Gitmo North: What's the Point?

The location was never the real problem, writes Glenn Greenwald
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Dec 16, 2009 8:15 AM CST
Gitmo North: What's the Point?
A sign stands in the snow outside the Thomson Correctional Center in Illinois, where some Gitmo prisoners will be moved.   (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green)

The president is making good on his promise to close Guantanamo in classic Obama style: by offering lofty rhetoric while continuing his predecessor's policies, writes Glenn Greenwald. The detainees being sent to Illinois won't be getting trials in real American courts and some will never be tried at all, meaning they'll have no more rights than they did at Guantanamo Bay, Greenwald notes in Salon.

What made Guantanamo so offensive in the first place wasn't its location, Greenwald argues, it was the fact that detainees were being kept indefinitely in a legal black hole, just like they will be in the new facility. Closing Guantanamo may have some symbolic value, but opening "within the US, on US soil, a facility explicitly devoted to imprisoning prisoners without charges" carries some dangerous symbolism of its own, Greenwald warns.
(More Thomson, Ill. stories.)

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