You Call This Justice?

The lead article in today’s New York Times, “Details of Lives in an American Limbo,” condenses 700 classified military documents about the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba into just a few poignant vignettes, but it makes its case in a striking way: decisions about who gets released and who doesn’t are arbitrary and often based on factors beyond the prisoners’ control.

The documents, a new trove of classified material from Wiki Leaks, are perhaps even more troubling than some of the diplomatic cables released just a month or two ago. They show some prisoners — with the exact same background as those who have been previously returned to their home country — still imprisoned because they come from Yemen, and the United States does not trust that nation to properly monitor them. They show soldiers who traveled to Afghanistan prior to September 11 swept up nevertheless as Al Qaeda sympathizers. They show shepards arrested based on either false intelligence or revenge by tribal leaders.

Meanwhile, the remaining prisoners in Guantanamo seem to be stuck there for an indefinite time period, with no trial, not even a military tribunal, because the evidence obtained from them was either illicitly procured by unacceptable techniques or is just fragmentary to begin with.

What a mess.