Right Side of the Rainbow

Now available as t-shirt:

U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (June 14, 2005):

During the operations since September 11th, the military has apprehended thousands of enemy combatants, and several hundred were determined to be particularly dangerous and valuable from an intelligence perspective.

There was no existing set of procedures or facilities to detain these enemies in Afghanistan or elsewhere. After extensive discussions with his senior advisers, the president decided that they were not entitled for formal prisoner of war status under the Geneva Conventions and that they were certainly not criminal defendants in the traditional law enforcement sense. Indeed, faced with this new situation, the president ordered that detained combatants be treated humanely under the laws of war. The detention facility at Guantanamo Bay was established for the simple reason that the United States needed a safe and secure location to detain and interrogate enemy combatants. It was the best option available.

The Department of Defense, working through the National Security Council interagency process, established procedures that would provide appropriate legal process to these detainees, procedures that go beyond what is required even under the Geneva Conventions. These included combatant status review tribunals to confirm that, in fact, each individual is, in fact, an unlawful enemy combatant. Every detainee currently at Guantanamo has received such a hearing. As a result, some 38 individuals were released.

(Thanks to Michelle Malkin.)