Today’s Must Read

Here’s a painful Guantanamo Bay irony: What to do with detainees slated for repatriation who fear abuse back home?

That’s a serious obstacle confronting the Bush administration as it considers shuttering the facility. The U.S. has legal restrictions barring it from sending people to countries where they’re likely to be tortured. As much as human rights groups object to the indefinite detentions and harsh interrogations at Guantanamo, they also don’t want to see further abuses occur in the name of closing the camp down, a problem the New York Times spotlights today.

Case in point: Ahmed Belchaba, an Algerian whom the Department of Defense no longer considers a danger to America. He’s contesting his repatriation in a case set to be heard by Chief Justice John Roberts.

Lawyers for Mr. Belbacha have said he is at risk of torture or death by Islamist radicals because he once served in the Algerian army, and by the government, which is likely to view him as a terrorist because of his tenure at Guantánamo.

In a filing on Wednesday, the Justice Department opposed any order barring a transfer of Mr. Belbacha, saying that “as the United States has explained, it is in no one’s interest to detain enemy combatants longer than is necessary.”

That case could open courthouse doors to dozens of similar claims by detainees who do not want to be sent home.

That throws an old Guantanamo problem into new light. Detainees there go through an administrative process, not a legal one, to determine whether the U.S. should continue to detain them. The operative consideration for Guantanamo jailers isn’t detainee guilt or innocence. So when the U.S. sends detainees back to their home country, their often-authoritarian governments have no independent reason to believe that the former detainees don’t pose a threat to them. And that makes them ripe for persecution.

In the recent case of a Tunisian detainee, Abdullah Bin Omar al Hajji, his lawyers sent a series of e-mail messages to government officials in May and June trying to stop a planned return to Tunisia, a court filing shows.

The lawyers told the officials he had apparently been convicted in absentia in Tunisia for affiliation with a nonviolent political party at a time when human rights monitors had said such trials were not fairly conducted.

They warned that he would face torture and a 23-year prison term without having had the chance to defend himself. On June 15, one message shows, the lawyers demanded to see their client when they were to arrive at Guantánamo on June 17. But that day, he was shipped back to Tunisia. Not long after, according to an affidavit by his Tunisian lawyer, he was put in jail, where he was slapped and threatened with rape and told that his wife, too, would be raped.

The Defense Department wants to winnow the Guantanamo population down to 150 from its current 360 residents, and charge approximately 80 of the remaining detainees with war crimes. That’s a task complicated by the paradox of keeping people at Guantanamo in the interest of protecting their human rights.