JJackson: I hear you loud and clear about not trusting what a government says about people in jail, just because it says so. It doesn't mean they are innocent, just that nobody has proven anything. You know this, “Well, if the government is holding them, they must be guilty of something” argument. What’s lurking behind behind this has to do with how strongly a person feels about habeas corpus. Obviously, some don’t feel it is such a big deal--at least as long as somebody else is on the business end of it. You might count Abe Lincoln in that category. But that is a different thread.

Warning to any Lurkers: Ancient History Follows. But it is a pretty interesting story.

Once upon a time, the British created their own version of Guantanamo Bay, and dispatched undesirable prisoners to garrisons off the mainland, beyond the reach of habeas corpus relief. The man who did this was Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon. Lord Clarendon is buried in Westminster Abbey. He was, for want of a better word nowadays, what would probably be called today the Prime Minister, and he was the main advisor to the king in a civil war in which the king was killed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_...l_of_Clarendon

There were two sides. You’ve got the monarchists, and then you’ve got the Puritans, who murdered the king because they said the kingdom was debauched and decadent. We Americans see Puritans as kindly settlers sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner. Brits loyal to the king saw them as SOBs and religious fundamentalists. Puritans believed all they had to do was overthrow the government, and the reign of Jesus Christ would come once more among them. So this was sort of a battle of civilizations, a battle of religious ideologies.

Some of the Puritans were among the most persecuted after the restoration of the monarchy. This is when the whole sending people away to offshore islands took place. Consider what it might have felt like for Clarendon and the monarchists. They’d been in exile for years. Many of their friends and supporters had been locked up or killed. The Puritans had been vicious; they had killed the king. And many of them who had done it were still at large, plotting out there. Clarendon may have been paranoid. The Monarchists saw plots everywhere. But some people said they had good reason to be paranoid.

The exact location of Lord Clarendon’s Gitmo is unknown. Historians think it was probably in Jersey or Guernsey, which today are nice seaside tax havens for the very rich. But suspending habeas corpus didn’t work out well for Lord Clarendon. He was impeached. At his impeachment trial, he was accused of sending people away to “remote islands, garrisons and other places, thereby to prevent them from the benefit of law, and to produce precedents for the imprisoning of any other of his majesty’s subjects in like manner.” He had to get the hell outta Dodge and move to France.

The outcome of all of this was the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, which specifically forbade what Clarendon had done, and made it illegal to send a prisoner into “Scotland, Ireland, Jersey, Guernsey, Tangier or into parts, garrisons, islands or places beyond the seas which are, or any time hereafter shall be within or without the dominions of His Majesty.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habeas_Corpus_Act_of_1679