The latest heap of ....
Source: BBC News
Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7411862.stm
Title: "US 'stuck' with Guantanamo prison"
Date: May 21, 2008
The latest excuse from the Bush administration:
The US is "stuck" with the Guantanamo Bay detention centre even though it wants to close it, Defence Secretary Robert Gates has said.
Mr Gates said the US wanted to send up to 70 prisoners home but countries would either not take them or could not be trusted to.
(
BBC News)
Left at that, it seems a legitimate worry. After all, some countries probably don't want these people back. Others might do their own harm to the suspects.
But wait. While the question of whether or not some governments will take them back is fair, the idea that others might torture or persecute Guantanamo suspects isn't even on the radar:
Mr Gates told a US Senate hearing: "The brutally frank answer is that we're stuck... We have a serious 'not in my backyard' problem.
"Either their home government won't accept them or we're concerned that the home government will let them loose once we return them home," he said.
"What do you do with that irreducible 70 or 80 who you cannot let loose but will not be charged and will not be sent home?" he asked.
The Pentagon has said 36 former inmates who were released are "confirmed or suspected of having returned to terrorism".
(ibid)
Note that phrase, "returned to terrorism". How many of the suspects released were ever proven to be terrorists, and why were they released?
It is a remarkable charge, all things considered, suggesting gross negligence if Gates is being truthful.
To the other, the problem is that these are Guantanamo suspects.
In March, 2006, the Chicago-based radio program
This American Life broadcast an episode about Guantanamo suspects. Some of it plays like the sickening farce so many critics suspect. For instance, Jack Hitt reported:
HITT: The administration quickly put together a kind of hearing based, in part, on the old Geneva Conventions hearing they'd abandoned. They called this hearing a Combatant Status Review Tribunal, or, in the elegant shorthand of the Pentagon, a CSRT. These new hearings have one oddity to them: the tribunal assumes all the evidence against the detainee is correct. If the detainee wants to prove them wrong, it'll be difficult—because he's not allowed to see the evidence. It's classified. As a result, these hearings make strange reading. In many of them, there comes a moment in the dialog like this one between detainee Abdul Malik and the judging panel.
MALIK: Regarding the charge that I worked at several guest houses and offices, what was the work?
JUDGE: I cannot answer that. This is the first time we've seen the evidence. I know nothing more than what is written here.
MALIK: Same with me. I don't know anything about this. Regarding the charge that I was frequently seen at Osama bin Laden's side—who saw me?
JUDGE: I don't know.
MALIK: If it says "was frequently seen", you have to prove that.
The Supreme Court has said the detainees did not deserve a full criminal trial, of course, only the basics of a fair hearing, which came down to three things: a lawyer, an impartial judge, and the chance to see the evidence against them. In practice, though, they get none of these.
Baher Azmy is a lawyer who represents one of the detainees, but he couldn't attend his client's CSRT—because actual lawyers aren't allowed.
AZMY: They were each appointed a personal representative who's a military officer, um, who in my case met with my client the day before for 15 minutes, sat silent and failed to present all of the exculpatory evidence in his file, which, of course, any lawyer would have done. Not the personal representative.
Hitt: And as for confronting the evidence, consider the case of Azmy's client, Murat Kumaz, a Turkish citizen raised in Germany. The Pentagon accidentally declassified the file with all of the secret evidence against it. And here's what's in it: nothing.
AZMY: The classified file contains—the Washington Post wrote about it—six statements from military intelligence. That's really what the classified file is. Memos saying "this person was here" or "so-and-so witnessed him ..." In Kumaz's case, there are five or six statements saying, "There's no evidence of any connection to Al Qaeda, the Taliban or a threat to the United States. The Germans have concluded he has got no connection to Al Qaeda. There's no evidence linking him to the Taliban." Over and over and over again.
HITT: But here's the thing: At the hearing, nobody talks about any of that. His personal representative doesn't bring it up. The tribunal doesn't consider it. And Kumaz himself doesn't even know about it. He's declared an enemy combatant; he's still at Guantanamo today.
But wait. There's more. The reason they give for holding him? A friend of his named Selcuk Bilgin blew himself up as a suicide bomber in Turkey in 2003. That's 2 years after Kumaz got picked up.
AZMY: So setting aside the sort of remarkable legal proposition that one could be detained indefinitely for what one's friend does, it's actually preposterous in that a simple Google search or a call to the Germans would have revealed that his friend is alive and well, and under no suspicion of any such thing.
HITT: You heard that right. Kumaz is in Guantanamo because two years after he got picked up, a guy he knows became a suicide bomber. Except that he didn't become a suicide bomber and is currently living in Germany.
AZMY: Yeah, he's walking around in Germany; I've met him.
(
This American Life)
And neither Malik or Kumaz's stories are unique. The prisoners at Guantanamo are a strange bunch, all things considered.
HITT: The government says that they would release Adel and the other Uighurs, if only it could find another country to send them to. I have an idea. Adel could go 90 miles north to Miami where there's an entire city of anti-Communists. Or he could be sent to one fo the largest Uighur ex-pat communities: in Washington D.C. So, why aren't we going to be seeing Adel anytime soon? Here's Willett:
WILLETT: I'll tell you what I think the answer is, although no one from the government would admit this. I think the answer is that if anybody actually met these guys, actually looked at them, and took their pictures and, you know, had them on TV shows or the radio, they'd be shocked. Because they've been told for four years that the people at Guantanamo are terrorists, that they're the worst of the worst. And you take a look at Adel, you're suddenly gonna realize you've been lied to for a long time. He struck me when I first met him like the kind of kid your college age kid would bring home—his roommate, his buddy from college, home for the weekend. People who meet Adel for the first time, they walk out of the meeting and, and, their jaws are a little unsprung. And they don't say much, because it's hitting them like a ton of bricks. You know. "This guy's in Guantanamo?"
• • •
HITT: Of course, as we're so often told, this war is different. Who wants to be the one who lets somebody go who then turns out to be the next 9/11 hijacker? So for the military, there's also this other new thing. A terrifying calculation that there can be no margin of error. Joe Marguiles of the University of Chicago represents a few detainees, and has been trying to make sense out of what has been happening at Guantanamo.
MARGUILES: If we give them the benefit of the doubt, it is possible—and there is a lot of evidence to support this—they had no idea who they were going to be capturing. And they thought they might get more, uh, serious people, people who were more seriously involved. The reality is, those people never came to Guantanamo. The most serious folks are those in CIA custody, of which there are approximately 30; 27 to 30, something like that. Those are the people in black sites that we don't even know where they are. The people who are of any significance never arrived at Guantanamo, but they didn't know that when the base opened. And they said, at the time, that these are the worst of the worst, they were trained killers, they would gnaw through the hydraulic lines to bring down the plane that was flying them to Guantanamo ... I mean, they used the most inflammatory rhetoric, and it very quickly became apparent that they were just mistaken. And then they were stuck with this PR nightmare. At the same time, there was this sense, this nagging sense, that maybe they are really bad and we just can't find out. Maybe they're not Afghan dirt farmers as all appearances seem to be. How do we really know? Maybe we need to use more aggressive techniques to find out. So they kept turning up the heat and using more and more coercive techniques on people who were less and less significant.
(ibid)
And these seem to be the people to whom Gates refers. They were never proven to be terrorists. They likely aren't terrorists. And yet, some of them, upon release, "returned" to terrorism.
It's a shameless con.
____________________
Notes:
Chicago Public Radio. "Habeas Schmabeas". This American Life #310. March 10, 2006. http://thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1123
