Detain the innocent to protect the guilty

Kevin Drum summarizes the articles in last week's National Journal on the Guantanamo detainees. Among Kevin's observations is this:

There's more like this, and the story it tells is that the problem at Guantanamo isn't just that it's difficult separating fact from fiction when prisoners have been captured in the heat of battle and the witnesses against them are thousands of miles away and untrustworthy to boot. That's a genuine problem, and not one that's easily resolved.

Rather, in too many cases, it turns out the Pentagon is relying on blatantly fabricated evidence against many of the Guantanamo prisoners, and it's doing so even though it knows the evidence against them is blatantly fabricated.

My guess is that the reason we won't let them go even though we know they're innocent is a combination of 1) the Cheney-Bush inability to admit to mistakes and 2) the fact that if we let them go, the story of what we did to them while in Guantanamo will get out. We certainly can't let #2 happen. Gee, there might be war crimes trials or something.