Benjamin Wittes has an interesting piece in The New Republic with the curious subtitle “Think the Guantanamo detainees are all innocent? Think again.”
He details known facts about the several of them, proclaimed “innocent” by their attorney before the Supreme Court last week, who are certainly terrorists by any reasonable definition. He closes,
For the past six months, I have been studying declassified materials from Defense Department reviews of Guantanamo cases: transcripts and records of the much derided panels known as the Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRT) and Administrative Review Boards (ARB). While my data are not yet fully complete, the general picture of the people who went through these reviews, many of whom have been released, is clear: About a third of detainees admit facts that offer significant–though not always adequate–support to the government’s contention that they are “enemy combatants.” About a third deny everything. And about a third make no statements at all. (While some military interrogations have been coercive and the CIA has probably crossed over into outright torture, nobody has alleged that these particular statements, which took place in hearings before panels of officers, were involuntary.) This approximate ratio has remained relatively consistent even as the population at Guantanamo has shrunk.
But the question is not whether there are any terrorists at Gitmo but rather whether we should be able to more-or-less arbitrarily detain people, with no hint of due process, for years on end. Surely, the fact that upwards of a third of those detained actually are terrorists does not render that question meaningless.
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