Angela Merkel Quotes

The military is trying very hard right now to put a better face on Guantanamo, and I think they actually have tried to rid some of the extreme versions of abuse that we have read about.

If they're in cell block 1A or 1B, these prisoners - they're murderers, they're terrorists, they're insurgents. Many of them probably have American blood on their hands. And here we're so concerned about the treatment of those individuals.

The United States is holding hundreds of suspected terrorists in prisons at Guantanamo and elsewhere. Many are locked up indefinitely. They have not been tried or even charged with any crime.

Sometimes people decide to write reports even though they haven't been to Guantanamo . And so I would just suggest that people look at some of the work that's been done by people who have been there. But that's not to say that we will not be very glad at the day that conditions permit the closure of Guantanamo and the trying of its inhabitants or for their release.

The most important issue is clearly not the quality of treatment and care of these prisoners; rather it is the perplexing issue of what we now do with them.

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.

This stuff on enemy combatants, the Bush Administration has fought like a tiger to avoid having to produce any evidence to a judge to show why somebody is locked up in perpetuity. Another example of that is the torture scandal.

I mean, the people who run Guantanamo, the military, pretty much dismiss complaints by the detainees because they say that they're all created as part of a political process to sort of fake complaints and get public support.

Yanukovych has changed everything in Ukrainian jails - real criminals have been released, while representatives of the middle class and politically rebellious free-minded people have filled the prisons.

Since January 2002, when the United States began detaining at Guantanamo Bay enemy combatants captured in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other fronts in the war on terror, critics have complained of human rights abuses.

Well, it is true that they did - the Pentagon did impose rules for governing the handling of the Koran in January of 2003, after there had been complaints about the handling of the Koran from detainees, from the International Red Cross.

Long before, and fully independent of, anything Congress did, President Obama made clear that he was going to preserve the indefinite detention system at Guantanamo even once he closed the camp. President Obama fully embraced indefinite detention - the defining injustice of Guantanamo - as his own policy.

In the years just after 9/11, even being breathed on by a suspected terrorist could land you in extralegal detention for the rest of your life.

What made Guantanamo such a travesty - and what still makes it such - is that it is a system of indefinite detention whereby human beings are put in cages for years and years without ever being charged with a crime.

Dutch prisons are probably the most civilized you're going to find anywhere in the world.

Today, 15 years after crime peaked, the American prison system has become a leviathan unmatched in human history. Never has a supposedly ‘free country’ denied basic liberty to so many of its citizens…. We have become a nation of jailers.

Even Adolf Eichmann got a trial.

In our zeal to kill the enemy, we internally debated the definition of torture. We held individuals at Guantanamo for years without due process. We inexplicably turned a blind eye to torture and executions by the Iraqi government. And we stomached countless other acts in the name of our war on terror.

One per cent of the U.S. population are in prison. In Iran, it’s .2 per cent, and most of them are drug traffickers. Nobody is talking about prisoners in the United States. Should there be an international determination against human-rights abuses in United States prisons? Is there any interest on the part of international organizations to do this? I don’t think so.

Guantanamo is still open, but it's unlikely that serious torture is going on at Guantanamo. There is just too much inspection.

In my heart of hearts, I don't think it's a good position to say that Guantanamo is not an acceptable answer for anyone we might capture now or in the future.

Prisoners have benefited disproportionately from 'rights inflation' - the expansion of human rights into unforeseen nooks and crannies.

By 2003, if you didn't understand that the United States was inflicting torture on those deemed enemy combatants, you weren't paying much attention.

When a government forcibly holds enough people indefinitely without trial, it evokes the kinds of raids, detention, and abuses of power associated with authoritarian states - or darker periods in American history.

We're a country that allowed waterboarding and indefinite detention, and we're a country where the NYPD Intelligence Division has police files on what Muslims think of the State of the Union address.