Guantanamo Bay

Wednesday the Supreme Court heard the third incarnation of the Guantanamo Bay case. The first two times this case was brought before the high court it was ruled against the Bush administration. Since these two cases, legislation has been passed allowing Bush to, in essence, do what he’s been doing all along. The fight, however, continues.
The men at Guantanamo Bay are being held on American soil; the country the air base land is being leased from can not allow the prisoners to be tried within their courts because that imposes itself upon American sovereignty.
The men at Guantanamo Bay are not being held on American soil; they are not subject to a writ of habeas corpus because the only people this is available to are citizens and those being held within the United States.
The men at Guantanamo Bay are prisoners of war and thus should not be subject to a writ of habeas corpus even if they are held on American soil because never in the past have we provided detainees with this opportunity.
The men at Guantanamo Bay can not be prisoners of war because there is not a declared war going on and, further, many of the men are not even citizens of the countries that we have engaged in any combat with.
The men at Guantanamo Bay are not subject to a writ of habeas corpus; in addition to what is listed above, the Constitution allows suspension of these rights if an adequate and equally effective alternative is put into place.
The men at Guantanamo Bay must be subject to a writ of habeas corpus; the Bush administration’s arguments against them are flimsy. The new evaluation system put into place does not allow for lawyers or access to the evidence against them, immediately assumes the Government’s evidence to be fully correct and allows for innumerable retrials if, somehow, the detainee wins the case.
Clearly, the Bush administration wishes only to rob these men of their right to be proven innocent. Why would they do so unless they were afraid that just that were true? Should they not concern themselves with finding and holding the men who are guilty, or are they afraid that there are, simply, no guilty men to be found?
Is the incompetence of a nation a good reason to hold innocent men prisoner for six years, away from their homes, away from their families, away from their lives. Is the incompetence of a nation a good reason to punish these families in such a manner as depriving them of the only person in the household whom is, feasibly, allowed to go out and make any decent sum of money? Is the incompetence of a nation a good reason to allow said nation to deprive a group of people of their rights? Does allowing them to this, now, setting this standard of conduct only allow them to do the same thing to us in the future? Does allowing such a flimsy trial system to stand as fair and just and right only facilitate the government’s ability to do the same thing to us, it’s citizens, at a later date?
This battle is about the rights of the imprisoned. Why should it matter what country their citizenship belongs to? A man is still a man, no matter the length of his hair or the country of his patriotism. As such, we should disregard the fact that this has never happened before, that rights have never been given in such a manner and we should move past that.
Just because rights had never been given to black men and women doesn’t mean we should not have given them those rights. This is no different.
The men at Guantanamo Bay must be given fair trials and, once it is realized that they are innocent men, Guantanamo Bay must be closed.