Just when you thought the War on Terr' was upstanding and just, here come the communists at NPR's This American Life to kill your fetuses, give your money away to homeless drug addicts, and tell you why the War on Terr' isn't so hot.

This week's show is an update of their Peabody Award-winning 2006 show about detainees at Guantanamo Bay. The producers of This American Life wanted to find out more about Gitmo detainees.

Some highlights:

• The military and intelligence officials themselves estimate that only "a handful," up to a maximum of "two dozen," of the prisoners at Guantanamo have yielded information relating to al-Qaeda. There are 600 men imprisoned at Guantanamo. Even considering that military intelligence officials may be underestimating by half, that means that 92% of the people imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay have no relationship to terrorism.
• Though President Bush and Vice President Cheney insisted that the people being held at Guantanamo were captured "on the battlefield" in Afghanistan and Pakistan, only 5% of them were actually captured in combat. The vast, vast majority of them were handed over to the United States by Pakistan and Afghanistan's Northern Alliance. Some of them were turned in for a reward, which, the show points out, led to a tremendous number of prisoners being falsely turned in for the reward money.
• In the habeas tribunals that the Supreme Court commanded the administration to organize, defendants weren't allowed access to the evidence against them, as that evidence was classified as a matter of national security. One defendant's dossier was accidentally declassified, and it turned out the evidence against him consisted of five or six statements made by U.S. military intelligence, including facts that were known to be false.

The post-September 11 immigrant sweep yielded many immigrants who were here on expired visas, but practically no immigrants who had active ties to al-Qaeda. The same thing happened in Afghanistan: most people were in the wrong place at the wrong time, or angered someone enough to get themselves handed over to the U.S. The Bush administration now seems keen on keeping prisoners locked up and as far away from courts as possible not because the prisoners are a threat to the United States, but because to release so many prisoners would require admitting that the administration made a huge and embarrassing mistake. What this administration cares more about than being correct is appearing not to have been wrong. Face-saving is something the Bush administration does all the time, and there is no good way to save face on the issue of Guantanamo Bay detainees, except to keep them locked up.