I have always opposed the imprisonment of people at the base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. I think our actions have been un-Constitutional, against the values of law, and ultimately self-defeating.

Others have argued that it is ok because the people there are "bad" people. If we caught them, the argument goes, they must have done something bad in the first place so they deserve to be there.

Of course this line of reasoning is the exact opposite of our principle of "innocence until proven guilty" - one of the fundamental tenets of our legal system designed to protect people from government abuse. (Like that whole torture thing we will never see the end of.) We, the citizens, have no fucking clue who these people are or what they have done (if anything) and it is wrong to presume guilt.

In the President's words, these people are "enemy combatants" captured on the "battlefield" which makes them enemies and dangerous. The emotional argument has held the day. People who dont trust the government with tax money are content to let them imprison and torture folks as long as its for a good cause.

This week we get a list of detainees, some 4 years after this debate started.

Uighurs? Is that some kind of yogurt or something? My world geography skills arent that great but how does the dragnet in Afghanistan pick up a bunch of guys from China? I know the President was bottom of his class at Yale and Harvard but you can tell Afghanistan isnt China just by the number of letters. (Although Iraq could almost be China...)

Allies' nationals gone from camps

A Miami Herald analysis of a Pentagon roster of captives at Guantánamo finds that the prison's population has markedly changed in two years.

BY CAROL ROSENBERG

Posted on Sat, Apr. 22, 2006

Guantánamo's captive population today is overwhelmingly natives of Arab nations and Afghanistan after the United States sent home nearly every detainee from its Western allies in the war on terrorism, an analysis of a newly released Pentagon roster of detainees reveals.

The Miami Herald used announcements of prisoner releases to update the 2004 Pentagon roster of Guantánamo captives, and found that the Bush administration thinned the prison population by more than 60 -- sending home almost every Western-born captive.

As a result, nearly half the captives now held at the detention center for suspected terrorists hail from Osama bin Laden's native and ancestral homelands, Saudi Arabia (128) and Yemen (106). Afghanistan came in third with 97 captives.

The analysis provides the fullest demographic picture so far at the 4-year-old prison camps on the U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba.

The Miami Herald accounted for the current prison population by subtracting from the list about 65 captives from 20 nations who have been sent home since the roster was created two years ago.

That leaves the number of prisoners at Guantánamo today at about 490. The prisoners were born in 35 countries plus the still-disputed, semi-autonomous Palestinian West Bank. They are overwhelmingly Arab and South Asian, with a smattering of Muslims from former Soviet republics.

It also includes the names of more than a dozen so-called nonenemy combatants, without distinguishing them from terror suspects.

Captive No. 283 on the list, for example, is Abu Bakr Qassem, a Chinese citizen from that communist country's Muslim minority Uighur population who is no longer categorized as an ''enemy combatant'' -- and whom a U.S. District Court judge has declared unlawfully detained. Yet the list does not distinguish him from the other terror suspects.

U.S. military panels investigating the 558 captives named in the list concluded that 38 of the captives were inappropriately caught in the worldwide net that started in January 2002, when suspected radical Muslim terrorists were funneled to Bagram, Afghanistan -- and then by air bridge to the prison camps overlooking the Caribbean.

The remaining detainees are for the most part Persian Gulf Arabs, South Asians and northern Africans -- plus a curious population of up to 22 Uighurs, members of a Muslim minority in China. U.S. policy prevents the Uighurs being repatriated out of fear they may be tortured or oppressed for their religion.