It's been two years since President Obama ordered the detention center at Guantanamo Bay to be closed. Today, 174 detainees remain.
Wikileaks' most recent documents expose many of the bad practices that the U.S. government has been employing in keeping suspects in the camp. In some of the starkest abuses, children and a senile elderly man were kept without probable cause.
Much of the rhetoric about Gitmo has been centered on keeping evil people out of society, but the new Wikileaks documents have shown that the majority of what the military does at the camp is intelligence gathering. Many of the inmates were proved harmless, yet they were still kept for interrogation.
While some of the people detained are dangerous, there are many more cases of injustice. Such is the case of Jamal al-Harith, who was detained after being tortured by the Taliban because he may have had knowledge of their interrogation techniques.
Tragically, over 100 of the 779 detainees have had some sort of mental illness. Many of them went on hunger strikes and even attempted suicide after being detained.
Worse still, the way detainees are being interrogated may be ineffective. Taking someone who has been beaten and tortured by the Taliban and throwing them into a jail cell may not be the best way to extract information from them. They would be much more likely to talk if they were simply treated fairly, and justly.
These terrible cases undermine our image around the world. Our Constitution is designed to protect people against unjust imprisonment, and even if the people in Guantanamo have committed a crime they need to be taken to trial and given due process.
The government says there is reason to keep these detainees, but the documents show the reasons may be extremely flimsy. In some cases, having a certain type of Casio watch was reason enough because al-Qaeda gave out a similar watch to some trainees. Some have been kept in Guantanamo because of the testimony of a single person, who is known to have lied to the government many times.
Guantanamo itself does need to stay open in some capacity. While the practices that put people there and keep them are corrupt, the need for a place to keep and interrogate known terrorists is clear.
These documents underscore a need to reform the process that these individuals go through. If a terrorist has been interrogated for five years and hasn't revealed information, it's unlikely that he ever will. Even if he does give information, it's unlikely to be reliable.
What needs to be put in place is a transparent limit on interrogation, and a requirement for a fair trial in U.S. courts. Interrogations should not include water-boarding or other so-called "enhanced" interrogation techniques, and should be limited to 2-3 years. After that, it's not only a waste of time and money, but a diversion from real prevention of terrorism.
Sept. 11 inarguably changed the U.S. forever, but this is not how it should be. Rather than having a win at all costs attitude, we need to be just to all people. Only then will we begin to truly defeat terrorism.
