CIA to create "Roach Motel" for tangoes

[MKSheppard]

Linka

Long-Term Plan Sought For Terror Suspects

By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 2, 2005; Page A01

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.

[Chmee]

Those idiots don't even remember what we're supposedly fighting these wars FOR. It's not to defend the Soviet legal system. Maybe they should spend more time figuring out how to properly analyze the date they HAVE instead of new ways to circumvent our entire history of jurisprudence.

[White Haven]

Since...fucking...when is the Judicial Branch of the US Government the enemy in this war? What the hell, we're watching the Executive Branch pressure the Legislative Branch for money so they can cut the Judicial completely out of the loop. for hundreds/thousands of prisoners. What the unholy flying fuck is WRONG with these people?

[Jadeite]

What the fuck? "Well, we don't have enough evidence to convict these people, so we'll just keep them in prison for the rest of their lives."

Seriously, it seems like the entire government is living in it's own fantasy world where they think the US is somehow in a fight for it's life.

[Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba]

Under the Bush administration, the government had fund new and exciting ways to violate the Constitution and the Bill of Rights!

[Drooling Iguana]

No, these ways have been around for a while. They just were rarely used in the US until now.

[Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba]

No, these ways have been around for a while. They just were rarely used in the US until now.

'Doesn't change the fact that the administration is now zealously gunning for it, unlike previous ones. Remember the city where natives where illegal within city limits, but this law was only revoked a month or so ago? The existence of law is unimportant- the enforcement, or in this case, implementation of it, is.

[Chris OFarrell]

They want the CIA to look into ways of INDEFINENTLY HOLDING PEOPLE WITHOUT TRAIL FOR THEIR *NATURAL LIVES* ?!?!?!?!?!

I just...this....

Up until this point, I truely thought the US under Bush's idiocy would be smashed appart by the US legal system, the SCOTUS stepping in eventualy when the cases reached them to blast apart Camp X-Ray and so on...

But now we have the US Governement looking for ways to hold onto these people for their entire lives without charge....I just....

[Ace Pace]

This is unbelivable, if this goes into action how the hell is the U.S better then the countries its fighting against?!

[Drooling Iguana]

No, these ways have been around for a while. They just were rarely used in the US until now.

'Doesn't change the fact that the administration is now zealously gunning for it, unlike previous ones. Remember the city where natives where illegal within city limits, but this law was only revoked a month or so ago? The existence of law is unimportant- the enforcement, or in this case, implementation of it, is.

I wasn't really referring to that. I was referring to the fact that these methods have been used by many other countries throughout history, but, until now, America had mostly been above that sort of thing, and had in fact fought those countries on several occasions (but, then again, if you tried to find all the countries that the US hasn't gone to war with at some point in its history it would be a pretty short list.)

[Alyrium Denryle]

This is unbelivable, if this goes into action how the hell is the U.S better then the countries its fighting against?!

It isnt.

[brianeyci]

"We keep them, but we have no proof to keep them so we keep them. For the rest of their lives."



Brian

[Admiral Valdemar]

I'm so glad the enemies of freedom are being treated like the scum they are. I hope they bring back public stoning too, now that's progress.

[Chmee]

Kinda reminds me of the line from the great COPS/SW parody "Troops", as Stormies are taking in some suspected rebel scum:

"All suspects are guilty until proven innocent ... otherwise they wouldn't be suspects, would they?"

[Spyder]

"Oh, you're building a Gulag. Just sing out if you want any help, I can personally reccomend some specialists."

"No, that's cool Vlad. We can handle it."