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Guantánamo jail switch planned
US inmates face threat of worse abuse under scheme to send them to prisons in their own countries
Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
Saturday March 12, 2005
The Guardian
The Pentagon is planning to transfer half the inmates at Guantánamo Bay to prisons in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Yemen, despite fears that they would face even worse human rights abuses than at the US camp.
The defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has urged the State Department to ratchet up the pressure on unresponsive allies to take custody of the prisoners, and relieve the Bush administration of maintaining a detention facility which is increasingly viewed as a burden.
According to yesterday's New York Times, the transfers would be similar to the much-criticised practice of "renditions", under which the CIA has moved prisoners to Syria and Egypt, although the Guantánamo prisoners would be subject to review by the State Department and other government agencies.
The plans are widely seen as a reaction to court judgments which have made it increasingly untenable for the US to continue to use the base on Cuba for its original purpose: a vast holding pen in which prisoners in the war on terror could be held indefinitely beyond the scrutiny of the US courts.
Recent revelations from freed British inmates about torture and sexual humiliation at Guantánamo have also made it increasingly awkward for the Bush administration to maintain the detention facility in its present form.
Human rights organisations believe the Pentagon is anxious to rid itself of the burden of housing hundreds of prisoners who are no longer believed to hold any intelligence value in the war on terror. Some of the prisoners at Guantánamo have been held without recourse to the courts since autumn 2001.
However, Washington has discovered that some foreign governments were unresponsive to its requests to hand over detainees, prompting Mr Rumsfeld to draft a February 5 memo to the State Department seeking its support.
Officials said reviews by the State Department and other government agencies would help ensure that the prisoners would not be tortured.
Despite such measures, the prospect of a wholesale transfer of prisoners from Guantánamo to America's allies is bound to be controversial, especially as many of the inmates face a return to countries known to practice torture. More than 300 of the prisoners at Guantánamo are from Afghanistan, Yemen and Saudi Arabia, none of which has a good human rights record.
Michael Rattner, president of the Centre for Constitutional Rights, which represents many of the Guantánamo detainees, said: "Now that they have put themselves in this pickle of picking up many people who were not involved in terrorism, and keeping them for two or three years and abusing them in a number of cases, what are they going to do with them? Send them back to countries where governments are known to be involved in torture, with a label of terrorist practically around their neck?
"We don't want people rendered, or given their so-called freedom from Guantánamo, and then jailed in a country where they are going to be tortured."
The inmate population at Guantánamo has been steadily declining since its peak in 2002, with 146 prisoners freed outright and 62 transferred to their home countries. The prison population is now 540.
The Bush administration has no intention of dismantling the facility. It is seeking Congressional approval for $41.8m (£22m) to build a permanent facility and security fence, and Pentagon officials say as many as 200 of the current inmates are so dangerous they are likely to remain at Guantánamo indefinitely.
Rendering Al Qaeda
So how is the CIA supposed to squeeze terrorists?
Friday, March 11, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST
It's hard to recall now, but in the wake of September 11 prominent liberals mused publicly about the possible need to torture al Qaeda captives. Only three years later they're devoting their time to assailing U.S. officials responsible for prying information out of terrorists.
The latest alleged scandal concerns so-called "renditions," or the policy of turning over prisoners to foreign countries so they can do the interrogating. Some of the places--Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan--don't have our legal scruples, so by turning over these suspects the Bush Administration is said to be condoning torture again. For a little perspective, allow us to cite no less a rendering authority than Sandy Berger, former National Security Adviser to Bill Clinton.
It happens that in the spring of 1996, the government of Sudan offered to deliver Osama bin Laden (then living in Khartoum) into U.S. custody. The Clinton Administration was aware of the threat bin Laden posed, but it worried it didn't yet have sufficient information to indict him on terrorism charges in court. Instead, the U.S. sought to have the Saudis take bin Laden and behead him.
"In the United States, we have this thing called the Constitution, so to bring him here is to bring him into the justice system," Mr. Berger told the Washington Post in October 2001. "I don't think that was our first choice. Our first choice was to send him someplace where justice is more 'streamlined.' " In the event, the Saudis were in no mood to take bin Laden, Mr. Berger did not press the matter, and bin Laden left for Afghanistan on a chartered plane.
In other words, the Clinton Administration used the rendering practice with the avowed expectation that suspects would be tortured, or worse. The Bush Administration says it uses it only on condition of humane treatment and assigns personnel to "monitor compliance." If this is a torture scandal, it didn't start on September 12, 2001.
Actually, renditions really are a scandal, though this has nothing to do with torture. The scandal is that this long after September 11 neither the CIA nor the Defense Department has a set of clear, effective and legally sanctioned means to extract actionable intelligence from terrorist suspects in their custody. The Justice Department's so-called "torture memo" was an attempt to set the legal limits on such a policy, but it was repudiated for political reasons in the wake of the Abu Ghraib abuses. The military and CIA have been unsure what is legal or not ever since.
Keep in mind that al Qaeda detainees enter U.S. custody trained to deal with U.S. interrogators, and well aware of our legal limitations. U.S. forces have found al Qaeda training manuals that explain in detail what they can expect. This removes the most powerful tool any interrogator can have in dealing with detainees, which is the anxiety that comes with uncertainty. The prospect of rendition creates that uncertainty.
Yet even this would be banned under legislation introduced by Democratic Massachusetts Congressman Edward Markey. "Torture is morally repugnant whether we do it or whether we ask another country to do it for us," he says. Which is true, except that nobody in the Bush Administration is suggesting the U.S. practice torture, and there would be no need to render suspects in the first place if American interrogators were not already, and increasingly, constrained.
To win the war on terror, the U.S. will require vastly better intelligence than it has had so far. Terrorist suspects are potentially among the most valuable sources of intelligence, yet the expanded use of renditions only indicates that the U.S. itself is incapable of mining these assets. No one we know wants to "outsource torture," but critics of the practice are obliged to say what tactics they will sanction that can extract information from terrorists when it might save American lives.
You make me laugh Kathianne.Am i that bad. :bat:Kathianne said:Honestly, there is NO PLEASING the Euros. Taff, I do NOT mean the UK, at least that not represented by the likes of this Guardian piece:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo/story/0,13743,1435896,00.html
