OPINION & EDITORIAL
Guantanamo’s end an unsolved misery
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Also by John Sprangers:
- Campaigns fail country, voters (November 30, 2007)
- Green movement missing key link (November 16, 2007)
- War rhetoric comprises policy (November 2, 2007)
- Familiar slogan to be flipped around (October 19, 2007)
- Guantanamo's end an unsolved misery (October 8, 2007)
Related Stories:
- Military tribunals imperil justice (March 16, 2007)
- Rights forgotten, torture unjustified (September 25, 2006)
- Those thugs (February 12, 2002)
- Bush's democratic vision is blind (November 11, 2003)
- Obama: Visionary, not fraudulent (September 19, 2007)
by John Sprangers
Monday, October 8, 2007
For Americans concerned about our country's prestige, closing the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay and ending the much-maligned "military commissions" system of trying "unlawful combatants" seems like common sense. They are ugly symbols of a post-9/11 America for which any principle is secondary to paranoid self-interest. Closing down the notorious facility and giving detainees their old-fashioned "day in court," they maintain, would do wonders for our international reputation and national psyche. Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and John McCain, columnist Thomas Friedman and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates have recently exhorted one or both of these measures.
But the devil is in the details, or, in this case, the detainees. Along with memories of repulsive prisoner abuse by U.S. military personnel, hundreds of dangerous enemy fighters remain at "Gitmo," including 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed. And, as the United States continues to fight terrorists in Afghanistan and elsewhere, the unpleasant truth is that it will capture suspects and require a secure location to keep them. Guantanamo can be closed, and perhaps it should be if only for its symbolic value, but they must remain in our custody somewhere.
Or must they? Human rights advocates contend the irregular nature of ongoing hostilities against terrorist groups should disallow the United States from holding detainees. Applying the "prisoner of war" standard to this new form of conflict, the U.S. government could effectively hold suspected terrorists forever without trial.
Yet, as conventional wars did not end according to a predetermined schedule and could theoretically have gone on for decades, this was hardly a neat or concrete guarantee. It also doesn't strike me as an adequate rationale to let suspected terrorists run wild.
An additional problem is that while the majority of detainees at Guantanamo were incarcerated for their participation in the ground war against the United States in Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002 and at least approximately fall under a legal definition of "prisoners of war," some are suspected terrorists whose capture was unconnected to a broader material conflict. Surely in these cases the U.S. government cannot appeal to the "war prisoner" justification — the status of these individuals is more similar to that of suspected civilian criminals, and like them, there must be a higher burden of proof regarding detainees' culpability.
The United States has addressed this tenuous situation by attempting to determine which of those under its custody are actually guilty of crimes against the United States to legitimize their captivity. Unfortunately, the system they devised to accomplish this, the "military commission," was so poorly designed that the Supreme Court deemed it unconstitutional in 2006's Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld. The Bush administration has since implemented a revised form but has placated few of the program's many critics in the process.
Among remaining deficiencies, the commissions allow the president to declare anyone he chooses an "unlawful combant," including U.S. citizens, and make them appear not before a jury of peers but a commission composed exclusively of members of the U.S. military.
In the meantime, however, we need to consider positive action to the same extent that we are currently advocating negative measures. Simply abandoning the Guantanamo prisons or shutting down the military commissions will not do; after all, we need a place to hold detainees and a separate legal system to try them. Instead of speaking and thinking in absolutes, we should narrowly identify what is problematic about these institutions. The aforementioned prominent individuals were right to call out the system, but it is now incumbent upon them to propose practicable reforms.
It may be in the end that seeking rational definitions and procedures to deal with a phenomenon as irrational as terrorism is a political case of attempting to drive a square peg through a round hole. But even if there are no perfect solutions with regard to our detainee crisis, and even if we can't (and perhaps should not seek to) appease the entire international community, this nation of lofty ideals can and must do better.
John Sprangers (sprangers@wisc.edu) is a senior majoring in international studies and political science.
Anonymous (October 8, 2007 @ 8:22am):
This drumbeat of Leftist-inspired anger doesn't seem to be based on any evidence of systematic American abuses. Despite Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin's claim that Guantanamo was akin to Nazi camps, the few reported regrettable, isolated cases of sleep deprivation and harassment seem no worse than what we read about in most prisons. The roughly 450 prisoners still there - many of them killers - are probably treated as well as inmates in either Europe or the U.S.
Further, Guantanamo exists to fill a vacuum in an undeclared and unprecedented postmodern war of few good choices in which the enemy does not wear uniforms, adhere to the Geneva Convention or distinguish civilians from soldiers.
If the U.S. were to close down Guantanamo and send the detainees back to their home countries, some returnees would be freed and treated as heroes - and then rejoin the global jihad. Other released terrorists, or so the Leftists no doubt would whine, might be executed by the autocratic Middle Eastern governments in their homelands that are as afraid of Islamic terrorists as we are.
So, should we instead try all of the Guantanamo detainees inside the U.S.?
No. By doing that, we would be inviting thousands of lawyers and public defenders to argue, on behalf of their clients, that we are not in a real war but simply prosecuting common criminals. Numerous trials and appeals as costly and circus-like as the drawn-out spectacle of Zacarias Moussaoui (the so-called 20th hijacker) would likely follow. And, in the end, Leftists in wacademia would still object, since the U.S. would be exposing foreign nationals to possible death-penalty sentences.
The real problem is that Guantanamo Bay, like Bush himself, has become a symbol of sorts. It is an easy scapegoat through which Leftists can vent their much larger love-hate frustrations with their protector, the hyper-power America.
The pacifism of Leftists was supposed to be a post-Cold War model of liberal reason for the rest of the world. Instead, Islamic fascists have either ignored Leftist's human-rights advocacy or considered it a sign of weakness to be exploited. Impotent Leftists are embarrassed and need cheap targets like Guantanamo to transfer attention away from their past naivete about the dangers of Islamic fascism.
By ankle-biting America on Guantanamo, Leftists sound moral and tough while ignoring the real dangers for which they have absolutely no solutions - unassimilated and angry Muslims throughout the socialist states of Europe, the French, Dutch, Danes, Brits and Spaniards under assault by radical Islamic censors and a defenseless EU potentially soon in range of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's nuclear-tipped missiles.
Note also that the U.S. has been mostly quiet about Europe's own ethical lapses in this war. Americans are in a quandary with Iran in large part because the Europeans - for whom profits trump idealism - sold the theocracy technology needed for the bomb. Nothing new there: Saddam once got his nuclear reactor from the French and his bombproof bunkers from the Germans.
We also hear a lot about the three suicides at Guantanamo but almost nothing about the still-unexplained death of Slobodan Milosevic while being held in Europe. When was the last time Americans chided the Germans that Mohammed Atta conspired to murder thousands of Americans while in their country?
Have we forgotten that Ahmed Omar Sheikh, the killer of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, and Richard Reid, the would-be shoe bomber, at one time fit in well with the radical Islamic culture that thrives in London. And how about Abu Hamza al-Masri, who plotted against the U.S. - he's wanted by American authorities on charges of trying to establish a terrorist training camp in Oregon - from his sanctuary in a London mosque?
Yet if the Eiffel Tower topples to a jihadist suicide bomber who assembled his team in Los Angeles or Miami, or if an Iranian missile soars over the Brandenburg Gate, expect Leftists to drop their present high talk about the "gulag" at Guantanamo - and start whispering about the need for more American terrorist detention centers, classical deterrence and their own missile defense.
But until the Leftists' dream world is shattered, we will hear nonstop screeching about American barbarity. Such outrage says far more about Leftists than America.
Anonymous (October 8, 2007 @ 10:28am):
Adopt the Islamist solution - cut off their heads.
Anonymous (October 8, 2007 @ 3:08pm):
Re 8:22 - "Rightists," on the other hand, love to say that other people "hate America" because they are so vain as to believe that their subjective intellectual construction of this vastly diverse country is definitive. Alternative opinions are seen not as finessing debates or indeed representative of different but thoroughly American idelogies, but instead as oppositional or subversive. The "hate" rhetoric is empty.
In fact, the criticism about Guantanamo is first and foremost about love for, and pride in America - in an America thats greatest strength is not its ability to impose its will on the world in a manner that fulfills its basest interests but for its rule of law, justice, and democracy. This argument that "leftists" want to give terrorists carte blanche to attack their own country is just insane-no one, no one wants to be a target.
Don't downplay the abuses at Guantanamo-as documented they were downright despicable, and more importantly, they in no way advanced our goals of fighting terrorism. The "leftist" argument (coming from such devout hippies as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates) is that we can hold suspected terrorists in a dignified way befitting America's proud history and prosecute them in a manner that complies with humanitarian law and our own traditions.
Also, I have yet to hear of anyone's solution to combat "unassimilated and angry Muslims throughout the socialist states of Europe, the French, Dutch, Danes, Brits and Spaniards under assault by radical Islamic censors" including your own beloved George W. Bush. What in the world would you recommend, sending smart bombs towards predominantly Muslim neighborhoods throughout Europe? Hmmm...It's a shame, those silly "Leftists" in the Senate probably "hate America" too much to see such a plan through.
Geoff Shaw (October 11, 2007 @ 3:32am):
A very common unexamined misconception among apologists for the Bush detainee policy is that
extending the presumption of innocence, and the other protections of the rule of law, to the
Guantanamo captives is a luxury -- one we can't afford because of the extreme nature of the
dangers posed by terrorists.
I think the very opposite is true. What has been desperately missing from JTF-GTMO's analyses has been any meaningful sanity-checking. Trials, like criminal trials, provided sanity-checking.
Apologists mock the idea that the GIs who take custody of the Guantanamo captives should even
try to preserve a chain of custody of the evidence against the captives. Apologist have
mockingly posed the question: "Should a GI read an enemy combatant his Miranda rights on the
battlefield?"
One problem with the apologist's defense of the GWOT captive policy is that the Summary of
Evidence memos prepared for their Combatant Status Review Tribunals and their Administrative
Review Board hearings, and the transcripts from their proceedings make painfully clear that
only a few dozen captives could be described as being "captured on the battlefiled". And at least half of those men were clearly just innocent bystanders.
There was a controversy within the USA's intelligence and counter-terrorism establishment,
as to whether the captives should be subjected to extreme and coercive interrogation
methods, or whether their interrogations should rely on "rapport-building". The FBI,
the intelligence agency with actual experience of interrogation, recommended rapport-buidling.
The lesson from Guantanamo should be that the experience FBI, and the NCIS, and the other
honorable professionals who recommended remaining within the bounds of law, were completely
correct.
The "intelligence" flowing from the use of coercive methods has proven completely unreliable.
This does not mean it has proven to be a complete waste of time and money. It is much worse
than that. The use of coercive methods has been disastrously costly -- because worthless
unreliable intelligence has been taken at face value.
The confessions of Ibn al Sheikh al Libi being a case in point. Al Libi was one of the
more senior captives. He is alleged to have been the director of an al Qaida training camp,
who was then assigned to command al Qaida's rear-guard, when the rest of the al Qaida
leadership slipped away. He is the senior al Qaeda operative that Colin Powell referred
to when he addressed the United Nations, who confessed that the trainees at his camp were
trained by agents from Saddam's intelligence service in how to use Saddam's WMD. His
confession "proved" (1) Saddam was supporting al Qaeda's efforts; (2) Saddam really did
have an arsenal of WMD.
Of course these confessions tortured out of him proved completely false -- illustrating the extreme danger in forgoing meaningful, measured, professional, sanity checking.
Sanity checking exists in our ordinary criminal justice systems. Even if the investigators and
prosecutors in the criminal justice system lose perspective, get tunnel vision, and lose the
ability to recognize or understand that they are finding evidence that their prime suspects
are innocent, sanity checking is provided when the suspect goes to trial. They have to make
a case. And the evidence they present gets challenged.
It has been said that the Bush partisans who had been appointed into senior positions where they provided the final analysis of the evidence Saddam had WMD "turned every question mark into an exclamation point."
A similar phenomenon is rampant in the analysis of the intelligence elicited from the GWOT captives. If you read the Summary of Evidence memos prepared for their Tribunals -- the allegations are not even internally consistent.
One of the more shocking cases is that of a a citizen of Afghanistan named Abdullah Khan. Khan was a member of the Uzbek ethnic group -- and a Shia muslim. And like that US sports hero who was arrested recently, he was a fan of cock-fighting and dog-fighting.
The good news part of his story is that a year and a half after the USA led the efforts to overthrow the Taliban he thought it would be safe for him to travel south to visit a market in the part of Afghanistan where Pashtuns lived -- the Taliban's former heartland. After the Taliban was overthrown he had become reacquainted with a well-off Pashtun landowner named Shahzada. He had worked for Shahzada, as a migrant farm worker, in his youth. After the overthrow of the Taliban Shahzada thought it would be safe for him to travel north, because he was also a fan of dog-fighting. Khan gave Shahzada a dog. Shahzada invited him to visit.
On this visit Khan was denounced, by bounty hunters. The bounty hunters told the local American intelligence officers that Khan was really Khirullah Khairkhwa -- the Afghan equivalent of Walter Cronkite. Khan, Shahzada, and another friend of Shahzada's were arrested.
All three were everntually sent to Guantanamo,
based on this unsupported, mercenary, and essentially unsupported denunciation.
Khan's American interrogators in Afghanistan kept insisting that he was lying about his identity, that they knew he was really Khirullah Khairkhwa. They threatened that they would send him to a worse place, if he didn't acknowledge he was really Khirullah Khairkhwa.
And, after a few months, they did send him to Guantanamo.
This is where the story gets hard to believe. Khan's fellow captives told him that the Americans had already captured the real Khirullah Khairkhwa, over a year before his own capture. The real Khirullah Khairkhw was also in Guantanamo, only a few hundred yards away, in another compound.
Khan testified to his Tribunal that during his next interrogation, when his interrogators insisted he was lying about his identity, that they check the prison roster, so they could see he was telling the truth about his identity.
If you thought that this would have settled the matter, and Khan and his two friends would be sent home, with an apology, you would be mistaken.
Khan said that his interrogators ignored his requests to check the prison roster, and kept insisting he was lying, for the next year and a half.
The assertion that he was really Khirullah Khairkwa was not present in the Summary of Evidence memo prepared for his Combatant Status Review Tribunal.
I am still shocked that one of his interrogators took the obvious step of checking the prison roster.
The DoD only conducted the CSR Tribunals because the Supreme Court forced them. What I think happened is that the discipline forced on the analysts to prepare the memo required a thorough enough review that they realized he had been telling the truth about not being Khirullah Khairkhwa.
You might think this is an exceptional case. But that would be a mistake. By my reading Khan's case was typical of the lack of sanity checking in Guantanamo.
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