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Tuesday, February 07, 2006

Here's why you can't trust the Bush Administration to only spy on terrorists
Posted by Jill | 4:43 PM

Because they can't tell a terrorist from a noncombatant -- nor do they care:

A high percentage, perhaps the majority, of the 500-odd men now held at Guantanamo were not captured on any battlefield, let alone on "the battlefield in Afghanistan" (as Bush asserted) while "trying to kill American forces" (as McClellan claimed).

Fewer than 20 percent of the Guantanamo detainees, the best available evidence suggests, have ever been Qaeda members.

Many scores, and perhaps hundreds, of the detainees were not even Taliban foot soldiers, let alone Qaeda terrorists. They were innocent, wrongly seized noncombatants with no intention of joining the Qaeda campaign to murder Americans.

The majority were not captured by U.S. forces but rather handed over by reward-seeking Pakistanis and Afghan warlords and by villagers of highly doubtful reliability.
These locals had strong incentives to tar as terrorists any and all Arabs they could get their hands on as the Arabs fled war-torn Afghanistan in late 2001 and 2002 -- including noncombatant teachers and humanitarian workers. And the Bush administration has apparently made very little effort to corroborate the plausible claims of innocence detailed by many of the men who were handed over.

The administration has also disclosed very little about who the Guantanamo detainees are, excepting 1) redacted transcripts of 314 detainees' hearings before Guantanamo's nonjudicial "Combatant Status Review Tribunals" or CSRTs; and 2) somewhat more-detailed responses to the federal court petitions filed by lawyers for 132 of these 314 men.

My estimates above are based largely on extrapolation from Hegland's analysis of these 132 federal court files. They appear to be reasonably representative of the men still at Guantanamo; certainly, the government has given no indication that its evidence is any weaker in these 132 cases than in the other 370 or so.

It is, therefore, quite remarkable to learn (from Hegland) that well over half (75) of the 132 are not even accused of fighting the United States or its allies on any battlefield in post-9/11 Afghanistan or anywhere else.

Indeed, only 35 percent of them (more precisely, of the 115 whose court files specify the locus of capture) were seized in Afghanistan; 55 percent were picked up by Pakistanis in Pakistan.

The government's case for continuing to detain most of these 75 nonbattlefield captives is that other people of doubtful reliability have said they were associated with the Taliban or Al Qaeda, often in very indirect ways.


Instead of having actual evidence, they rely on the say-so of unreliable witnesses. What's to say they won't do the same thing in this country, given carte blanche to perform surveillance on anyone they want, for no reason, with no warrant?

If you watched yesterday's hearings, or if you read any of the transcripts, you may have noticed Alberto the Torture Czar Gonzales make repeated reference to "the program we are discussing today" or "I can only talk about the program the president has confirmed". Aside from giving him a HUGE loophole in the extremely unlikely event that the Republican-controlled Congress is ever going to regard a lie from a Republican flunky before Congress as "perjury" (when in fact it is equivalent), his remarks also imply that there are OTHER surveillance programs being conducted by the White House that are NOT being covered by these hearings.

Total Information Awareness, anyone?
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