Very powerful response to the Bergdahl nonsense by a retired US Navy Chief Warrant Officer

[Uncle Joe]

65. American influence will be positively influenced by this trade.

The sooner they can close Guantanamo Bay detention camp, the better, it should never have been opened in the first place.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp

Although the Bush administration said most of the men had been captured in fighting in Afghanistan, a 2006 report prepared by the Center for Policy and Research, Seton Hall University Law School reviewed DOD data for the remaining 517 men in 2005 and "established that over 80% of the prisoners were captured not by Americans on the battlefield but by Pakistanis and Afghans, often in exchange for bounty payments."[28] The U.S. offered $5,000 per prisoner and distributed leaflets widely in the region. A perfect example would be Adel, a Chinese Uighur and dissident who had been sold to the US by Pakistani bounty hunters.[29]

(snip)

In 2010, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, a former aide to Secretary of State Colin Powell, stated in an affidavit that top U.S. officials, including President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, had known that the majority of the detainees initially sent to Guantánamo were innocent, but that the detainees had been kept there for reasons of political expedience.[46][47] Wilkerson's statement was submitted in connection with a lawsuit filed in federal district court by former detainee Adel Hassan Hamad against the United States government and several individual officials.[48] This supports numerous claims made by former detainees like Moazzam Begg, a British citizen who had been held for three years in detention camps in Afghanistan and Guantanamo.The Prisoner - Moazzam Begg

A 2013 Institute on Medicine as a Profession report concluded that health professionals working with the military and intelligence services "designed and participated in cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment and torture of detainees". Medical professionals were ordered to ignore ethical standards during involvement in abusive interrogation, including monitoring of vital signs under stress-inducing procedures. They used medical information for interrogation purposes and participated in force-feeding of hunger strikers, in violation of World Medical Association and American Medical Association prohibitions.[49][50][51][52][53]

(snip)

On 13 January 2009, the Pentagon said that it had evidence that 18 former detainees have had direct involvement in terrorist activities.[222] The Pentagon said that another 43 former detainees have "a plausible link with terrorist activities," according to its intelligence sources.[222] Peter Bergen, a national security expert and CNN analyst, says that DOD has classified some former detainees of the latter category as suspected of having returned to terrorism because they made statements against the United States; Bergen noted "that's not surprising if you've been locked up in a U.S. prison camp for several years."[223] If all 18 people on the "confirmed" list have "returned" to the battlefield, that would amount to 4 percent of the detainees who have been released. This is much lower than the recidivism rate of the general U.S. prison population (>65%).[223]

(snip)

European Union members and the Organization of American States, as well as non-governmental organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, have protested the legal status and physical condition of detainees at Guantánamo. The human rights organization Human Rights Watch has criticized the Bush administration over this designation in its 2003 world report, stating: "Washington has ignored human rights standards in its own treatment of terrorism suspects. It has refused to apply the Geneva Conventions to prisoners of war from Afghanistan, and has misused the designation of 'illegal combatant' to apply to criminal suspects on U.S. soil." On 25 May 2005, Amnesty International released its annual report calling the facility the "gulag of our times."[9][225] Lord Steyn called it "a monstrous failure of justice," because "... The military will act as interrogators, prosecutors and defense counsel, judges, and when death sentences are imposed, as executioners. The trials will be held in private. None of the guarantees of a fair trial need be observed."[226]