Only two prisoners who have been brought to Guantánamo have left. One is Mr. Hamdi, who was discovered to have been born in the United States; he is now in the Navy brig in Norfolk, Va. The other was an Afghan prisoner who received a diagnosis of schizophrenia and returned to Afghanistan, where he is reportedly in a state mental hospital. -- from the NY Times

There are 598 "detainees" at Guantanamo Bay. Many have been there since January. The military isn't even sure who they are, and hasn't given any of them a hearing or charged them with crimes. And the only way out, at least so far, is to go to a Navy brig or a mental hospital in Afghanistan. I was always appalled and saddened when reading Solzhenitsyn and other stories of people locked away for months or years with little or no hope of freedom. While some of these "detainees" may have been bad dudes intent on killing and destroying, many were likely just Taliban foot soldiers, an "honor" you could get just by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Many Taliban soldiers were basically draftees, with death as their only alternative to enlistment. In any case, they were simply soldiers fighting in what was basically a civil war. Well, the civil war is over and these people are under the control of a country that supposedly believes in freedom. Let's let them go and go back to living up to our ideals.