‘In 2002, Donald Rumsfeld famously called the detainees at Guantánamo "the worst of the worst." General Richard B. Myers, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned they were "very dangerous people who would gnaw hydraulic lines in the back of a C-17 to bring it down." These claims were designed to justify locking up hundreds of men and boys for years in small cages like animals.

George W. Bush lost no time establishing military commissions to try the very "worst of the worst" for war crimes. But four and a half years later, the Supreme Court decided in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that those commissions violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Geneva Conventions. So Bush dusted them off, made a few changes, and rammed his new improved military commissions through the Republican Congress last fall.

Only three detainees have been brought before the new commissions. One would expect the people Bush & Co. singled out for war crimes prosecutions would be high-level al-Qaeda leaders. But they weren't. The first was David Hicks, who was evidently not so dangerous. The U.S. military made a deal that garnered Hicks a misdemeanour sentence and sent him back to Australia.’

The Prison Is The War Crime

meanwhile …..

A coalition of human rights groups has drawn up a list of 39 terror suspects it believes are being secretly imprisoned by US authorities & published their names in a report released Thursday.

Information about the so-called "ghost detainees" was gleaned from interviews with former prisoners & officials in the US, Pakistan, Afghanistan & Yemen, according to Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch & four other groups.

"What we're asking is where are these 39 people now & what's happened to them since they 'disappeared'?" Joanne Mariner of Human Rights Watch said in a statement.

The Center for Constitutional Rights