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Afaik, the prisoners at Guatanano Bay are there because the USA regards them as unlawful enemy combatants, not because they are terrorists.
Avidfan-
Afaik, the prisoners at Guatanano Bay are there because the USA regards them as unlawful enemy combatants, not because they are terrorists.
Which itself is an unfortunate legal theory leveraged purely to justify black sites, indefinite detention without representation or right of appeal, and effectively outlawing people post 9/11. Sadly it wasn’t challenged strongly enough at the time to do away with the ridiculous notion.
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the prisoners at Guatanano Bay are there because the USA regards them as unlawful enemy combatants, not because they are terrorists.
They had to invent that term because they labeled Al Q terrorism as a war. Which implied that captured Al Q were soldiers, not terrorists, and therefore entitled to the rights of POWs! That's the kind of farce you get when you mangle the meaning of words. They wouldn't let the prisoners be POWs and they wouldn't let them be terrorists because that would require trying them in an American court, which the public wouldn't accept because they think the US legal process is a luxury which terrorists don't deserve. So they had to make up a new term and keep their prisoners in Gitmo where neither US nor international law applies. All because Bush wanted to declare war on fear, by which he meant Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and anyone else with a shemagh and a Kalashnikov.
Leshaches
nick_h.
Also IIRC the Geneva convention doesn't apply to terrorists (hence Guantanamo bay)