Closing Guantanamo: A bloody mess

By MICHAEL HALEY

The Bush Administration had a bad habit of not thinking through the consequences of many of its actions, or not caring, and one of them was what is the eventual outcome going to be of torturing prisoners of war? It was inflicted on many of them, many of whom have turned out to be innocent, at least of terrorism.

But even in the case of top tier Al Qaeda prisoners that were tortured, there are huge problems and when Guantanamo is closed those problems are going to come to the surface.

When you capture someone and imprison them without trial, with little evidence often based on the account of another prisoner who has given the name under torture themselves, you end up with a system where the prisoners are unprosecutable under U. S. law. Once you take prisoners outside the rule of law, you have a hard time bringing them back in.

When you have tortured them, held them indefinitely without charges, and gained confessions under torture, you "shock the conscience of the court" in legal parlance by violating a number of United States laws including the Constitution. That is the situation we find ourselves in with many of the Guantanamo Bay prisoners.

Take Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, better known as al-Libi, his story is a key one. "The Dark Side" by Jane Meyer gives a detailed account of his story. He was the field trainer for one of Bin Laden’s training camps and trained hundreds of Al Qaeda terrorists in Afghanistan. He was captured by the Pakistanis in December of 2001, and for lots of cash from the CIA was turned over to the U.S.

Al Libi was taken captive by the FBI and questioned in a friendly manner, and gave them lots of actionable intelligence. He gave them information about Richard Reid the shoe bomber and could have been used as a witness in his trial, and he also told them about an upcoming attempt to blow up the US Embassy in Yemen which helped avert it.

In stepped the CIA, for reasons that are not entirely clear, who took him to Egypt under a rendition agreement and began to torture him. The most likely reason was that the Bush administration was looking for intelligence that said that Al Qaeda was in Iraq, and they were trying to torture it out of al Libi.

In the fall of 2002, Bush was trying to get Colin Powell to give what is now his famous United Nations speech supporting the need to go to war in Iraq. Powell was refusing to read the speech Cheney had written for him, and said that the intelligence was so weak he was seriously balking on giving the speech at all.

Then in came George Tenant, CIA Director, and said we had high level Al Qaeda intelligence that confirmed that Al Qaeda was in Iraq. Powell was told that this was human intelligence from a former training camp commander, that had put Saddam’s secret police together with Al Qaeda in Iraq. And, they were using biological and chemical weapons. Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell’s Chief of Staff, said that was the thing that turned Powell around and gave him confidence to give the speech.

But it was a lie, and top level Defense Intelligence officials that had reviewed the transcript of the sessions had been saying al Libi’s evidence looked highly dubious for months before that. That information was readily available to both Tenant and Powell yet somehow it did not make it to them.

A year after the war started al-Libi himself recanted his story, and it was obvious from the beginning that he was not in a position in the Al Qaeda organization to even know what was going on in Iraq. When asked why he made it up, he said "they were killing me. I had to give them something".

There are a whole lot of problems here, and if you read the entire detailed story you will see that there are even more. At this point the government is not saying exactly where al Libi is but he may be in Guantanamo, or he may be dead. The Bush administration has violated many US laws, not to mention the Constitution. No normal Judge would allow this kind of evidence or treatment to pass muster in court.

No current U.S legal system could convict al Libi, despite the fact that he was a high level Al Qaeda operative. If trials start for those like al Libi, the CIA torturers will face scrutiny as well. For the most part, the FBI, which ironically had much more experience dealing with terrorism than the CIA, did not want to get its hands dirty and stayed out of it. The whole torture system and systematic violation of US law and the Constitution is in the hands of the CIA and the Bush Administration, primarily originating with Dick Cheney.

Americans need to face and know the truth of what went on, who we tortured, how and why, and we must cleanse ourselves of this horrible contamination of the body politic of America. What makes American identity is not its geography, it is its adherence to principles. America stands for something, something of character, something of dignity and freedom. America’s soul rests on our ideals, and if this isn’t a violation of the American ideal, of freedom in the land of opportunity, of valuing the individual, the rule of law, of being the "good guys", then what is?

There is a point of changing yourself to respond to your enemies that you become just like your enemies. When you do that, you have lost the war, because the real war is about human dignity and the value of the individual. When your enemy brings you down to their level, they win. The Bush administration policy of torturing violated the most fundamental values of our Constitution and our nation and we have to repair the damage from that.

It is going to be more than a can of worms, it is going to be a big bloody mess, but it is our mess and we need to own up to it. Incoming President Obama should not back down from this challenge. We need it to cleanse our very soul.

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