The overwhelming majority of the 229 detainees remaining at Guantanamo were captured in Afghanistan or fleeing the battlefield along the border with Pakistan or in Pakistan proper. Only around 30 were seized in places like Thailand or Kenya, and most of those detainees are accused of high levels of terrorist activity that should make them excellent candidates for criminal prosecution.

The overwhelming majority of those 229 eh?
Well isn’t that just as meaningful as the number that are left handed.

You know what else is an overwhelming majority? The number of detainees killed in detention through brutal treatment that weren’t at Gitmo. In fact it’s not a majority, it’s all of them. And apparently fixing the mistakes of the Bush detention policies can be proposed and assessed without once mentioning any of these other facilities where the worst abuses have occurred and where most prisoners are currently held.

The Supreme Court sustained military detention authority of those detainees captured in zones of active combat in 2004 in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld,

Yes, and when they ruled in Rasul vs Bush that Gitmo detainees had access to US courts, the DoD stopped sending prisoners there who were captured in such war zones. Making your point meaningful only for those who were fortunate enough to be sent to Gitmo beforehand. For the majority of detainees who were purposely kept out of that little legal problem…. well, I guess that’s a topic for another day when someone forces you to address that.

Seriously, is there no point prior to the day Gitmo is shut that anyone is going to acknowledge that Gitmo isn’t the primary facility where detainees are held? That prisoners have for 5 years been actively detoured to other facilities precisely to avoid the legal status Gitmo grants them that other facilities don’t.

It’s intellectually dishonest enough when talking generally about the issue, but to continue this Potemkin Village approach when assessing the President’s proposed solution to detainee policy, while not once even considering that this doesn’t apply to the majority of detainees? What kind of complicit nonsense is that?

And this from someone supposedly representing and “International Rights and Responsibility Program”?

Serious concerns remain about the prospect of continued military detention for Guantanamo detainees captured outside zones of active combat. The Post reports Obama is considering…

This may have been an excellent point at which to illustrate what form Obama has shown those considerations to take. Like arguing in court that Habeas Corpus rights do not apply to detainees at Baghram, regardless of the fact that this is a facility that holds prisoners captured in various countries and unrelated to any battlefield.

Although that would tend to be the complete opposite of this description.

… holding some of these detainees in military detention with improved due process protections to ensure as fair a system as possible.

“torture has tainted much of the evidence…No evidentiary concerns exist on the most important legacy case, 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed”

This would be the most well known case of waterboarding which resulted in him confessing to a list of plots including a murder he simply did not commit.

If that’s the standard, and confessing to a murder you are known not to have committed while being tortured isn’t a problem, how could “evidenciary concerns” consist in any other case? Did someone else confess to killing JFK?