Gulag

Here's what can happen when you start imprisoning people without fair trials:

"When we went to Pakistan the local people treated us like brothers and gave us good food and meat," said another detainee. But soon, he said, they were in prison in Pakistan where "we heard they sold us to the Pakistani authorities for $5,000 per person."

There have been reports of Arabs being sold to the Americans after the U.S.-led offensive in Afghanistan, but the testimonies offer the most detail from prisoners themselves.

In March 2002, the AP reported that Afghan intelligence offered rewards for the capture of al-Qaida fighters — the day after a five-hour meeting with U.S. Special Forces. Intelligence officers refused to say if the two events were linked and if the United States was paying the offered reward of 150 million Afghanis, then equivalent to $4,000 a head.

That day, leaflets and loudspeaker announcements promised "the big prize" to those who turned in al-Qaida fighters.

Said one leaflet: "You can receive millions of dollars. ... This is enough to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life — pay for livestock and doctors and school books and housing for all your people."

Talk of fair trials and due process of law can sometimes sound excessively legalistic, like some kind of courteous behavior demanded by etiquette. The point that hasn't been drilled into people's skulls is that when you don't give a terror suspect a fair trial, you don't know whether he's a terrorist or just some goatherd who got caught in the net. And when you're capturing people in chaotic places like late-2001 Afghanistan, the risk of error is going to be way higher than in domestic circumstances. The need for a fair trial, likewise, is far higher.

So when you hear Richard Myers talking about how the detainees in Guantanamo want to slit our childrens' throats, remind yourself that there's no telling how many people he's falsely accusing. And given the way that the Bush Administration tries to cover up its mistakes, there's no telling how many innocent people are still locked up in Guantanamo to forestall a PR disaster.

--Neil the Werewolf