The world got a little safer in the past few weeks, as more of the “worst of the worst” were transferred to Camp Delta, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. On the President’s order, 14 of the worst of the worst — after an undisclosed length of time in undisclosed locations — were taken from their ghost prisons and black sites and moved to the Caribbean. Observers estimate at least 15,000 are being held in some form of indefinite detention between Gitmo, Iraq and Afghanistan. We’re told by the honest and humble President that the 14 include some seriously dangerous people, but we know for sure that lots of the enemy combatants are anything but dangerous.

Someone should tell Bush about Haji Nasrat Khan. After being held as an enemy combatant since 2003, he was flown from Cuba to Afghanistan in late August and released. He has never been charged with any crime, and never will be. After all, he’s 79 and nearly blind since his stroke 15 years ago. Khan isn’t even the oldest in the enemy combatants club. Faiz Muhammad claimed to be 105 when he was held captive at Camp Bagram, Afghanistan, in 2002. Remarkably, his captors kept their sense of humor there, where at least two captives were murdered in custody (they were beaten to death during interrogations, according to the autopsy). Muhammad was nicknamed “Al-Qaeda Claus,” but the Pentagon has since decided that neither he nor Khan are the enemy combatants America so feared.

In fact, the monsters Bush describes include hundreds of enemy combatants — the “worst of the worst” — who have been released back into society. Neither terrorists nor troublemakers, most of the “worst” were victims of paranoid American aggression. Over 700 people have done time at Gitmo, where they were force fed, tortured, abused and denied access to court systems, legal representation or any chance of hope, yet fewer than 10 have ever been charged with a crime. Three killed themselves over the summer, an act the Pentagon called “warfare,” but more sober people realized that this was a likely outcome of kidnapping someone and torturing him for years.

And just last week, the Senate passed legislation, at the request of the President, to pave the way for “prosecuting” the “worst.” Given the Pentagon’s history of kidnapping old men and falsely accusing them of terrorism, it’s a shame that the legislation forbids detainees from challenging their detention or treatment in federal courts. Violations of the Geneva Conventions like rape and some torture are forbidden (Thanks, McCain!), but the President has the authority to determine what torture is. Deafening music, simulated drowning and hypothermia will continue. Detainees will not be present in their tribunals; they cannot confront their accusers or those presenting evidence against them. “Evidence” obtained via torture is admissible. The Fourth Amendment’s guarantees against illegal searches and seizures are thus void. Habeas Corpus, the only right the Framers thought important enough to include in the original Constitution (unlike freedom of press, separation of church and state, right to bear arms, etc.), is gone.

These restrictions might seem more justified if the government had a better record of knowing a “terrorist” when it sees one. The Secretary of Defense, after all, was Reagan’s personal envoy to Saddam Hussein, now on trial for genocide, and a supporter of Reagan’s decision to remove Iraq from the list of states that support terrorism in 1982.

Then there’s Jose Padilla, the alleged “dirty bomber.” He still hasn’t been convicted of anything, let alone charged with anything related to a bomb. Yet he was held for over three years as an enemy combatant, one of the “worst of the worst,” and denied all the rights the Senate just agreed should be withheld from the “worst of the worst.” The Federal Judge overseeing his case now calls it “extremely light on facts.” His case doesn’t inspire confidence in the Department of Justice’s ability to spot terrorists. There’s always the “worst of the worst” example that Rumsfeld released in November, 2005: Old Dominion University student Nah Aamee. Along with two other young men who were never charged with anything despite being held captive for four years, Aamee told his interrogators that he lived in Virginia, not Afghanistan, and was in Pakistan for a wedding.

The US of A’s record on “terrorists” is weak. So why require fewer checks and balances of the men and women with a proven track record of ineptitude and racial profiling? A typical response would slam my “naiveté” and decry my “support for the terrorists who want to kill us,” probably demanding that I “love America or leave it.” But to the contrary, it’s ignorant to believe Bush’s “worst of the worst” bullshit when his own documents — Combatant Status Review Tribunals, CSRTs — make very clear that fewer than 5 percent of the “worst of the worst” were actually apprehended by the United States, and fewer than half are thought to have ever engaged in hostilities against the U.S. Read the Denbeaux report, and love it. Idiocy isn’t patriotic.

Should we give suspected murderers the benefit of the doubt (I mean suspected al-Qaeda, not the Bush regime)? Well, given America’s track record of labeling anyone they meet in Afghanistan with a Casio watch a terrorist (wearing a Casio watch was cited as grounds for declaring someone an enemy combatant at Gitmo, seriously), maybe we don’t need to answer. We should consider whether it should be easier for this batch of trigger-happy imbeciles to detain and torture other human beings. Let’s not be so demented that we allow Birdshot Cheney to make even more mistakes.

If you have confidence in these people to either protect you (the entire U.S. intelligence community said that the occupation of Iraq is making us less safe), or be honest with you (“worst of the worst,” they tell us about 79-year-old blind men with walkers), then you’re naïve. There’s nothing so unique about 2006 or Osama bin Laden that requires us to torture or end habeas corpus. Those who say otherwise are part of the problem, a far closer approximation of the “worst of the worst” than Haji Nasrat Khan.

Jeff Purcell is a graduate student in Africana Studies. He can be reached at jlp56@cornell.edu. Brutal Honesty appears Mondays.