71

I think one thing has been overlooked that President Obama said in his speech on thursday because of the major pushback on "preventative detention". Allow me to excerpt:

The third category of detainees includes those who we have been ordered released by the courts. Let me repeat what I said earlier: this has absolutely nothing to do with my decision to close Guantanamo. It has to do with the rule of law. The courts have found that there is no legitimate reason to hold twenty-one of the people currently held at Guantanamo. Twenty of these findings took place before I came into office. The United States is a nation of laws, and we must abide by these rulings.

The fourth category of cases involves detainees who we have determined can be transferred safely to another country. So far, our review team has approved fifty detainees for transfer. And my Administration is in ongoing discussions with a number of other countries about the transfer of detainees to their soil for detention and rehabilitation.

Now I take nothing away from the people blowing up about his references to possibly instituting "preventative detention" for the first time in our Country's history. However how is there not an outcry in the liberal and progressive blogosphere to get these 71 detainees out of GITMO ASAP? We don't know yet how long many of these detainees have been there but you would imagine it has been at the least several years. But even though we know that they are "innocent" in some way shape or form, justice has not come to them. I know its hard to imagine sitting in a cell probably being mistreated for years on end without ever being charged with a crime, but imagine all of those things describe your experience AND you have been found to not be guilty and or not be a danger to society yet you STILL sit in the same cell day after day. I hope that we pull ourselves away from the "preventative detention" subject long enough to demand that these detainees get to see the light of day. Last thought on this, those 71 prisoners make up almost 30% of the population of GITMO right now and the process of reviewing cases isn't even over yet. Not only does that expose the level of fail coming out of the Bush Adminstration, but it also exposes the lie that the Republicans have repeated week after week that "only the worst of the worst" are left at GITMO. Something needs to give, and soon!