Korean Job Discussion Forums

[RJjr]

[Big_Bird]

[Pluto]

Guantanamo Is a Model Prison (Really)

[yawarakaijin]

I wonder if that high level of care may have something to do with the knowledge that a good many of the detainees may simply be innocent goat herders sold to the US for a bounty. Or at the very least, at least the Army views them as prisoners of war rather than "enemy combatants"

I have infinite more faith in the basic decency of the men and women of America's armed forces than I do in the current administration. It's a shame so many people lump them together.

[Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee]

Why ought Al Qaeda fighters get POW status?

They are fighting for a sinister cause, are not from any particular country and use tactics that the military could not get away with.

That is why they are called unlawful combatants.

[Gopher]

[yawarakaijin]

[Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee]

[Gopher]

I think we should guarantee their right to send and receive correspondence while at Guantanamo. We should not treat them emotionally in any way. Our attitude ought to be this: this is war, we are keeping you here for its duration, we are going to protect your rights as a pow while we do, it gives us no pleasure to do this, but we are doing it nonetheless.

One of the W. Bush Administration's failures is to adopt and promote that kind of professional leadership re: our armed forces. Luckily, however, many if not most of the professional officer and nco corps thinks as I have outlined here already.

[catman]

The militants crept up behind Mohammed Akhtiar as he squatted at the spigot to wash his hands before evening prayers at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

They shouted �Allahu Akbar� - God is great - as one of them hefted a metal mop squeezer into the air, slammed it into Akhtiar�s head and sent thick streams of blood running down his face.

Akhtiar was among the more than 770 terrorism suspects imprisoned at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. They are the men the Bush administration described as �the worst of the worst.�

But Akhtiar was no terrorist. American troops had dragged him out of his Afghanistan home in 2003 and held him in Guantanamo for three years in the belief that he was an insurgent involved in rocket attacks on U.S. forces. The Islamic radicals in Guantanamo�s Camp Four who hissed �infidel� and spat at Akhtiar, however, knew something his captors didn�t: The U.S. government had the wrong guy.

�He was not an enemy of the government, he was a friend of the government,� a senior Afghan intelligence officer told McClatchy. Akhtiar was imprisoned at Guantanamo on the basis of false information that local anti-government insurgents fed to U.S. troops, he said.

An eight-month McClatchy investigation in 11 countries on three continents has found that Akhtiar was one of dozens of men - and, according to several officials, perhaps hundreds - whom the U.S. has wrongfully imprisoned in Afghanistan, Cuba and elsewhere on the basis of flimsy or fabricated evidence, old personal scores or bounty payments.

McClatchy interviewed 66 released detainees, more than a dozen local officials - primarily in Afghanistan - and U.S. officials with intimate knowledge of the detention program. The investigation also reviewed thousands of pages of U.S. military tribunal documents and other records.

This unprecedented compilation shows that most of the 66 were low-level Taliban grunts, innocent Afghan villagers or ordinary criminals. At least seven had been working for the U.S.-backed Afghan government and had no ties to militants, according to Afghan local officials. In effect, many of the detainees posed no danger to the United States or its allies.

The investigation also found that despite the uncertainty about whom they were holding, U.S. soldiers beat and abused many prisoners.

Prisoner mistreatment became a regular feature in cellblocks and interrogation rooms at Bagram and Kandahar air bases, the two main way stations in Afghanistan en route to Guantanamo.

While he was held at Afghanistan�s Bagram Air Base, Akhtiar said, �When I had a dispute with the interrogator, when I asked, �What is my crime?� the soldiers who took me back to my cell would throw me down the stairs.�

The McClatchy reporting also documented how U.S. detention policies fueled support for extremist Islamist groups. For some detainees who went home far more militant than when they arrived, Guantanamo became a school for jihad, or Islamic holy war.

Far from being an ally of the Taliban, Mohammed Akhtiar had fled to Pakistan shortly after the puritanical Islamist group took power in 1996, the senior Afghan intelligence officer told McClatchy. The Taliban burned down Akhtiar�s house after he refused to ally his tribe with their government.

The Americans detained Akhtiar, the intelligence officer said, because they were given bad information by another Afghan who�d harbored a personal vendetta against Akhtiar going back to his time as a commander against the Soviet military during the 1980s.

�In some of these cases, tribal feuds and political feuds have played a big role� in people getting sent to Guantanamo, the intelligence officer said.

He didn�t want his name used, partly because he didn�t want to offend the Western officials he works with and partly because Afghan intelligence officers are assassinated regularly.

�There were Afghans being sent to Guantanamo because of bad intelligence,� said Helaluddin Helal, Afghanistan�s deputy interior minister for security from 2002 to early 2004. �In the beginning, everyone was trying to give intelligence to the Americans � the Americans were taking action without checking this information.�

Nusrate Khan was in his 70s when American troops shoved him into an isolation cell at Bagram in the spring of 2003. They blindfolded him, put earphones on his head and tied his hands behind his back for almost four weeks straight, Khan said.

By the time he was taken out of the cell, Khan - who�d had at least two strokes years before he was arrested and was barely able to walk - was half-mad and couldn�t stand without help. Khan said that he was taken to Guantanamo on a stretcher.

Several Afghan officials, including the country�s attorney general, later said that Khan, who spent more than three years at Guantanamo, wasn�t a threat to anyone; he�d been turned in as an insurgent leader because of decades-old rivalries with competing Afghan militias.

Ghalib Hassan was an Interior Ministry-appointed district commander in Afghanistan�s Nangarhar province, a man who�d risked his life to help the U.S.-backed government. Din Mohammed, the former governor of that province and now the governor of Kabul, said there was no question that local tribal leaders, offended by Hassan�s brusque style, fed false information about him to local informants used by American troops.

The Pentagon declined requests to make top officials, including the secretary of defense, available to respond to McClatchy�s findings. The defense official in charge of detainee affairs, Sandra Hodgkinson, refused to speak with McClatchy.

The Pentagon�s only response to a series of written questions from McClatchy, and to a list of 63 of the 66 former detainees interviewed for this story, was a three-paragraph statement.

�These unlawful combatants have provided valuable information in the struggle to protect the U.S. public from an enemy bent on murder of innocent civilians,� Col. Gary Keck said in the statement. He provided no examples.

Rear Adm. Mark H. Buzby, until recently the commanding officer at Guantanamo, said that detainees had supplied crucial information about al Qaida, the Taliban and other terrorist groups.

�Included with the folks that were brought here in 2002 were, by and large, the main leadership of al Qaida and the Taliban,� he said in a phone interview.

Buzby agreed, however, that some detainees were from the bottom rung.

�It�s all about developing the mosaic � there�s value to both ends of the spectrum,� he said.

Former senior U.S. defense and intelligence officials, however, said McClatchy�s conclusions squared with their own observations.

�As far as intelligence value from those in Gitmo, I got tired of telling the people writing reports based on their interrogations that their material was essentially worthless,� a U.S. intelligence officer said in an e-mail, using the military�s slang for Guantanamo.

Guantanamo authorities periodically sent analysts at the U.S. Central Command �rap sheets on various prisoners and asked our assessment whether they merited continued confinement,� said the analyst, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. �Over about three years, I assessed around 40 of these individuals, mostly Afghans. � I only can remember recommending that ONE should be kept at GITMO.�

HOW FOOT SOLDIERS, FARMERS GOT SWEPT UP

How did the United States come to hold so many farmers and goat herders among the real terrorists at Guantanamo? Among the reasons:

After conceding control of the country to U.S.-backed Afghan forces in late 2001, top Taliban and al Qaida leaders escaped to Pakistan, leaving the battlefield filled with ragtag groups of volunteers and conscripts who knew nothing about global terrorism.

The majority of the detainees taken to Guantanamo came into U.S. custody indirectly, from Afghan troops, warlords, mercenaries and Pakistani police who often were paid cash by the number and alleged importance of the men they handed over. Foot soldiers brought in hundreds of dollars, but commanders were worth thousands. Because of the bounties - advertised in fliers that U.S. planes dropped all over Afghanistan in late 2001 - there was financial incentive for locals to lie about the detainees� backgrounds. Only 33 percent of the former detainees - 22 out of 66 - whom McClatchy interviewed were detained initially by U.S. forces. Of those 22, 17 were Afghans who�d been captured around mid-2002 or later as part of the peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan, a fight that had more to do with counter-insurgency than terrorism.

American soldiers and interrogators were susceptible to false reports passed along by informants and officials looking to settle old grudges in Afghanistan, a nation that had experienced more than two decades of occupation and civil war before U.S. troops arrived. This meant that Americans were likely to arrest Afghans who had no significant connections to militant groups. For example, of those 17 Afghans whom the U.S. captured in mid-2002 or later, at least 12 of them were innocent of the allegations against them, according to interviews with Afghan intelligence and security officials.

Detainees at Guantanamo had no legal venue in which to challenge their detentions. The only mechanism set up to evaluate their status, an internal tribunal in the late summer of 2004, rested on the decisions of rotating panels of three U.S. military officers. The tribunals made little effort to find witnesses who weren�t present at Guantanamo, and detainees were in no position to challenge the allegations against them.

http://detainees.mcclatchydc.com/

[yawarakaijin]

For some reason, the Count of Monte Cristo pops into my head when I read stuff like this. Very sad.

[Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee]

[daskalos]

Gopher, you made a couple of very good points early in this thread. It is idiocy to release prisoners of war before the war is over. Also, that whatever the Bush administration wants to call these men, they should be treated and seen as POWs.

But this is exactly where Bush screwed up, insisting that these men were unlawful combatants. Had he declared them POWs, he could have had the benefit of the Geneva Conventions in addition to the burdens. He wouldn't have had, three times now, the Supreme Court tell him that he can't just hold people without demonstrable cause. A POW is a POW, and habeus corpus doesn't really apply, but since they're not prisoners of war, they're just prisoners, and even though he tried to write a law creating a special category not covered by Geneva rights or any rights of the US legal system, he got pwned, a pwning he could have avoided had he not assumed what amounts to dictatorial powers, had he just called them POWs.

None of that, of course, has anything to do with whether any of these men were innocent, but even if all of them were innocent yet afforded all the protections of the Geneva convention, the fact remains he would have a lot less egg on his face now than he does, America's reputation in the world would not stink quite so much, and no one would be asking the question, "So, what the hell do we do with these people now?"

That we have let some go and will likely have to let more go, and that it's a safe bet most of them will join or rejoin the jihad, is the entire fault of GWB for not having done the right thing to begin with, and the allied lives lost to these returnees is, as far as I'm concerned, the very sad price those victims have to pay for this administration's ... oh, I don't know ... crimes, I suppose. Thanks again, George, you've done a bang-up job.

Whether or not the idea to go into Iraq was a good one to begin with (a question about which I still have some ambivalence), it's hard to deny that nearly every stage of the operation has been a total clusterfuck, a horror of mismanagement. Guantanamo is just another one.

[Gopher]

Thanks for your comments, Daskalos. Re: the W. Bush White House's "mismanagement" and "clusterfucks," you will get no objections from me.

[TheUrbanMyth]

While people are talking about the rights that POWs have, it should be noted that there ARE qualifications for being a POW in the first place including wearing distinctive markings and bearing arms openly prior to being captured or surrendering


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner_of_war

(under the heading Qualifications.)