Gitmo Reveals Some Other Nations’ Criminal Extremism

By Nick Levinson

If you manage to get arrested by the Americans for terrorism, even if you’re cleared, you must still be awful, as far as many nations are concerned. They won’t let you enter their borders. That says something about those nations’ standards for arrest and conviction, especially related to asymetrical warfare, when compared to U.S. standards, even when arrest is by the U.S. military exercising greater arrest powers than civilian U.S. police officers have.

Many people confined by the U.S. at Guantanamo are cleared for release. But they have nowhere to go to, because the U.S. won’t admit them past Guantanamo and the nations they come from and many other nations won’t accept them or strongly discourage them from coming their way. In one case, a prisoner was threatened with torture (including, by visiting foreign national officials, “[y]ou will talk”). This is as reported in mass news media.

I doubt that they’re cleared because of the expense of conducting trials for them, because the long-term post-clearance confinement cost while trying to find places to depart to may, I think, come to as much as the adjudication costs.

I also doubt we’re being lenient. U.S. opinion is almost entirely against admitting them into the U.S. states. If leniency was politically acceptable, we’d at least allow them to be confined in hard stateside Federal custody. We don’t, so it’s not, so we’re not.

This does not address over-arresting in some communities within the U.S. or the percentage of the population in prison or under criminal justice oversight being higher than in many other nations, legitimate issues to raise, or whether the U.S. should lower those figures or ameliorate the long-term effects. However, it does raise an issue about numerous other nations and their excesses.