Um, no, these guys are NOT all the "baddest of the bad". Some were flat-out innocent. We put out a bounty on bad guys in Afghanistan, and some of the people there got the bright idea that all they had to do was to point out people that they didn't like and tell the Americans that "those people are planning to attack you!" or "We heard them laughing about killing your troops!"...
...and our side ate it up - we'd pay the bounty, swoop in and get these guys and bring them to Guantanamo...and then we'd find out that maybe, just maybe they were innocent all along. Right now,
there's 86 who have been cleared to go back to their home countries...but the House Republicans won't let them go.
For the 86 prisoners, it's a plight almost Kafkaesque in its cruel absurdity: though the United States believes they should be released from their concrete cells at Guantanamo Bay, they have stayed in prison, often for years, not because of any crime they committed or immediate threat they pose, but because of diplomatic and political hurdles out of their control.
For the Obama administration, it's a maze with no obvious exits: it doesn't want to keep these prisoners locked up in Gitmo, which is politically and diplomatically costly, not to mention antithetical to Obama's stated desire to close the prison, but Congress has forbidden the prisoners from being transferred to U.S. soil. Though the administration had searched for foreign countries to which the detainees could be released, it appears to have since given up, having closed the office responsible for finding those countries.
"Innocent until proven guilty in a court of law"...unless, of course, you're stuck in Gitmo...because if you are, it doesn't matter if you're innocent...because America's AFRAID that you might do something bad if we let you go...
...never mind that by refusing to let you go home, we've probably succeeded in radicalizing most of your family who are outraged that we took you and won't let you go. By keeping Gitmo open, by not letting the ones go home who should've been gone a long time ago, we're probably creating a heck of a lot more terrorists than we would have otherwise....and so more of our troops die.
