Guantanamo Bay Detention Center should remain open.

As I suspected, I'm going to contest a number of my opponent's assumptions, so be ready for that.1: GTMO does not house war criminals, but rather mostly innocent civiliansOf the 779 people who have been brought to GTMO since the beginning of 2002, none have been convicted in a US federal court. Only three have been convicted in a military court, and one of those three (Salim Hamdan) had their conviction vacated in the US court of appeals. Another one of them (David Hicks) was only convicted because of a plea bargain. None of the three was convicted of a recognised war crime: Hicks was convicted of "providing material support for terrorism", Hamdan of being Bin Laden's chauffeur, and the third man, Ali al-Bahlul, of opening up Windows Movie Maker and making a video that "celebrated" the terrorist attack on the USS Cole. To be fair, a fourth person who was briefly held was later convicted in a Russian court, although again not of a war crime. So there's the worst of the 779. A director whose speech was a little too free, a driver, and a person who helped wire some money. I do not believe these are "the most high value detainees and war criminals the US has captured. " Regardless, this is a detention facility, not a prison. The difference is that to be a prison there needs to be criminals, and at best, only 3/779 people have ever been convicted of a crime. A detention facility is where you go before you have been convicted, usually while you're going to court (but hardly anyone at GTMO ever gets that chance). So who are the others? Mostly ordinary people. Right now many of you will be familiar with the case of Shaker Aamer, the British guy of Saudi origin who happened to be doing aid work in Afghanistan when he was captured and tortured. He was taken the GTMO without trial, and has been there ever since, more often than not in solitary confinement. The Bush administration admitted it had no evidence against him. Both the governments of Bush and Obama have cleared him for release, and yet the military is refusing to let him out. Many have speculated this is because he has often stood up for the rights of other prisoners. (. http://goo.gl...)Shaker is not alone. In a recent article, former US president Jimmy Carter argued that more than half of those in GTMO have actually already been cleared for release, and that there's virtually no evidence against the rest of them, but that most of those have next to no chance of ever getting out (. http://goo.gl...).There is no shortage of stories from the inmates. Imad Abdullah Hassan, the Yemeni university student pulled out of his dorm, and who still doesn't know why. Mustafa Ait Idir, who was apprehended by the USA in Bosnia almost immediately after having been proved innocent by the Bosnian Supreme Court. Mosa Zi Zemmori, who wore a brand of wristwatch the US did not endorse. Fawaz Mahdi, a seriously mentally ill person (and there are almost 100 others like him who've been through GTMO). Jamal al-Harith, who was held by the Taliban in a prison, so the US thought they could torture information out of him about, ironically, Taliban torture techniques. The list goes on and on (. http://goo.gl... and . http://goo.gl...).2: It is not detainees who attack guards, but guards who attack detaineesMy opponent has made inmates at GTMO sound violent, but in fact a quick glance through their administrative review board hearing cases reveals almost no such instances. Instead we see numerous references to attempted suicides (a number of which have been successful) and hunger strikes - hardly violent forms of protest. There is no shortage of stories, however, of inmates who have been attacked in various ways by guards. A Red Cross inspection concluded that GTMO "cannot be considered other than an intentional system of cruel, unusual and degrading treatment and a form of torture" (. http://goo.gl...). These attacks are so extreme that one time, during a training exercise, a US soldier named Sean Baker, posing as a prisoner, was beaten so extremely that he received a severe brain injury. As one US senate report argued, these extreme attacks on prisoners were authorised and apparently legalised (. http://goo.gl...). If it were true that the facility is there for military intelligence (though what intelligence a mental retard may offer does baffle me) then these kinds of attacks on prisoners cannot possibly give more accurate information - and if it isn't, then why torture at all? This is not simply reserved for uncooperative inmates - in fact, there has scarcely been anybody released from GTMO who has NOT complained of the torture that occurs there.3. The Geneva conventions do not apply at GTMOThe reason why GTMO isn't on US soil is because some lawyers working for Bush thought they found a loophole to get around the Geneva convention (see also the next point). In the 2006 lawsuit of Hamdan v Rusfeld, the US Supreme Court found that this loophole doesn't work for Article 3 of each Geneva convention, which requires humane treatment (precisely the one the lawyers wanted to avoid) or the entirity of the third one (dealing with prisoners of war). A 2007 United Nations report argued that the Bush administration had violated international law through GTMO (. http://goo.gl...). To date the Geneva conventions have not been implemented, for instance, prisoners are denied the right to Article 5 tribunals. Most of congress and the supreme court are still scrapping over whether prisoners can even have habeus corpus.4. Assuming the remaining prisoners are all guilty, they can go placesLiterally on the same day as this debate was begun, a government report was published showing that all 166 remaining inmates could be safely relocated to any of the 6 Defense Department prisons or 98 Justice Department prisons (. http://goo.gl...). Which makes a lot of sense, given that 373 convicted terrorists are already held in such locations, and these guys don't even have a conviction. There have been absolutely no security problems with any of the terrorists. Even so, remember that these people are likely mostly innocent. The vast majority of GTMO's inmates since 2002 have been.5. Justice works on faithThe whole point of justice is to give people the impression they are secure. Right now, people all around the world (including within America, because Americans have been detained there too) are genuinely concerned they will be arbritrarily and indefinitely detained. This is not an unwarranted fear. There are literally hundreds of such cases that have happened before, and GTMO just so happens to be one of the places they are sent. Therefore, the existance of GTMO undermines the principle of justice. This impacts on the whole of the United States. Any claim that the US is a champion of rights or freedoms is instantly reversed with this very obvious way in which it isn't. I imagine most of the US is a pretty cool place, but when even one foreign national is detained indefinitely without trial, that nation is not going to like you very much. For US allies, this means that GTMO is a roadblock. For US enemies, GTMO is both a source of propaganda and a sort of vindication for their cause. Several times, al Qaeda has referred to it by name for the fear it strikes in people. This is why nations such as Russia and Australia have gone to great diplomatic lengths to get their citizens out of GTMO. Unfortunately most of the nations represented at GTMO do not have nearly so much diplomatic influence. ---The harm of the status quo is that there's a detention facility out there holding people without trial, in conditions no semblance of international law would permit, including the worst forms of torture, for indefinite periods and without having committed a crime. GTMO is, more than anything else, a symbol of the failure of the US justice system to actually deliver justice. The USA should not settle for failure. Close GTMO.