American soldiers had to guard prisoners on the inside while receiving mortar and weapons fire from the outside. Guantanamo is distant from any battlefield, making it far more secure.
Prisoners
Without territory, it does not even have the resources to provide detention facilities for prisoners, even if it were interested in holding captured POWs.
Steady, firm, and kind government of prisoners is the truest humanity and the best exercise of duty. It is with convicts as with children: unseasonable indulgence, indiscreetly granted, leads to mischiefs which we may deplore but cannot repair.
Human-rights advocates, for example, claim that the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners is of a piece with President Bush’s 2002 decision to deny al Qaeda and Taliban fighters the legal status of prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions.
It has never demonstrated any desire to provide humane treatment to captured Americans. If anything, the murders of Nicholas Berg and Daniel Pearl declare al Qaeda’s intentions to kill even innocent civilian prisoners.
In light of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, critics are arguing that abuses of Iraqi prisoners are being produced by a climate of disregard for the laws of war.
Without history we are the prisoners of the accident of where and when we were born.
Pain dies quickly, and lets her weary prisoners go; the fiercest agonies have shortest reign.
The Pentagon said that these prisoners were kept in accordance with the Geneva Convention, and of course I was not reassured by that, but I couldn’t prove that that was wrong; so we’re clearer about that.
Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but is also their means of communication. It is the same with us and God. Every separation is a link.