If You Care About Freedom, Free the Gitmo 60

By Kevin Spak,  Newser Staff
Posted May 20, 2009 1:32 PM CDT
If You Care About Freedom, Free the Gitmo 60
Guards stand on either side of a line-up of Guantanamo detainees, in white, to perform a search for unauthorized items, at Guantanamo's Camp 4 detention facility.   (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley)

About 60 of the inmates at Guantanamo haven't committed any crime. The courts cleared them of all charges, and the military declared them not dangerous. Yet they’re entering their eighth year in custody, because Congress apparently doesn’t give a damn, Sabin Willett writes in the New York Daily News. A hysterical House has voted to bar their release in the US, and they have nowhere else to go.

We have two options, writes Willett, a lawyer who represents Uighurs held at Gitmo pro bono. "Free them. Because in this country we just don't capture and imprison people without a legal reason.” Or we can say, “the hell with them. They stay there forever.” And if we, as a nation, are really OK with that, it means our values aren’t what they’re cracked up to be. “We may care about security, but we don’t give a damn about freedom.” (More Uighurs stories.)

Get the news faster.
Tap to install our app.
X
Install the Newser News app
in two easy steps:
1. Tap in your navigation bar.
2. Tap to Add to Home Screen.

X