Michelle Malkin writes in Townhall:
Newsweek. Amnesty International. Jimmy Carter. Dick Durbin. The Guantanamo Bay-bashing continues.
In a rant published Tuesday, the Minnesota Star Tribune actually castigated Durbin for “caving in” on his slanderous remarks comparing U.S. treatment of detainees at Gitmo to torture and genocide by Nazis, Soviets and Pol Pot. The paper wrote that Durbin shouldn’t have apologized and decried the entire operation as a “hellhole.”…
And now, the facts:
Every single detainee currently being held at Guantanamo Bay has received a hearing before a military tribunal. Every one. As a result of those hearings, more than three dozen Gitmo detainees have been released. The hearings, called “Combatant Status Review Tribunals,” are held before a board of officers, and permit the detainees to contest the facts on which their classification as “enemy combatants” is based.
Gitmo-bashers attack the Bush administration’s failure to abide by the Geneva Conventions. But as legal analysts Lee Casey and Darin Bartram told me, “the status hearings are, in fact, fully comparable to the ‘Article V’ hearings required by the Geneva Conventions, in situations where those treaties apply, and are also fully consistent with the Supreme Court’s 2004 decision in the Hamdi v. Rumsfeld case.”
Treating foreign terrorists like American shoplifters — with full access to civilian lawyers, classified intelligence, and all the attendant rights of a normal jury trial — is a surefire recipe for another 9/11. That is why the Bush administration fought so hard to erect an alternative tribunal system — long established in wartime — in the first place…