Those Casio watches you mention were a specific model given out to "graduates" of Al Qaeda training camps to be used as detonators for bombs.
Let me engage you in an analogy. Suppose the Crips, the Bloods, or some other gang starts equipping its membership with a certain brand of watch. Would wearing such a watch be legitimate grounds for detaining someone for a year or more?
When they captured one of these men, they found in his house explosives plans, weapons information, and military attack plans.
I have in this room guerilla warfare manuals, sniper training manuals, and manuals on infantry tactics. I have guides on how to disarm the common types of landmine. What's your point?
Let me repeat my statement:
There are dozens of examples of people being imprisoned who have either not been captured on foreign battlefields, or not belonging (according to the DoD's own estimates) to anti-American terrorist groups, or even not involved in terrorism.
The
very justification for imprisoning these people in Gitmo is that they're supposedly 'illegal combatants', i.e. captured on the field of battle against US troops.
If a person is not an illegal combatant (even if he is a terrorist or a bad-guy), then the moral and legal justification for capturing him and imprisoning him like a wartime prisoner disappears. Such a person should be given a
trial and then imprisoned
when proven guilty.
I do not suggest that a lot of these people are innocent - although some are certainly so. I suggest many of them are not illegal combatants and need to be given a fair trial. Until we give these people a fair trial, we are certain to imprison a proportion of innocent people.
The right to have a fair trial is not just a legal right of Americans. It's a matter of simple human dignity.
In addition, the prosecution SAYS these three people trained in Afghanistan. Maybe they did, maybe they didn't. Being a suspect doesn't make you automatically guilty.
Understand my position on this very clearly:
I do not believe that these are nice people.
Nor do I believe Gitmo must be abolished.
Merely I believe two things:
1. People in Gitmo must be treated on an individual basis. Nobody - and I mean NOBODY - is talking about releasing all of them. We're talking about the British people taking in a dozen guys.
2. People in Gitmo who are NOT combatants need to be given the benefit of a trial - a real trial, lawyer, jury, and all. People who are NOT combatants captured on foreign battlefields must be given a trial, a conviction, and a defined prison term - ten years, twenty years, life, whatever they deserve for actual crimes they had committed.