Remember those “terrorists” who were “among the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth”, according to then-US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld?
Of the 779 imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay since 2000, 705 have been released or cleared for release.
Two pleaded guilty before military commissions; one was tried and found guilty; a third faces criminal charges for involvement in two 1998 US embassy bombings.
Of those remaining, 30 are scheduled to be prosecuted.
One of those supposedly “guilty” was Australia’s David Hicks, sold to US soldiers for $1000 by local warlords and held for more than five years in limbo on the island of Cuba. He pleaded guilty to “providing material support for terrorism”: the Obama Administration now agrees there is no such charge, no such crime, on the US statute books.
Hicks was therefore coerced into signing an agreement based on an illegal charge, and was then further detained, arguably illegally, by the Australian Government and the South Australian Government for seven months in Yatala Prison in Adelaide.