>>>My understanding is that they are highly unlikely to be released in the U.S. Some of the ones where the evidence is compelling might be moved to supermax prisons.
>>>
>>>You seem to have me down as more of a bleeding heart than I am. I realize some of these guys, maybe most of them, really do mean us harm.
>>
>>Now they surely do. And now they have a good reason for it.
>
>Yeah, and before we were so mean to them they liked us and had our best interests at heart.

The fundamentalists had to fight their own people who were adopting bits of Western lifestyle. Look, I've seen this at home. We'd go ranting against Sloba, pointing out the obvious robbery and ruining of our collective lives, and pointing out that at least the West leaves their own citizens alone, lets them spend their money in peace and generally lets them do what they want. And we'd usually get slapped in the face with the latest propaganda bit (where we as a nation were generally all painted as the bad guys, each one of us Idi Amin incarnate), or a heavy handed attack on all of us as a people, or more sanctions, or any possible way of letting us know that we are not wanted because we're classified into the same drawer with him and his camarilla.

So if you think your "surgical actions" are justified by there being a bunch of fundamentalists or whichever enemies you may see, you probably don't even think of possible friends you never made.

>You talk like these people were snatch off the street at random.

Not at random, at least not as a rule - usually there was a tip from an informer who got $5000 for it. So there was a procedure in place - wait for the tip, detain the guy, pay off the informant. See Tracy's links, in case this was news to you.

> Whatever evil intentions you assign to the US security apparatus, that just isn't a very efficient way to do it. They actually detained and continued to detain these people because they knew something about them.

Sure, they still had the receipts signed by informants, and whatever informants said about them. This is bull. It's a deliberate devastation of whatever legal system there was, assertion of dictatorial powers, cheap lawyerish mockery of international law and treaties, and barenaked return to the right of the might. Some might, still mired in two local wars after six years.

It never mattered how much milk was there in the bucket, if the cow kicked it.

p.s. so you provoked me into politics again - as the Judeo-Christian lore has it, "careful with what you wish for".