All dressed up and nowhere to go

The Center for Constitutional Rights has charged that there are more than 30 refugees currently detained at Guantánamo who have been cleared for release - some of them years ago - but who now

face the impossible choice of returning to torture and persecution in their home countries or remaining detained indefinitely at Guantánamo

because, shamefully, no nation in the world has agreed to take any of them in. One nation, Albania, has previously accepted eight, but the remaining 30-plus have nowhere to go.

Many are men who fled persecution in their own countries yet ended up in Guantanamo because they were captured or sold for bounty in the chaos of war.

The US has refused to allow entry to any of them even though they have been found to pose no threat. Or, more exactly, no threat to the security of the nation. They would be, however, a threat to the security of the Shrub team, which for years branded the prisoners at Gitmo the “worst of the worst” and “hard core, well-trained terrorists” who were properly beyond the reach of courts, law, treaties, and human rights. Having these innocent people running around the country telling their story, why, that could threaten to undermine the Bushites' ability to scare the citizenry into submission. And we can't have that, now, can we?

Attorneys with CCR called on the U.S. government, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and other traditional resettlement countries to come up with a plan of action and implement it promptly.

"The U.S. admits it has no reason to hold these men, but the inaction of the international community has left them stranded," said Shayana Kadidal, managing attorney of CCR's Guantánamo Global Justice Initiative. "The prolonged detention of these men is unconscionable."

For years now, the US has illegally imprisoned, abused, and tortured people in a concocted legal limbo supposedly free from all oversight or control in a Kafkaesque mockery of any principle of justice. As CCR Executive Director Vincent Warren says, the US has an ongoing responsibility to those it has wronged.

However, it should also be said, as CCR indirectly does, we are not alone: It's time for those countries that denounced, decried, or even merely tut-tutted about Gitmo to put their refugee resettlement where they mouths are. That is, it's time for the nations of the world, presented as they are with the opportunity to get some innocent people out of our legal black hole, to put up or shut up.

The report, including stories of a few of the men, is in .pdf format at this link.

Footnote: The first sentence of the Agencie France Presse (AFP) article on this, found on Yahoo News, is misleading. It says CCR "criticized a US decision to transfer a group of former inmates to Albania." The actual complaint is that Albania, the poorest country in Europe with a rudimentary refugee system that can't offer those sent there proper assistance, is the only option these prisoners have other than remaining at Gitmo because nowhere else will take them.