The U.S. military was desperate for information after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Our government sought anyone with any information on potential terrorists.
While the goals of the government to stop terrorism might have been noble, it exploited the desperate condition of war-ravaged nations in the Middle East. People with nothing were willing to tell the military anything they wanted to hear.
Many detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba say they are being wrongfully held, but have no way to gain a trial and challenge their imprisonment.
This must be fixed immediately. It was well on its way to being solved when the Supreme Court ruled that detainees have the right to challenge their confinement in federal court. However, the Senate approved an amendment to a military budget bill last week that will strip detainees of this right. As the bill stands, the prisoners at Guantanamo will return to having no rights and no legal standing in this country.
In defending the decision, several senators said giving enemy combatants access to the U.S. legal system is a bad move. Democratic Sen. Joseph Lieberman compared the idea of allowing the detainees the right to challenge their imprisonment to letting prisoners from war challenge their detainment during the World War II.
The problem with this logic is, while prisoners taken during World War II were legally POWs, those detained at Guantanamo Bay were specifically not given this designation. Prisoners at Guantanamo might not be released until the end of the war on terror, since the United States isn't in a formal war with a single nation.
While the courts could have become jammed with many detainees challenging the lack of a trial, something does need to be done to fix this problem. Now that the Senate has decided detainees do not have a right to the American justice system, they must come up with a solution of their own.
The United States needs to work with countries that have detainees at Guantanamo. The justice system of this country should be used with the systems of the detainees' respective countries to ensure justice is served.
