Well, they 'shouldn't be in the business' of slaughtering innocent American citizens...
You've been drinking way too much governmental cool-aid propaganda. What people swept up in Afghanistan had ever "slaughtered innocent American citizens?" There were 12 year old boys swept up, tortured, and then thrown in Guantanamo. You think 12 year old boys living in huts in Afghanistan slaughtered American citizens?
The US had to have "terrorists" to show the American people. So they bought them in Afghanistan, by paying Afghan warlords $5000 a head to find and turn over such "terrorists." The warlords then grabbed people at random, grabbed rivals for their power, or grabbed people with whom they had scores to settle, and sold them to the Americans.
What had these Chinese ever done to us?
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/US/02/18/gitmo.detainees/index.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/01/guantanamo-china
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/US/10/08/court.chinese.muslims/index.html
Our government wanted to give this guy the death penalty. Now we find that that the evidence against him is so non-existent that it can't even pass the test for habeus corpus:
Judge Orders High-Profile Gitmo Detainee Released
Federal judge James Robertson today ordered Mohamedou Ould Salahi, once referred to as the “highest value detainee” in all of Guantanamo Bay, released after ruling that the government lacked any legal basis to hold him. The details of the release order are classified, but a redacted version is expected in the next few weeks.
Salahi has been held by the US since November 20, 2001. The memo regarding his detention accused him of traveling to Afghanistan to wage jihad, though this was decades ago in response to the Soviet occupation. He was arrested in Mauritania and renditioned to Jordan.
Salahi’s abuse in US custody, amid accusations that he was a “top” al-Qaeda operative, have been well documented, and prosecutors have repeatedly expressed hope that he could eventually be executed.
Though the Justice Department is said to be reviewing the ruling and Salahi remains in custody for the time being, the order does serious damage to the credibility of the military commissions system, as his attorney, Nancy Hollander noted: “they were considering giving him the death penalty. Now they don’t even have enough evidence to pass the test for habeas.”
There have been articles on this stuff in the news every day for years, if you cared to locate and read them. What about this?
From The Times
April 9, 2010
George W. Bush 'knew Guantánamo prisoners were innocent'
George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld covered up that hundreds of innocent men were sent to the Guantánamo Bay prison camp because they feared that releasing them would harm the push for war in Iraq and the broader War on Terror, according to a new document obtained by The Times.
The accusations were made by Lawrence Wilkerson, a top aide to Colin Powell, the former Republican Secretary of State, in a signed declaration to support a lawsuit filed by a Guantánamo detainee. It is the first time that such allegations have been made by a senior member of the Bush Administration.
Colonel Wilkerson, who was General Powell’s chief of staff when he ran the State Department, was most critical of Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld. He claimed that the former Vice-President and Defence Secretary knew that the majority of the initial 742 detainees sent to Guantánamo in 2002 were innocent but believed that it was “politically impossible to release them”.
General Powell, who left the Bush Administration in 2005, angry about the misinformation that he unwittingly gave the world when he made the case for the invasion of Iraq at the UN, is understood to have backed Colonel Wilkerson’s declaration.
Colonel Wilkerson, a long-time critic of the Bush Administration’s approach to counter-terrorism and the war in Iraq, claimed that the majority of detainees — children as young as 12 and men as old as 93, he said — never saw a US soldier when they were captured. He said that many were turned over by Afghans and Pakistanis for up to $5,000. Little or no evidence was produced as to why they had been taken.
He also claimed that one reason Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld did not want the innocent detainees released was because “the detention efforts would be revealed as the incredibly confused operation that they were”. This was “not acceptable to the Administration and would have been severely detrimental to the leadership at DoD [Mr Rumsfeld at the Defence Department]”.
Referring to Mr Cheney, Colonel Wilkerson, who served 31 years in the US Army, asserted: “He had absolutely no concern that the vast majority of Guantánamo detainees were innocent ... If hundreds of innocent individuals had to suffer in order to detain a handful of hardcore terrorists, so be it.”
He alleged that for Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld “innocent people languishing in Guantánamo for years was justified by the broader War on Terror and the small number of terrorists who were responsible for the September 11 attacks”.
He added: “I discussed the issue of the Guantánamo detainees with Secretary Powell. I learnt that it was his view that it was not just Vice-President Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld, but also President Bush who was involved in all of the Guantánamo decision making.”
Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld, Colonel Wilkerson said, deemed the incarceration of innocent men acceptable if some genuine militants were captured, leading to a better intelligence picture of Iraq at a time when the Bush Administration was desperate to find a link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, “thus justifying the Administration’s plans for war with that country”.
He signed the declaration in support of Adel Hassan Hamad, a Sudanese man who was held at Guantánamo Bay from March 2003 until December 2007. Mr Hamad claims that he was tortured by US agents while in custody and yesterday filed a damages action against a list of American officials.
Defenders of Guantánamo said that detainees began to be released as early as September 2002, nine months after the first prisoners were sent to the jail at the US naval base in Cuba. By the time Mr Bush left office more than 530 detainees had been freed.
A spokesman for Mr Bush said of Colonel Wilkerson’s allegations: “We are not going to have any comment on that.” A former associate to Mr Rumsfeld said that Mr Wilkerson's assertions were completely untrue.
The associate said the former Defence Secretary had worked harder than anyone to get detainees released and worked assiduously to keep the prison population as small as possible. Mr Cheney’s office did not respond.
There are currently about 180 detainees left in the facility.
Although he wasn't denied habeus corpus, what about Johnny Walker? What innocent American citizens had he slaughtered? He went to Afghanistan before 9/11 to fight in the civil war between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. He's gonna spend the rest of his life in prison.
We're not 'denying' them Habeus Corpus - they have no right to it as enemy combatants not entitled to Geneva Convention protections.
Says who? Bush? What the hell is an "enemy combatant" anyway? Just some amorphous label the Bush admin came up with, that's what. Anybody can be labeled an "enemy combatant," which is the point of it.
Look, instead of arguing whether people are entitled to habeus corpus or not, why don't you ask yourself why any government would ever deny it to anyone regardless? Why did the medieval kings of europe grab people and lock them away in dungeons for the rest of their lives, with no charges, no trials, no evidence, no convictions, no nothing? BECAUSE THERE WAS NO EVIDENCE AGAINST THEM, WHICH MEANT THE KING WOULD LOSE IN ANY TRIAL! THEY WERE SIMPLY POLITICAL PRISONERS! Bush and Cheney denied habeus corpus to people because they had no evidence, yet they needed "terrorists."
Try to think of a good reason why a government would deny habeus corpus to anyone, whether you think they have a right to it or not? If you can think of a reason, can you figure out a way that it wouldn't be abused? I mean, if the government doesn't even put on a trial and show evidence against someone, how the hell do YOU as a citizen know whether the government is telling the truth or not? If you say "you trust them," then why not simply do away with habeus corpus for everyone? Why is habeus necessary?
You are like most Americans. You think civil liberties like habeus corpus protect criminals and "terrorists." They protect YOU, fool!
To relate this to the topic of this post, yeah, we unfortunately live in a very different America, with very different values. What do you think Jefferson would have said here about the topic of habeus corpus?