Government Says Six Years Not Long Enough to Prepare Evidence

Imagine being seized in Afghanistan or Pakistan, where you were, perhaps, a completely innocent man, sold for a bounty, or a Muslim soldier, fighting other Muslims in a civil war whose roots lay in the resistance to the Soviet occupation of the 1980s, which was partly funded by the United States.
Then imagine that, both during and after being treated with appalling brutality by US forces, you are given no opportunity to establish whether you are an innocent man seized by mistake, a soldier, or the victim of bounty hunters, and you are, instead, flown halfway around the world to an experimental offshore prison, where you are interrogated about your connections to al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.
At no point are you offered the protection of the Geneva Conventions (to which your captors are a signatory), which were designed to prevent the "humiliating and degrading treatment" of prisoners seized during wartime, and also to prevent their interrogation (prisoners may be questioned, but any form of "physical or mental coercion" is prohibited). Moreover, if you struggle to answer the questions put to you -- perhaps because you know nothing about al-Qaeda or Osama bin Laden -- you are not only interrogated relentlessly, you are also subjected to an array of "enhanced interrogation techniques," which contravene the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, to which your captors are also a signatory.

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