Acquitted Guantánamo prisoners may still languish in jail, according to the Pentagon

Your’re a prisoner at the U.S. Guantánamo detention center and you’ve been acquitted on all counts during a trial, but you very likely will have to wait until the so-called war against terrorism is over to go back home.

That’s what “The New Yorker” reporter Jeffrey Tobin revealed on April 14^th in an interview with Brig. General Thomas Hartmann, legal adviser to the Pentagon’s Office of Military Commissions:

“What’s unusual about what we’re doing is that we’re having the commissions before the end of the war,” the officer said. “The Nuremberg trials (of accused Nazi war criminals) were after World War Two, so there was no possibility of the defendants going back to the battlefield.”

Hartmann further explained: “We still have that problem. We are trying these alleged war criminals during the war. So, in order to protect our troops in the field, in general we are not going to release anyone who poses a danger until the war is over.”

But…there are unresolved considerations considering the circumstances that led the Bush Administration to declare “war” not against a nation but against a loosely defined “terrorism;” questionable practices such as torture have been systematically employed to oblige prisoners to confess; prisoners have been transferred in secret flights to secret detention in centers in foreign countries; yet curiously enough hundreds of Guantanamo prisoners—once depicted by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as “the worst of a very bad lot””—have already been released.

Why have some been released while the Pentagon announces that it has to right to keep others in jail? Might it not be that they were innocent victims or “sold” to the U.S. by bounty hunters eager to collect dollars and useful to “sell” the theory that thousands of Islamist terrorists seething to attack the United States?

 Clive Stafford Smith, a detainees’ lawyer, told The New Yorker: “Now that it’s clear that Guantanamo is such an embarrassment, they are just shipping as many of them (captives) out the door as they can, and just keeping enough of them to save face. It’s a political process that has little to do with terrorism.”

About 275 prisoners remain in Gitmo, down from an estimated peak of 680 from 43 countries. According to Toobin, about 60 have been approved for transfer, if countries can be found to take them, and Hartmann anticipates there is sufficient evidence to bring commission trials against only 80. “In sum,” Toobin writes, “there are more than 130 detainees for whom Administration officials acknowledge they have no plan, except indefinite detention without trial.” Toobin’s article is titled “Camp Justice.”