One of President Bush’s news conferences earlier this week concerning detainees at Guantanamo contained an extremely rare snippet of candor. Since this is about as frequent of an occurance as laying eyes on Haley’s Comet, I think it’s worth some attention. “Some (detainees) have been released to their previous countries, and they got out and they went on to the battlefield again.” Getting a follow up question to Bush on this statement could take a while, anything significant for a response will be unlikely, but the failure he’s admitting to here is alarming. We captured a terrorist, either handed them over to authorities in their country of origin or simply droped them off and they went back to fighting. Are we really that bad at this?
Innocent men have been kidnapped and handed over for cash, detained and released after seeking a writ of habeas corpus that was approved by a federal judge. Is Bush saying here that he has proof that actual terrorists have also been released in this process only to rejoin the fight? Or is this merely one of his more biodegradable statements? Taking him for his word would mean that the system is broken, and if so, it’s surely worth more time and attention than it’s bound to get in the American press. What’s important here has nothing to do with the conditions at Guantanamo, but instead something far more important. I don’t think that America is tuned up well enough to recognize this at the moment.
Forget about the insurgency being in it’s ‘last throes’, the ‘we’re making progress’ line and every other piece of arbitrary information they leave us with on most days and instead focus on what specifically happens when the alledged terrorist falls into our custody. I assume that the information given when they were captured or sold to us is what the file starts as. Their identity is determined and cross-checked through an internal and international database to see if they have a record. In the meantime they’re interrogated for information and otherwise investigated until the file is as think as we can possibly make it. At some point the detainee seeks a writ of habeas corpus, a judge reviews the work done by our defense department, and decides to either let them go or denies their request.
Detainees are also moved around through a process known as ‘extrodinary rendition’ whre we hand them over to a foreign government rather than house them in one of our facilities. What specific qualifications deem rendition the choice over detaining them ourselves is so far unknown, but the information that is known tells us that practically any detainee – whether they were captured by our forces and renditioned directly from the battlefield or already being held in one of our detention centers – can be transferred at a moment’s notice by Aero Contractors Ltd, Pegasus Technologies or Tepper Avaition. All three of these companies are controlled by or tied to the CIA, and have the capability of taking off and landing in places no commercial airliners can fly.
One Australian we renditioned to Egypt ended up in Guantanamo, minus most of his fingernails. I mention this not to envoke questions as to who or why, but only to establish that once a detainee is renditioned, they sometimes return to one of our facilities. So if a detainee can file a writ of habaes corpus and get released, how much information on the custody trail does a judge end up seeing when they review the government’s evidence? When the detainee claims to have been flown somewhere and tortured by foreigners, is there paperwork in front of the judge that indicates what the country of origin of those foreigners happened to be? Better yet, what systems are in place to ensure that once we rendition a detainee, that the country we turned them over to doesn’t send them back out with some free explosives?
I guess what I’m wondering is, once we’ve got someone, what record is there of where he’s been while in our custody? If the government didn’t want a judge to see information corroberating the detainee’s story of a flight overseas, could they simply claim he’s lying or would that be a fight they’d lose? How about when we rendition a detainee to a country and never hear from him again? If the country we turned him over to claims he died while in captivity, are we provided remains to verify? The entire procedure is largely a mystery, and for detainees to be rejoining the terrorist effort, it’s definitely not working.
Questions like this are in really in need of a whistleblower for answers, but imagine what might be running through that person’s mind right now. The GOP-spin brass managed to turn Deep Throat into a villian, what do you think would happen to the guy who leaked answers to all these questions? Most likely he’d get a glimpse of things from the other side of those bars, until he was taken first class to Egypt of course.
I think the potential is there for this information to come out, but the focus of those who would apply the necessary pressure to make it happen seems to be lacking. Perhaps Congress is too used to the game of chasing windmills in search of those illusive golden heartstrings. The right move may actually be to take the President on his word this time and find out who it was that we allowed to rejoin the fight against us, and more importantly, discover how it happened.