420 innocent people and counting image:37575:0::0

If these people were dangerous terrorist then the government would be highly remiss in releasing them. The very fact that they have been released without any charges is prima facie evidence they should not have been there in the first place.

Some, such as the "Tipton Three" were British citizens held without charges for over two years and subjected to torture and abuse which included being:

...repeatedly punched, kicked, slapped, forcibly injected with drugs, deprived of sleep, hooded, photographed naked and subjected to body cavity searches and sexual and religious humiliations.

They also tell of having seen the "beating of mentally-ill inmates." Since civil rights are not on the top of the list of priorities at Guantanamo prison the US citizenry can be certain that it was not a concern for human rights, or even world opinion, that caused these people to be released. There was simply no evidence that they had done anything that would justify them being there.

Other wrongfully held prisoners include three children aged 13 to 15 that were held until January 2004 after which they were returned to Afghanistan since no evidence had been found of any wrong doing.

Fifteen Chinese Muslim prisoners were found in 2005 to not have been "enemy combatants after all." It was discovered that they simply:

were in the wrong place at the wrong time, some of them picked up by Pakistani bounty hunters for U.S. payoffs

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When lawyers for five of these men filed writs of habeas corpus in US District Court the men were suddenly sent to refugee camps in Albania and the Department of Justice filed an "Emergency Motion to Dismiss as Moot"

Barbara Olshansky, one of the lawyers for the innocent men described the move as an attempt by an embarrassed US government to:

"avoid having to answer in court for keeping innocent men in jail."

Other high profile innocents include journalist Sami al-Hajj, known to the world as Prisoner 345. Although the US Government has long known that he was innocent, and he is scheduled to be released at the end of next month, he has been held for years and subjected to inhumane treatment mainly because he refused to spy against Al-Jazeera.

Although apologists for the administration's criminal behavior try to make Guantanamo seem like some "Club Med" summer camp where prisoners spend their happy days in recreation and getting fat the fact remains that these were innocent people, with no proven links of any sort to terrorism, held without basic human rights, abused and unjustly robbed of years of their lives.

Many were sold to the gullible US officials by Afghan bounty hunters and their chief "crime" seems to have been to be of the wrong religion and of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. How many of those who make excuses for the administration's criminal behavior would be willing to trade places with any of the prisoners of Guantanamo who have been shown to have been innocent all along?

"He who would trade liberty for some temporary security, deserves neither liberty nor security."
Benjamin Franklin

Bush's opinion of how many branches of government the US has.