Liberty Street: Maybe Not the Worst of the Worst

The Xsociate has some valuable commentary on the Bad Guys who were so bad that hundreds of them were sent back to the Middle East, and then (in most cases) released back to their families (plus, he linked to my post on this news, which automatically endears him to me):

Worst of the Worst

That was how former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once characterized the men held at the prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. For years we were told how dangerous these men were. How they were "vicious killers" who would stop at nothing to kill as many Americans as they could, even chewing through their own restraints if necessary. The need to keep them locked up seemed obvious.

But now the AP has found that of the hundreds of men transferred to various other countries, many of them were subsequently set free. How can this be you might ask? How could these countries just let these men go? Don't they know how dangerous they are, as we have been told by our leaders for the past five years?

Or is it more likely that this "worst of the worst" rhetoric was just that: a baseless attempt to demagogue the American public into accepting the establishment of a facility that has since become a blight on this country. No doubt there are some at Gitmo who would wish to see harm come to Americans. But we should not let that change who we are: a nation that stands for justice for all, even for the worst among us.

I've emphasized the sentence above because guess what? In addition to the Gitmo detainees who might have originally wished harm to Americans (almost certainly a small percentage of the men who were and are there), now we can probably add a bunch of former detainees who can't forget or forgive what was done to them:

Some former detainees say they never intended to harm the United States and are bitter.

"I can't wash the three long years of pain, trouble and humiliation from my memory," said Badarzaman Badar, an Afghan who was freed in Pakistan. "It is like a cancer in my mind that makes me disturbed every time I think of those terrible days."