Critical Mass

James Taranto has written an important editorial on the terrorist detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.  Taranto argues that the detainees are truly dangerous and do not deserve the special protections of the Geneva Convention.  He also debunks the left-wing myth that many of the prisoners are helpless victims who are denied not only basic human rights, but also any semblance of due process:

The case against Guantanamo rests on a web of falsehood. Far from being held "beyond the laws of civilized nations"--laws that terrorists, by definition, reject--the detainees here enjoy a panoply of procedural protections. All except the 14 recent arrivals have gone before Combatant Status Review Tribunals to re-examine their designation as enemy combatants--even though these "Article V" hearings are required under international law only if that designation is in doubt, and under the U.S. Supreme Court's 2004 Hamdi v. Rumsfeld ruling if the detainee is a U.S. citizen. (Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told me last week that the newly arrived detainees had not yet received Article V hearings but would.) In addition, each detainee annually goes before an Administrative Review Board, analogous to a parole hearing, which determines whether he can be released without harming U.S. security.

These processes are not mere window dressing. As President Bush noted in a speech last week, some 315 of 770 Guantanamo detainees have been released from U.S. custody, either through one of these proceedings or through informal processes that predated them. More than a dozen of the freed detainees, Mr. Bush added, are known to have returned to the battlefield, suggesting that the procedures are, if anything, too lenient.

Many detainees also have petitioned for habeas corpus since the Supreme Court's 2004 Rasul v. Bush ruling; and of course trials for the four detainees who've been charged with war crimes have been delayed only because Osama bin Laden's bodyguard was able to avail himself of our appellate courts to challenge the legality of the proceedings.

Likewise, it is nonsense to say the detainees are "completely cut off from the world." There is no solitary confinement at Guantanamo; even at maximum-security Camp 5, the cells have outside light and openings in the doors through which detainees can communicate with one another. They have ample contact with the world beyond the camp, too. "Over 40,000 pieces of mail have come in and out of here," Adm. Harris says. "If you chose to write one of them a letter, all you'd need to do is put their name on it, say 'Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,' put our ZIP code on it, and they will get that letter.

"Most of the detainees have lawyers," the admiral adds. "There are over 900 habeas lawyers representing less than 450 detainees," and the lawyers are free to visit their clients. Representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross "come down for almost a month at a time, four times a year, and then [for shorter periods] at other times, and they have unfettered access to any detainee they want to see, whenever they want to see them."