Quotes About Detainees

conservative lawyer John Yoo at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught. Yoo had sterling credentials in conservative legal circles. An alum of George W. Bush's Justice Department, he was the author of the "torture memos," which provided a legal basis for torturing detainees in the war on terror and had also been a Supreme Court law clerk for Justice Clarence Thomas.

When I visited Guantanamo Bay several years ago, I met a team of psychiatrists treating the detainees. When I asked how they distinguished between, say, schizophrenia or bipolarity and a bedrock religious commitment to holy war, they couldn't answer.

The detainees at GTMO are treated exceptionally well - so well that some have even declined to be resettled, instead choosing to stay at GTMO.

With respect to the legal justifications or the policies relating to the treatment of detainees, I was not aware of any issues on that or the legal memos that subsequently came out until the summer, sometime in 2004, when there started to be news reports on that.

However, the Department of Defense treats these detainees in accord with the Geneva Convention, even though that is not required because of the inhumane methods used by these killers.

We've got fifty people at Gitmo that are too dangerous to be let go that will never go through a normal criminal trial. Let's create a new legal system, so they'll have their day in court.

In January of 2009, President Barack Obama signed an executive order to close Guantanamo Bay within a year's time, vowing to continue to fight terror but 'in a manner that is consistent with our values and ideals.' A plan was considered to move a number of detainees to stateside prisons in order to have them stand trial in civilian court.

It troubled me that we had these reports of torture of detainees, we had people jailed at Guantanamo Bay who couldn't even talk to their lawyers and couldn't see the evidence against them - sort of fundamental bedrock civil liberties things.

I can tell you categorically that any mal-treatment of any detainees by U.S. forces or coalition forces is totally unacceptable - that our orders have and will continue to be that we will treat everyone in our charge with - humanely and with respect.

The military tribunals currently underway at Guantanamo Bay create a clear legal process, as affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, for adjudicating the cases of these terrorists, when possible. Those efforts would be severely undercut by moving the detainees to the United States.

Now, unfortunately, some prissy card-carrying members of the U.S. Constitution have made us all look bad by pointing out that many of the Gitmo detainees weren't guilty of anything. Whoops!

The Democrats in the Senate adopted a resolution, an amendment, saying that there should be no Guantanamo detainees brought into this country. So, more and more, we're finding the American people on one side, the ACLU and the troglodytes from the New York Times on the other, where they belong.

Regrettably, it has become clear that torture of detainees in United States custody is not limited to Abu Ghraib or even Iraq. Since Abu Ghraib, there have been increasing reports of torture.

Guantanamo allows us to secure dangerous detainees without the risk of escape, while at the same time providing us with valuable intelligence information on how best to proceed in the war against terror and prevent future attacks.

We got valuable information from debriefing of Al Qaeda detainees, and I don't think it's knowable whether interrogation techniques played a role in that.

The opposition remained maddeningly opaque. Intelligence people scratched their heads. A January 25, 2004, count of detainees totaled 9,754. Casualty estimates ran to at least that number. So, essentially, the U.S. and its partners had captured and killed the entire insurgency. Yet the bad guys were still out there.