What of Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, and Secret CIA Facilities?

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http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/771uukif.asp

The Weekly Standard


What's the Matter with Gitmo?
From the July 4 / July 11, 2005 issue: Detention, torture, and other illiberal things.
by Reuel Marc Gerecht
07/04/2005, Volume 010, Issue 40


ALTHOUGH PATRICK LEAHY STOPPED SHORT of calling for the closure of the counterterrorism prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in a June 15 Senate hearing on detainees in the war on terrorism, the Vermont Democrat certainly expressed views that now dominate his party and the liberal media. Those views are shared by increasing numbers on the right, who feel queasy about indefinite detentions, secret, unmonitored Central Intelligence Agency prison facilities, and the policy of rendition, whereby the U.S. government turns over terrorists and suspected terrorists to foreign governments for "aggressive interrogation." Given the breathtaking historical illiteracy of Democratic senator Richard Durbin, who had no difficulty juxtaposing Hitler's death camps with Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, and Democratic congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, who thought Republican objections to Durbin's remarks were just politically motivated, it's not hard to sympathize with the military and civilian leadership of the Pentagon who have obviously been annoyed by all the criticism.
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"The net effect of all these problems," warned Leahy,

is that Guantanamo has not made our country safer. It is increasingly clear that the administration's policies have seriously damaged our reputation in the world and that they are making us less safe. The stain of Guantanamo has become the primary recruiting tool for our enemies. President Bush often speaks of spreading democratic values across the Middle East, but Guantanamo is not a reflection of the values that he encourages other nations to adopt. The United States has often criticized other nations for operating secret prisons, where detainees are hidden away and denied any meaningful opportunity to contest their detention. Now we have our own such prisons. Even if the administration fails to see the hypocrisy in this situation, the rest of the world does not.​

Now, some of the concerns the senator expressed do demand the attention of the administration; and to those, we will return in a moment. But first, let us look at the belief, which is now in many corners a firm conviction, that Guantanamo has degraded our security and become a recruiting tool for our enemies.

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However, it is far more reasonable to suppose, given the history of al Qaeda and of the first generation of holy warriors, that the prison's closure would be seen on Islamic extremist websites--the ones New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman is rightly terrified of--as an enormous boon to militants. Many in the American elite are beginning to revert to a pre-9/11 worldview, where U.S. aggression or "unilateralism," not American weakness or self-doubt, is seen as the fuel for bin Ladenism. Yet this is a reversal of history. It was the fearful U.S. withdrawal from Lebanon in 1984 and from Somalia in 1994, not the original incursions there, that bin Laden saw as proof that determined Muslims could best the United States.

Rabid pan-Arab nationalism died and Islamic fundamentalism grew after the crushing Israeli victory in 1967, but I have not yet seen Muslim holy warriors using the Six Day War as a recruitment banner. Could Israeli prison camps, which the Arab street and press have depicted for decades as degrading and brutal, have helped create the young men and women who became, quite suddenly, the Palestinian suicide bombers of the 21st century? Sure. It's possible. Although one would have thought that such perceived mistreatment, if it had been so provocative for Palestinians, would have provoked suicide-bombers years ago. Much more causative was surely the sense of victory created by Israel's flight from Lebanon in 2000 while diehard Shiite Hezbollah militants continued killing Israeli soldiers.
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The decisive, defining event for Islamic holy warriors today is the Sunni-led insurgency in Iraq. And the defining psychological factor of that struggle is the open question of whether the Americans will endure.
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THE FIRST AND MOST IMPORTANT RULE for terrorist detention should be: Do nothing overseas that we would be embarrassed to do on U.S. soil. If the war with Nazi Germany had been a 30-year struggle, we would have kept German soldiers in prison until they were old and gray. We may well do this with some of the Islamic "enemy combatants" we've got locked up in our counterterrorist prisons. So be it. If we cannot repatriate detainees to their homelands after we've exhausted their intelligence value because we fear their home countries will allow them to rejoin jihadist groups, lock them up for 10 years till their testosterone drops, and then revisit the question. Frontline holy warriors over the age of 40 are few and far between.

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The devil is in the details, and a trusting attitude within and outside Langley and the Pentagon does no one any good. Throughout the Cold War, the CIA was plagued with translation problems. Not infrequently the CIA allowed officers who were not linguistically or educationally up to snuff to handle important cases where greater precision and sophistication should have been deployed. This problem cropped up repeatedly in the 1980s and 1990s against the Iranians, when they were America's most challenging terrorist enemy. Perhaps this has all changed at the secret interrogation sites; maybe an institution that was routinely a bit sloppy has become more serious, now that case officers live in more serious times.

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The administration understandably does not want to introduce a judicial review process run by civilian courts into the detention and interrogation of Islamic holy warriors--doing so could easily turn the war against jihadists into a set of criminal proceedings, which is exactly what happened under the Clinton administration. This would inevitably have a deterrent effect on our actions overseas, which may well be what the cleverer antiwar Democratic critics of the administration have in mind. But the Bush administration certainly needs to have somebody--someone not employed by the CIA or Pentagon--review the intelligence officials' judgments on enemy combatants.

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Reuel Marc Gerecht is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.

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