[Mb-civic] Long-Term Plan Sought For Terror Suspects

[Cheeseburger]

I rarely do this.  In fact I never do this.  But I wanted any Americans 
hanging around to read this entire article, although it is just the tip of 
the iceberg of the entire subject, so I printed it here.  I'll try not to 
ever do it again.  :|  This is basically where America stands, has stood, 
and is firmly heading toward in The Future.  Although it covers only one 
aspect of "how we deal with things", I, personally, find it utterly and 
definitively indicative of the end result that is coming from the bad 
directions we have been led into under bad leadership.  If you disagree, I 
can only encourage you to write your Congressman and declare your adulation 
for a country and its methods run by its secret police and other unnamed 
and unknown secret societies and organizations that begin to make The 
Inquisition pale by comparison.  There remains nothing more despicable than 
a  global  New World Order in an open society directed from the shadows by 
people who continuously falsely profess to have principles, unless one 
wishes to include the fact that we pay for it all with our taxes and our 
childrens' futures endlessly.  "This is War" simply does not cut it 
anymore.  It is one thing for our politicos, penatagonians, soapbox 
preachers, goons and spooks at The Top to literally turn into the Monsters 
they say they have been fighting forever, yet it is an entirely different 
thing to drag all the rest of us kicking and screaming along with them into 
the void and, again, paying for it all in more ways than there exist 
measurements for.  Forgive my length in this post.  I just sometimes see 
things coming from a long ways away before they get here in full force, and 
the cringing in my spirit at realizing the final end results move me to 
oververbage.  I'll try not to write anything for a while to make up for it.


Long-Term Plan Sought For Terror Suspects

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41475-2005Jan1.html


Administration officials are preparing long-range plans for indefinitely 
imprisoning suspected terrorists whom they do not want to set free or turn 
over to courts in the United States or other countries, according to 
intelligence, defense and diplomatic officials.

The Pentagon and the CIA have asked the White House to decide on a more 
permanent approach for potentially lifetime detentions, including for 
hundreds of people now in military and CIA custody whom the government does 
not have enough evidence to charge in courts. The outcome of the review, 
which also involves the State Department, would also affect those expected 
to be captured in the course of future counterterrorism operations.

"We've been operating in the moment because that's what has been required," 
said a senior administration official involved in the discussions, who said 
the current detention system has strained relations between the United 
States and other countries. "Now we can take a breath. We have the ability 
and need to look at long-term solutions."

One proposal under review is the transfer of large numbers of Afghan, Saudi 
and Yemeni detainees from the military's Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention 
center into new U.S.-built prisons in their home countries. The prisons 
would be operated by those countries, but the State Department, where this 
idea originated, would ask them to abide by recognized human rights 
standards and would monitor compliance, the senior administration official 
said.

As part of a solution, the Defense Department, which holds 500 prisoners at 
Guantanamo Bay, plans to ask Congress for $25 million to build a 200-bed 
prison to hold detainees who are unlikely to ever go through a military 
tribunal for lack of evidence, according to defense officials.

The new prison, dubbed Camp 6, would allow inmates more comfort and freedom 
than they have now, and would be designed for prisoners the government 
believes have no more intelligence to share, the officials said. It would 
be modeled on a U.S. prison and would allow socializing among inmates.

"Since global war on terror is a long-term effort, it makes sense for us to 
be looking at solutions for long-term problems," said Bryan Whitman, a 
Pentagon spokesman. "This has been evolutionary, but we are at a point in 
time where we have to say, 'How do you deal with them in the long term?' "

The administration considers its toughest detention problem to involve the 
prisoners held by the CIA. The CIA has been scurrying since Sept. 11, 2001, 
to find secure locations abroad where it could detain and interrogate 
captives without risk of discovery, and without having to give them access 
to legal proceedings.

Little is known about the CIA's captives, the conditions under which they 
are kept -- or the procedures used to decide how long they are held or when 
they may be freed. That has prompted criticism from human rights groups, 
and from some in Congress and the administration, who say the lack of 
scrutiny or oversight creates an unacceptable risk of abuse.

Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), vice chairman of the House intelligence 
committee who has received classified briefings on the CIA's detainees and 
interrogation methods, said that given the long-term nature of the 
detention situation, "I think there should be a public debate about whether 
the entire system should be secret.

"The details about the system may need to remain secret," Harman said. At 
the least, she said, detainees should be registered so that their treatment 
can be tracked and monitored within the government. "This is complicated. 
We don't want to set up a bureaucracy that ends up making it impossible to 
protect sources and informants who operate within the groups we want to 
penetrate."

The CIA is believed to be holding fewer than three dozen al Qaeda leaders 
in prison. The agency holds most, if not all, of the top captured al Qaeda 
leaders, including Khalid Sheik Mohammed, Ramzi Binalshibh, Abu Zubaida and 
the lead Southeast Asia terrorist, Nurjaman Riduan Isamuddin, known as 
Hambali.

CIA detention facilities have been located on an off-limits corner of the 
Bagram air base in Afghanistan, on ships at sea and on Britain's Diego 
Garcia island in the Indian Ocean. The Washington Post reported last month 
that the CIA has also maintained a facility within the Pentagon's 
Guantanamo Bay complex, though it is unclear whether it is still in use.

In contrast to the CIA, the military produced and declassified hundreds of 
pages of documents about its detention and interrogation procedures after 
the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. And the military detainees are guaranteed 
access to the International Committee of the Red Cross and, as a result of 
a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, have the right to challenge their imprisonment 
in federal court.

But no public hearings in Congress have been held on CIA detention 
practices, and congressional officials say CIA briefings on the subject 
have been too superficial and were limited to the chairman and vice 
chairman of the House and Senate intelligence committees.

The CIA had floated a proposal to build an isolated prison with the intent 
of keeping it secret, one intelligence official said. That was dismissed 
immediately as impractical.

One approach used by the CIA has been to transfer captives it picks up 
abroad to third countries willing to hold them indefinitely and without 
public proceedings. The transfers, called "renditions," depend on 
arrangements between the United States and other countries, such as Egypt, 
Jordan and Afghanistan, that agree to have local security services hold 
certain terror suspects in their facilities for interrogation by CIA and 
foreign liaison officers.

The practice has been criticized by civil liberties groups and others, who 
point out that some of the countries have human rights records that are 
criticized by the State Department in annual reports.

Renditions originated in the 1990s as a way of picking up criminals abroad, 
such as drug kingpins, and delivering them to courts in the United States 
or other countries. Since 2001, the practice has been used to make certain 
detainees do not go to court or go back on the streets, officials said.

"The whole idea has become a corruption of renditions," said one CIA 
officer who has been involved in the practice. "It's not rendering to 
justice, it's kidnapping."

But top intelligence officials and other experts, including former CIA 
director George J. Tenet in his testimony before Congress, say renditions 
are an effective method of disrupting terrorist cells and persuading 
detainees to reveal information.

"Renditions are the most effective way to hold people," said Rohan 
Gunaratna, author of "Inside al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror." "The 
threat of sending someone to one of these countries is very important. In 
Europe, the custodial interrogations have yielded almost nothing" because 
they do not use the threat of sending detainees to a country where they are 
likely to be tortured.

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