Interesting story in the WaPo:
The Bush administration is negotiating the transfer of nearly 70 percent of the detainees at the U.S. detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to three countries as part of a plan, officials said, to share the burden of keeping suspected terrorists behind bars.
U.S. officials announced yesterday that they have reached an agreement with the government of Afghanistan to transfer most of its nationals to Kabul’s “exclusive” control and custody. There are 110 Afghan detainees at Guantanamo and 350 more at the Bagram airfield near Kabul. Their transfers could begin in the next six months.
Pierre-Richard Prosper, ambassador at large for war crimes, who led a U.S. delegation to the Middle East this week, said similar agreements are being pursued with Saudi Arabia and Yemen, whose nationals make up a significant percentage of the Guantanamo population. Prosper held talks in Saudi Arabia on Sunday and Monday, but negotiations were cut off after the announcement of King Fahd’s death.
The decision to move more than 20 percent of the detainees at Guantanamo to Afghanistan and to largely clear out the detention center at Bagram is part of a broader plan to significantly reduce the population of “enemy combatants” in U.S. custody. Senior U.S. officials said yesterday’s agreement is the first major step toward whittling down the Guantanamo population to a core group of people the United States expects to hold indefinitely.
I wonder if US forces will be at all involved in their detainment in Afghanistan. I also wonder how long this has been in the works.
Katherine
Ah, outsourcing. It was first reported in March, I think.
Usually we get a promise from the other country that they will be indefinitely detained and that they will not be tortured. The latter sort of promise usually turns out to be worthless in practice. Though Afghanistan’s not Uzbekistan, and many people would probably prefer to take their chances there than remain in U.S. custody depending on the conditions of confinement.
And yeah, I think back to the “Salt Pit” case and wonder if they’re really being transferred out of U.S. custody, or just out of range of the courts and cameras.
Jimmy Jazz
That’s one alternative. The other is that this is a face-saving measure and that most of the (worthless) detainees will be quietly released after transfer.
Jcricket
Seriously, do people really think we’d be releasing 70% of the prisoners to places like Aghanistan, Pakistan, etc. if we were really worried about them being “hard core jihadists”? In these unstable regions we have to know that most of these prisoners will either be tortured to death (see Musharaff) or quietly released.
Again, if these people are innocent, or no longer a threat, why can’t we just fess up? And without that, how are we supposed to be convinced that the people that remain at Gitmo are any more of a threat? Just because they are still there? Because Rumsfeld/Cheney say so?
This makes a total mockery of everything we’ve been saying about the need for indefinite detention, rendition, torture, etc.
Defense Guy
As I said in the torture thread, this act to will bring condemnation from the likely crowd.
Keep them = screaming rage
Release them = screaming rage
Not that this is insane or anything.
norbizness
Good thing we didn’t implement the O’Reilly plan to execute all of them.
neil
Are you kidding, Defense Guy? You really think that the situation before could accurately be distilled to “keep them” and that this action can be accurately distilled to “release them?”
I can think of a lot of other things that they could have done that would not bring condemnation. This attempt to claim that the Bush administration has acted above contempt is transparently dishonest.
Defense Guy
I think in all honesty, neil, that if Bush single handedly cured cancer, some of you would bitch about all the scientists being put out of work.
Scream that we have no right to hold them and then scream even louder when we don’t actually hold them anymore. Again, not that is insane or if it is that there is anything wrong with that. Don’t want to offend anyone after all.
doinkman
Liberty and Justice for all.
neil
Well, Defense Guy, your bad faith strawman argument has been noted. Nice to know that for opposing torture and the detention of uncharged prisoners, I am presupposed to be a person with no rationality or reason.
Anderson
Josh Marshall was wondering how dangerous these guys are if we can transfer them to 3d parties. Good question.
Kimmitt
I suspect we’ve known that they were essentially innocent (or small fry) for a long time now but only now have gotten around to beginning to do something about it. This is likely one of several moves to try to defuse the situation before the torture pics and videos come out.
Katherine
I should add, there are ways to do this that would be quite acceptable to me. We are not necessarily sending them to be tortured. I can believe Hamid Karzai is acting in good faith here; he’s been genuinely upset aboout the U.S. treatment of Afghan nationals at Guantanamo, Bagram, and CIA facilities. Whereas the Saudi government, the Yemeni government, the Egyptian government–they torture prisoners a LOT; it’s hard to believe their assurances. But even in those cases, if the prisoners would rather take their chances with their own governments than remain in Guantanamo, great. And if they would not do so, and there is reason to believe they are dangerous, it would be quite legal to detain them under our immigration laws.
The thing is, though Bush has sent prisoners off knowing they would be tortured. We have secret prisons in foreign countries that the CIA controls, which exist to be legal black holes for interrogation. Say “trust us, we’re treating them humanely, we would never condone torture, it was a few bad apples but even if we did they’re all mass murderers who deserve it” enough times, and violate that trust enough times, and people are not going to trust a thing you do or a word you say.
Defense Guy
The governments recieving the prisoners have ensured the US that they will be no further problem in this conflict. Could be bad news for the detainees, as they could legally be charged and executed should they be found to fall outside the purvue of the geneva conventions.
I think it is naive not to assume that in some cases, that is exactly what is going to happen.
Stormy70
No way, send them to their country of origin. Let’s not import the enemy combatants we faced on the battlefields.
Katherine
Well, I think you could use the facility at Guantanamo to do this. There’s nothing magic about the geography.
Not all of them were captured on battlefields, you know.