We can just start indefinitely confining people on American soil.

wiredispatch.com/news/?id=183191

That’ll teach those pesky thought criminals!

Another big problem with Gitmo is that people want to give these guys civilian trials when in many cases when they were picked up it wasn’t like a CSI crime scene was established to gather evidence because many were picked up in the midst of combat operations. Not to mention what a propaganda coup it would be for these people like we saw with the Moussaoui trial.

However it Gitmo ends it will be ugly with probably more of these thugs being let go to go kill more people like in Mosul last month.

I also felt from the start that the US and world community would fail to move forward as a result of 9/11 and the Afghan War. We had a chance to move forward on international law related to terrorism and 21st century warfare. The Geneva Conventions, as the Gitmo Situation has proven, were written for a different era.

They were not designed to deal with contemporary transnational terrorism — well — I think you could argue they were - but the world-leading nations have shown they are unwilling to apply them to today’s reality.

That is what has bothered me more about the Gitmo case.

The critics have kept bringing up the Geneva Conventions, but from my limited reading of them, it seems they are actually arguing that the Conventions should NOT be applied — that they should be twisted to be applied as how they want to interpret them - with their interpretation being against the very letter of the Conventions.

From what little I’ve read, the type of fighters taken to Gitmo were specifically defined as not being covered by the GC which spell out how official POWs are handled.

It seemed to me the critics wanted to actually counter provisions of the Conventions by redefining what a lawful combatant is.

If the nations wanted to move the Conventions forward by rewriting the rules to include irregular fighters to be covered by the same rules as real soldiers (per GC definitions), then they could have proposed to do that.

Instead, they have relied on a public relations campaign that mangled the GC as written.

They could have also changed the Conventions by putting in clauses that say that irregular fighters will not be given POW status but must be treated as domestic criminals of the capturing state - in this case to be tried in American criminal courts - or - they could have said they must be considered “war criminals” and tried by the International Criminal Court - or some such other rules. —– instead of - again - refusing to do the tough job of revising the GC in favor of public relations campaigns.