Could intelligence be politicized in the Obama era?
Betsy's Page
Remember all the accusations that the Bush administration was politicizing intelligence? Well, how about this? The Defense Department is postponing releasing a report that will purportedly say that 1 in 7 released Guantanamo detainee is returning to terrorism.
<<<The Pentagon promised in January that the latest report would be released soon, but Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said this week that the findings were still “under review.”
Two administration officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said the report was being held up by Defense Department employees fearful of upsetting the White House, at a time when even Congressional Democrats have begun to show misgivings over Mr. Obama’s plan to close Guantánamo. >>>
Yeah, it could be a mite bit inconvenient to his whole plan to close the place down. He can't find a place to put them in America. Congress refuses him money to close it up until he comes up with a plan for what he's going to do with the more than 200 guys who are still there. No wonder the Defense Department doesn't want to pour some more oil on the fire.
This is a total unforced error. Although Barack Obama enjoyed the moral position of saying that Gitmo was a violation of American principles, he has now had to support many of the Bush-era approaches to terrorism such as indeterminate detentions and keeping military tribunals. He walked into the Oval Office and ordered that Guantanamo be closed but didn't have any plan of what to do with the guys there. Perhaps he's finding that some of these questions aren't the open-and-shut cases that he thought they were as a candidate.
As Politico details today, there really is no good solution about where to put a large number of the rather mid-level detainees, not the big name terrorists, but the smaller guys. A particular problem are the 100 or so Yemenis.
<<< Almost 100 of the roughly 240 prisoners left at Guantanamo hail from Yemen – the site of the USS Cole bombing in 2000. But the country’s checkered record when it comes to restraining and “rehabilitating” other Islamic militants has made U.S. officials leery about returning anywhere near 100 prisoners there.
Some militants that Yemen tried to retrain “went to Iraq and carried out suicide attacks on U.S. forces,” while other prisoners broke out of jail, said Greg Johnsen, a foreign policy scholar at Princeton. The Yemeni government is barely in control of its own territory.
One possible option for the U.S. is to send the Yemenis to Saudi Arabia. However, it’s unclear if Saudis could handle or are willing to take such a large group of Yemenis. “In the long run, it might cause the same problems,” Johnsen said. >>>
And holding trials are problematic, especially with the courts discounting any information that might have been gained from controversial interrogation techniques. So what should we do with these guys?
<<< Courts have held that evidence obtained under harsh interrogations – torture, to the critics – isn’t admissible in court. The Bush administration tried to get around this by sending in “clean teams” to re-interview detainees without the use of sleep deprivation, water-boarding and other methods.
But it’s far from clear that courts will consider evidence gathered by these “clean teams” to be truly clean.
That could mean there is a significant number of prisoners who judges might rule simply cannot be given a fair trial, even under the new rules being set up by Obama. What then?
In another twist, the so-called clean teams, apparently at the instruction of the Bush administration, did not give Miranda rights warnings to Guantanamo prisoners, according to lawyers tracking the situation. That fact alone could complicate efforts to bring cases to federal courts in the United States. >>>
Clearly, it's not as easy a problem to solve as political speeches on the campaign trail made it seem.
The Bush administration tried to release as many of the detainees as possible and what did we get for that move? The recidivism of these militants. Perhaps, this is one Bush policy, Obama would be right to reverse.
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