LexisNexis Global

"Returning Home: Resettlement and Reintegration of Detainees Released from the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba" is a policy paper jointly issued this month by the International Human Rights Law Clinic and the Human Rights Center both of the University of California at Berkeley. It  proposes a comprehensive justice-centered program to treat and aid the Guantanamo detainees to reintegrate into normal life in America after their years of detention.  The proposed program is comprehensive, including resettlement and short-term financial aid, physical and mental health evaluations and treatment and involvement of local community organizations to assist in implementation and integration locally.  Members of the International Human Rights Law Clinic and the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center are actively circulating the policy paper among various government authorities in Washington in the hopes that these policies will be adopted.  If you've been confined and regularly water-boarded for the past several years, the prospect of re-entering civil society can be daunting.  A program such as the Berkeley groups have proposed would go far towards easing those concerns.  For those who have been radicalized by their detention experience, this program might look like a sugar-coated method to continue surveillance and tracking to discourage reinvolvment with potentially subversive groups, as well as a propaganda tool.  It would certainly be the more humane way to help these people from whom our government's recent past policices have not only taken away several years of their lives, but in addition  have subjected them to harsh treatment of questionable legality.  There will be those who will object, claiming this is better treatment than they deserve - these people wouldn't have been detained if they hadn't been closely associated with known or actual terrorists.   As is very true of the common law system of adjudication, since objective truth is not the quest or purpose of a trial, and many of these people never got to trial anyway, many innocent persons are among their number.  For them to have to try to seek redress through the ordinary court system will be a lengthy, expensive and torturous process would be the same as justice denied; and denying them redress may only push them to embrace the radicalism of some of their fellow detainees.  If all the good reasons for adopting this program don't seem good to you, let us know with your comment below.