Oh get real, will you? Guantanamo Bay naval base was granted to the US more than a century ago, by Cuba, as repayment for the US giving Cuba its freedom from Spain. For a century "Gitmo" was nothing more or less than a Navy refueling station. Being a large base, it had a large brig.
Â
'Twas Bush's bright idea to turn the brig at Gitmo into a POW camp, something it was never designed for. 'Twas also Bush who muddied the legal standing of POWs taken in the Afghan/Iraq war, though Obama has done nothing to clarify it. Look, is the "War on Terror" still being fought, or not? If we're at war, then enemy combatants taken prisoner in that war are legally Prisoners Of War. POWs are not tried in civil courts; they're held in POW camps until they're either exchanged for American prisoners, or until the war ends -- whereupon they're sent home. The problem is that nobody has declared an end to the Iraq/Afghan war.Â
 This is what leaves the prisoners at Gitmo in legal limbo. If they're POWs, they should have been sent back to Iraq and Afghanistan by now. If they are, by some legal back-bends, considered civil prisoners, then they should have been run through the court system long since. This whaffling and fumbling about the legal status of the prisoners is no fault of the Navy's, let alone the administration at Guantanamo Bay. Treating the Navy base as the villain in this case, and demanding that it be closed, is nothing but a political red herring.
Â
As for the prisoners there going on hunger strike, the Navy will probably treat them as it has similar hunger-strikers in the past; wait until they're too weak to fight, then strap them to beds and feed them intravenously. What the Navy really should do, and should have done years ago, is to protest having one of its bases used as a POW camp, which it was never intended to do.
Â
--Leslie <;)))>< Fish Â
Â
Opinion • 
