Via the NYT: Evidence Faulted in Detainee Case
In the first case to review the government’s secret evidence for holding a detainee at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a federal appeals court found that accusations against a Muslim from western China held for more than six years were based on bare and unverifiable claims. The unclassified parts of the decision were released on Monday.
[...]
The unanimous panel overturned as invalid a Pentagon determination that the detainee, Huzaifa Parhat, a member of the ethnic Uighur Muslim minority in western China, was properly held as an enemy combatant.
The panel included one of the court’s most conservative members, the chief judge, David B. Sentelle.
So, yet another example that suggests that we do not, in fact, have only the most dangerous persons in the world detained at Guantanamo.
Indeed, the government was unable to produce any evidence to suggest why Parhat ought to be held, save for the fact that the government asserted that he was dangerous:
With some derision for the Bush administration’s arguments, a three-judge panel said the government contended that its accusations against the detainee should be accepted as true because they had been repeated in at least three secret documents.
The court compared that to the absurd declaration of a character in the Lewis Carroll poem “The Hunting of the Snark”: “I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.”
“This comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true,” said the panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Sadly, that has been a favorite of the Bush administration when it comes to explaining much of its actions (i.e., “trust us”).
The thing that strikes me about the broader context is that it is truly shocking (from a political perspective) that the administration has been unwilling or unable to parade a number of clearly guilty detainees before the public in the sense that there has been no flow of tribunals or other proceedings to deal with these prisoners.1 While I understand the argument (that I increasingly find dubious in nature) that the government cannot reveal certain evidence that might expose intelligence techniques and such, the bottom line is that if we have in our custody a critical mass of al Qaeda finest, surely there are some against whom the evidence it so clear, that the government could have, by now, have shared some of that with the public.
The fact that they have not done so, especially since it would have been a political boon to the President and his policies, does raise serious questions.
Back to Mr. Parhat:
Although the decision was a defeat for the Bush administration, it was unclear what it might mean immediately for Mr. Parhat, a former fruit peddler who in recent years sent a message to his wife that she should remarry because his imprisonment at Guantánamo was like already being dead.
That our policies have created this situation should concern all Americans. Nonetheless, many will dismiss the situation (and it is clearly not unique).
Sphere: Related Content- And I don’t mean Geneva Convention violating media show trials (not that we have been all that concerned about those rules), but simply evidence that confirms that the administration’s assertions about the process. [↩]
July 3rd, 2008 at 8:36 pm
I continue to find common ground with you on the basic problem of detention in the context of our democracy. That guys could be held for years without adequate investigation of their status as combatants or not is inexcuseable.
However, I have to disagree on one thing in this post. It might be politically expedient of Bush to “parade the clearly guilty AQ” before us, but it would go against everything that has been tauth abotu CT strategy at the Army War College and elsewhere for a long time. In fact the military doctrine that prevents Bush from doing that has been in place since before his dad was president, so it’s one of those things that we really can’t attribute to him.
The clearly guilty are the LAST people you want to put on the tube. The reason is simple, as you know all terrorist organizations have different methods and command structures; AQ is fairly typical of the middle eaastern variety and consists of cells that operate largely without knowledge of each other. The thinking is that if one gets busted, the worst it can do is rat out the time and place where they were going to meet their direct boss (who is probably the only person in the organization that the cell has direct knowledge of and contact with). There are different ways that cells communicate with their leadership, but communication is infrequent, sometimes measured in months or years, because the more they talk the more opportunities for that talk to be intercepted.
If we have “clearly guilty” we first of all don’t know how long it might be before their boss knows they’ve been captured. We want to keep it that way - we want them laboring under the belief that their cells are all in place for as long as possible. If we’re really lucky, someone talks, and we bag the guy who is next up the food chain; and if we’re really really lucky, he talks, and at some point we find out enough to begin the very long process of infiltrating our own people into the organization.
When the cell does go incommunicado - we want them to not know why. If the cell just disappears, it could mean that we got them; or that it was the Brits, or the Germans, or the Israelis, or any number of other nations that they managed to anger; it could mean that they decided on their own that they didn’t want to play anymore and simply quit and moved to Brazil; it could mean that infighting within the cell destroyed it. The point is, as long as we keep our mouths shut, the leadership doesn’t know what the ultimate disposition of their forces is. The best they can do is guess.
We parade them on TV and the AQ leadership knows exactly what happened to whom and when. That is useful to them on many levels, but the most obvious use is that it tells them to shut down all ties to that cell permanently and immediately.
If they don’t know - and we put our own guys into the “jobs” of some of the cell members - this is one way we can put human intelligence assets in place in tight organizations. But if you advertise what you’ve got, you blow your hand.
Maybe it would be politically expedient for the president to put these folks on the tube, but I applaud him for resisting that effort. I know for a fact that we are holding some bona fide terrorists who represent not only a threat but an oppotunity to learn more about their organizational heirarchy and possibly infiltrate it. The sad thing is that I fear a large number - possibly even a majority - of detainees are NOT such people, and should have been released a long time ago.
We wouldn’t have a problem if someone had thought about prisoner detention in the context of an unconventional, counterinsurgent war before we got into it. But there was no forethought; hence, we have the abomninations that are Gitmo and our other detention facilities.
It is a reasonable thing to question the operation of these places and demand reform; but it is a leap of blind belief to simply assume that everything the administration says or does on this matter is bupkis simply because some of what it has said has turned out to be. The administration dug this hole for itself, but we need to be fair in criticizing it and realize where to draw the lines - at detention policy, not the strategy of keeping known terrorists captive in secrecy. This is policy that has proven effective since the early 80’s when the doctrine was written.
July 3rd, 2008 at 8:40 pm
I am not suggesting that we parade them front of the cameras (indeed, as I alluded in the post, that is against the Geneva conventions).
However, there are ways to inform the American people of at least some of the information me have if it is as slam dunk (to borrow a phrase) a situation as the administration makes it out to be. I think their inability to do so in some way to this point is telling.