact that there are indeed many vicious terrorists in Guantanamo Bay does not mean it is a fair, humane or effective instrument of a fair, humane or effective policy. About one fifth of the inmates were actually captured by US forces. The evidence for the rest is often extremely sketchy. It's hard to convey this until you hear the specifics. Here are some:

In a hearing on Oct. 26, 2004, a transcript shows, one detainee was told that another had identified him as having attended a terrorism training camp.

The detainee asked that his accuser be brought to testify. “We don’t know his name,” the senior officer on the hearing panel said.

At another hearing, later reviewed by a federal judge, a Turkish detainee, Murat Kurnaz, was said to have been associated with an Islamic missionary group. He had also traveled with a man who had become a suicide bomber.

“It would appear,” Judge Joyce Hens Green wrote in 2005, “that the government is indefinitely holding the detainee possibly for life solely because of his contacts with individuals or organizations tied to terrorism and not because of any terrorist activities that the detainee aided, abetted or undertook himself.”

In a third hearing, an Afghan detainee said he had indeed been a jihadist during the 1980s war against the Soviet Union, when a lot of Afghans were jihadists. Was that what the accusation against him meant, he asked, or was it referring to later, during the American war?

Again, a very traditional, conservative and careful patriot has risen to the occasion to illuminate these abuses and to try to correct them. And that man, reservist Colonel Stephen Abraham, had a role in getting the Supreme Court to review its own previous decision. America does indeed require the virtue of its most loyal citizens to survive as a constitutional republic. Thank God some still exist.