Rumsfeld Sees No Problem With Holding Gitmo Detainees Forever

From Voice of America:

Mr. Rumsfeld says the Guantanamo Bay detention Center is being run as well as possible and any allegations of torture or abuse of prisoners are being handled through appropriate military procedures. Almost 500 prisoners in the war on terror have been held without trial at the base.

Rumsfeld says calls to close the center by critics and some human rights groups are unrealistic and would open the gates to terrorists. He says at least 15 prisoners who have been released have returned to the battlefield where they have been killed or captured. He also disagreed with the remark by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan that the United States will have to close the center "sooner or later."

"We have several hundred terrorists, bad people. If they went back out on the field they would try to kill Americans," said Mr. Rumsfeld. "That is just a fact. To close that place and pretend that there is no problem just is not realistic. Second, he has never been to Guantanamo Bay."

Someone explain this logic to me:

Fifteen former Gitmo detainees out of somewhat over 500 detainees were subsequently captured or killed "on the battlefield."

How does that make those 15 former detainees "terrorists"? What act of terrorism did they commit? They were fighting U.S. soldiers in their home countries, not in the United States. Maybe the experience of being arbitrarily detained and tortured in Guantanamo made them more eager to fight Americans "on the battlefield" in their own countries.

And regardless, how does 15 former Gitmo detainees found on the battlefield justify holding the rest of the 500-plus detainees at Guantanamo?

I suppose one could make an argument that the Gitmo detainees have become a danger to U.S. national security even if they were not so before their detention, because of the unjust and illegal treatment they have received from the Bush administration. But that is hardly a moral argument; in fact, it's rather like a tyrannical leader who keeps an iron control over his people because he knows they hate him enough to kill him.

And how can over 500 people who have never been charged with or tried for a crime be referred to as "terrorists, bad people"? If they're terrorists, why has the government refused to say what, if any, evidence it has against them; why haven't any of them been told the specific acts of terrorism they committed to have ended up in that hellhole?

And here's what I most need to have explained to me: How is it that Donald Rumsfeld, or anyone else in the Bush administration, can continue to insist that the United States is the world leader in human rights and the global model for democracy, while simultaneously claiming the "right" to imprison hundreds of people indefinitely, with no legal rights and no protections against physical and psychological mistreatment?