Guantanamo Bay

I just came across a remark on the POAC forum that I felt needed a response, so I provided one....perhaps it bears being publicized if this is an idea people are still carrying around.

"Guantenamo Bay is far from a concentration camp...people are not there merely because of some group membership but for specific crimes they may have committed."

My response: "Look again..."

WASHINGTON — The United States is holding dozens of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay who have no meaningful connection to Al Qaeda or the Taliban, and were sent to the maximum-security facility over the objections of intelligence officers in Afghanistan who had recommended them for release, according to military sources with direct knowledge of the matter.

At least 59 detainees -- nearly 10% of the prison population at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba -- were deemed to be of no intelligence value after repeated interrogations in Afghanistan. All were placed on "recommended for repatriation" lists well before they were transferred to Guantanamo Bay, a facility intended to hold the most hardened terrorists and Taliban suspects.

Dozens of the detainees are Afghan and Pakistani nationals described in classified intelligence reports as farmers, taxi drivers, cobblers and laborers.

... None of the 59 met U.S. screening criteria for determining which prisoners should be sent to Guantanamo Bay, military sources said. But all were transferred anyway, sources said, for reasons that continue to baffle and frustrate intelligence officers nearly a year after the first group of detainees arrived at the facility.

"There are a lot of guilty [people] in there," said one officer, "but there's a lot of farmers in there too."

The sources' accounts point to a previously undisclosed struggle within the military over the handling of the detainees. Even senior commanders were said to be troubled by the problems.

Maj. Gen. Michael E. Dunlavey, the operational commander at Guantanamo Bay until October, traveled to Afghanistan in the spring to complain that too many "Mickey Mouse" detainees were being sent to the already crowded facility, sources said.

... Even some prisoners red-flagged by the screening guidelines were clearly of no intelligence value and should not have been sent, military intelligence sources said.

One prisoner was transferred because he was Arab by birth and had once fought for the Taliban, thereby meeting two key screening criteria. But before the war he had sustained such a massive head injury that he could utter little more than his name and was known by interrogators at Guantanamo Bay as "half-head Bob."

"He had basically had a combat lobotomy," the interrogator said. "Every [intelligence report] on him from Afghanistan said, 'No value, no value, don't send him.' "

Others were grabbed by Pakistani soldiers patrolling the Afghan border who collected bounties for prisoners, sources said. One such prisoner was captured at a restaurant near the border where he claimed to have lived and worked for 20 years.

"He had the mental capacity to put flatbread in an oven and that was the extent of his intellect," the interrogator said. "He never got trained on a rifle, never got pressed into service. But he was Arab by birth so he was picked up and sent away."

... To call attention to the problem, some began circulating lists of prisoners they believed were being improperly placed on Guantanamo Bay flight manifests. The lists were seen by senior intelligence officers in Afghanistan, Kuwait and the United States.

One of the lists covers 49 Afghans and 10 Pakistanis who were being held at Kandahar Air Base until the Afghan facility was shut down in June, prompting their transfer to Guantanamo Bay, sources said.

The list describes detainees' occupations, the circumstances of their captures, summaries of interrogations and alibis they provided. The prisoners range in age from 16 to 50, most with little or no education. None was deemed to have meaningful ties to Al Qaeda or the Taliban.

A typical entry describes a 30-year-old Afghan farmer captured by Afghan forces who "seemed most interested in stealing his car and money."

Another describes a 22-year-old Afghan who sold firewood at a bus station in Konduz and was picked up by Northern Alliance forces while he and six others were traveling to Kabul, the Afghan capital.

... These detainees would almost certainly have been repatriated had they not been captured early in the war, before screening systems were overhauled to make releasing low-level prisoners easier, sources said.

By midsummer, military officials took to withholding the names of new inmates from prison rosters until they could be evaluated. That way, they didn't officially exist and, if deemed harmless, could be released before their names got caught up in the system.
  full December 2002 LA Times article

And how about that release program that was supposed to be going on to rectify the situation?

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.