I think you kind of missed his point, almost reinforced it. His point is that no matter how we (the government/military) define terrorism vs. lawful combatant doesn't matter to the family members of someone who lost their life. Their loved one is still dead, and no matter how detailed a definition of the finer points of the LOAC you go into won't bring them back, and that all they see is that we are building a $750,000 soccer stadium for someone who may or may not been involved in the death of their loved one.
So what's your point, that grief is a carte blanche to play fast and loose with how we treat people? That it doesn't make a difference whether or not they were involved in the death of Americans? That sounds awfully and dangerously close to the justification Faisal Shazad (and other Pakistanis) made to use the death of innocent Pakistanis in drone strikes to justify attacking unrelated Americans.
I am not equating soccer field to punishment/mistreatment/torture, but when you start blanket accusations of terrorism, that's the road you go down. It's OK to do X,Y,Z to them because they're just terrorists. As C420's water boarding wisecrack amply shows. They're detainees. And if you want to treat them like terrorists, you owe it to yourself to determine if they are - something Republicans have fought tooth and nail.
The fact is that just as there have been the worst of the worst, there have also been innocent bystanders in Guantanamo, released on the order of military judges who have seen the intelligence. And a lot of people in-between. And the hard question is what we do with people we're not certain about. Because it should make you uncomfortable that our government can lock someone away indefinitely, and you should demand a level of certainly that they deserve it, and not write off the lot (or exonerate the lot) based on one or two individual examples.
Pilot_man, let's be honest. What do you really know about the detainees actually at Guantanamo? How many of those "bad dudes" you've seen in theater ended up in Gitmo? Because the problem set we're dealing with are not the folks we've captured in the last few years after we've largely figured out our intelligence and detainee processes. The problem set are folks captured in the first few years of the GWOT, based on weak evidence, and who, 10 years later, we still shamefully haven't figured out what to do with.
The Guantanamo Review Task force reviewed all the intelligence, and recommended 36 be prosecuted, 48 be detained indefinitely under the laws of war for affiliation with Al-Qaeda, and 126 be released or transferred. That is a damn broad category to dismiss under the label of "terrorist" - and the full quote, LSO is:
"
For a handful of detainees cleared for transfer, there was scant evidence of any involvement with terrorist groups, the report says. Most were low-level fighters affiliated with al-Qaeda or other groups in Afghanistan"
