Quote Originally Posted by Gnostic Yevon
We are giving them basic rights
I seem to recall a Supreme Court case that ruled that the practice of refusing habeas corpus was against the Fourth Amendment. Despite that ruling, I still continue to hear stories of prisoners being held without trial. So no, they are not being given basic rights.

but the thing is that because they are a part of a group that plans attacks on civillians, and the army is trying to figure out how to stop those attacks on civillians, we can't give them the Geneva rights, which would mean that all we'd get is name/rank/serial number.
One very important fact that several people have pointed out in this thread, which you, for whatever reason, continue to disregard, is that we have absolutely no proof in many of these cases that they are terrorists. In many cases, we are simply holding people because we believe they have information about friends or family members that they are withholding from us; we have no actual proof, per se, that these people themselves have done anything wrong. So, no, we're not just holding people who have done evil.

And either way, we're supposed to be better than that. The whole purpose of fighting this war was, so President Bush has been telling me for the past year and a half, to spread freedom and democracy to the Arab world. Holding prisoners without habeas corpus doesn't sound like freedom to me. Even terrorists are given some rights under the Constitution; the Bill of Rights applies to everyone. Holding government to any less stringent a standard than that is nothing but sheer hypocrisy.

That isn't going to stop the next attack.
Neither is holding random people without trial or any sort of proof that they have done anything wrong. In fact, that's probably going to make attacks more likely, because someone is going to be very pissed off that their uncle/father/brother/best friend/former roommate is being held without habeas corpus in a prison that tortures its inmates by a country that purports to be against such practices. I know I'd be pretty smurfing pissed off if that happened to a friend of mine, and I'd probably hate the country that was responsible for it, too.

We can't have a public trial because of the risk to the jury (they'll probably be murdered if they convict)
Ever heard of something called the Witness Protection Program? Yeah, that renders this argument irrelevant.

and the risk of giving out intelligence ("we caught this guy because we got a hold of his cellphone records", therefore no more cellphone calls we can track)
If the records are being obtained illegally, our government shouldn't have them in the first place. Transparency of government is a necessary evil.

as well as the fact that even knowing who we have at any point tells them which plans are compromised.
Who said we had to release the prisoners' names?

So we need MPs, I suppose, and closed trials.
I disagree, for reasons stated above.

If you were given information that an attack was going to happen in your neighborhood, that you knew came from torture, and the cops came and said "Cloud 9, since this info came from torture, should we act on it or not?" Which way do you want it? Would you really stand for the rights of the guy in gitmo who was tortured into giving the info, or do you protect your family and friends in your neighborhood? You can only have one.
I'd still stand for the rights of the guy who was being tortured, because believe it or not, America is supposed to be better than that, and I don't believe that the lives of three thousand Americans are worth the lives of one hundred thousand Iraqis.