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"Preventive Detention?"
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| Shakka |
How interesting. We get these 2 stories in the Times today.
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May 21, 2009
1 in 7 Freed Detainees Rejoins Fight, Report Finds
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
WASHINGTON — An unreleased Pentagon report concludes that about one in seven of the 534 prisoners already transferred abroad from the detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has returned to terrorism or militant activity, according to administration officials.
The conclusion could strengthen the arguments of critics who have warned against the transfer or release of any more detainees as part of President Obama’s plan to shut down the prison by January. Past Pentagon reports on Guantánamo recidivism have been met with skepticism from civil liberties groups and criticized for their lack of detail.
The Pentagon promised in January that the latest report would be released soon, but Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said this week that the findings were still “under review.”
Two administration officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said the report was being held up by Defense Department employees fearful of upsetting the White House, at a time when even Congressional Democrats have begun to show misgivings over Mr. Obama’s plan to close Guantánamo.
At the White House on Wednesday, Mr. Obama ran into a different kind of resistance when he met with human rights advocates who told him they would oppose any plan that would hold terrorism suspects without charges.
The White House has said Mr. Obama will provide further details about his plans for Guantánamo detainees in a speech Thursday.
To relocate the 240 prisoners now at Guantánamo Bay, administration officials have said the plan will ultimately rely on some combination of sending some overseas for release, transferring others to the custody of foreign governments, and moving the rest to facilities in the United States, either for military or civilian trials or, in some cases, perhaps, to be held without charges.
But the prospect that detainees might be moved to American soil has run into strong opposition in Congress. To show its misgivings, the Senate voted on Wednesday, 90 to 6, to cut from a war-spending bill the $80 million requested by Mr. Obama to close the prison, and overwhelmingly approved a second amendment requiring that a threat assessment be prepared for each prisoner now at Guantánamo to address what might happen on release.
The F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, said Wednesday that moving detainees to American prisons would bring with it risks including “the potential for individuals undertaking attacks in the United States.”
But Michele A. Flournoy, the under secretary of defense for policy, said of the detainees: “I think there will be some that need to end up in the United States.”
Pentagon officials said there had been no pressure from the Obama White House to suppress the report about the Guantánamo detainees who had been transferred abroad under the Bush administration. The officials said they believed that Defense Department employees, some of them holdovers from the Bush administration, were acting to protect their jobs.
The report is the subject of numerous Freedom of Information Act requests from news media organizations, and Mr. Whitman said he expected it to be released shortly. The report, a copy of which was made available to The New York Times, says the Pentagon believes that 74 prisoners released from Guantánamo have returned to terrorism or militant activity, making for a recidivism rate of nearly 14 percent.
The report was made available by an official who said the delay in releasing it was creating unnecessary “conspiracy theories” about the holdup.
A Defense Department official said there was little will at the Pentagon to release the report because it had become politically radioactive under Mr. Obama.
“If we hold it, then everybody claims it’s political and you’re protecting the Obama administration,” said the official, who asked for anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation. “And if we let it go, then everybody says you’re undermining Obama.”
Previous assertions by the Pentagon that substantial numbers of former Guantánamo prisoners had returned to terrorism were sharply criticized by civil liberties and human rights groups who said the information was too vague to be credible and amounted to propaganda in favor of keeping the prison open. The Pentagon began making the assertions in 2007 but stopped earlier this year, shortly before Mr. Obama took office.
Among the 74 former prisoners that the report says are again engaged in terrorism, 29 have been identified by name by the Pentagon, including 16 named for the first time in the report. The Pentagon has said that the remaining 45 could not be named because of national security and intelligence-gathering concerns.
In the report, the Pentagon confirmed that two former Guantánamo prisoners whose terrorist activities had been previously reported had indeed returned to the fight. They are Said Ali al-Shihri, a leader of Al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch suspected in a deadly bombing of the United States Embassy in Sana, Yemen’s capital, last year, and Abdullah Ghulam Rasoul, an Afghan Taliban commander, who also goes by the name Mullah Abdullah Zakir.
The Pentagon has provided no way of authenticating its 45 unnamed recidivists, and only a few of the 29 people identified by name can be independently verified as having engaged in terrorism since their release. Many of the 29 are simply described as associating with terrorists or training with terrorists, with almost no other details provided.
“It’s part of a campaign to win the hearts and minds of history for Guantánamo,” said Mark P. Denbeaux, a professor at Seton Hall University School of Law who has represented Guantánamo detainees and co-written three studies highly critical of the Pentagon’s previous recidivism reports. “They want to be able to claim there really were bad people there.”
Mr. Denbeaux acknowledged that some of the named detainees had engaged in verifiable terrorist acts since their release, but he said his research showed that their numbers were small.
“We’ve never said there weren’t some people who would return to the fight,” Mr. Denbeaux said. “It seems to be unavoidable. Nothing is perfect.”
Terrorism experts said a 14 percent recidivism rate was far lower than the rate for prisoners in the United States, which, they said, can run as high as 68 percent three years after release. They also said that while Americans might have a lower level of tolerance for recidivism among Guantánamo detainees, there was no evidence that any of those released had engaged in elaborate operations like the Sept. 11 attacks.
In addition to Mr. Shihri and Mr. Rasoul, at least three others among the 29 named have engaged in verifiable terrorist activity or have threatened terrorist acts. |
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May 21, 2009
Obama Is Said to Consider Preventive Detention Plan
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
WASHINGTON — President Obama told human rights advocates at the White House on Wednesday that he was mulling the need for a “preventive detention” system that would establish a legal basis for the United States to incarcerate terrorism suspects who are deemed a threat to national security but cannot be tried, two participants in the private session said.
The discussion, in a 90-minute meeting in the Cabinet Room that included Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and other top administration officials, came on the eve of a much-anticipated speech Mr. Obama is to give Thursday on a number of thorny national security matters, including his promise to close the detention center at the naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Human rights advocates are growing deeply uneasy with Mr. Obama’s stance on these issues, especially his recent move to block the release of photographs showing abuse of detainees, and his announcement that he is willing to try terrorism suspects in military commissions — a concept he criticized bitterly as a presidential candidate.
The two participants, outsiders who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the session was intended to be off the record, said they left the meeting dismayed.
They said Mr. Obama told them he was thinking about “the long game” — how to establish a legal system that would endure for future presidents. He raised the issue of preventive detention himself, but made clear that he had not made a decision on it. Several senior White House officials did not respond to requests for comment on the outsiders’ accounts.
“He was almost ruminating over the need for statutory change to the laws so that we can deal with individuals who we can’t charge and detain,” one participant said. “We’ve known this is on the horizon for many years, but we were able to hold it off with George Bush. The idea that we might find ourselves fighting with the Obama administration over these powers is really stunning.”
The other participant said Mr. Obama did not seem to be thinking about preventive detention for terrorism suspects now held at Guantánamo Bay, but rather for those captured in the future, in settings other than a legitimate battlefield like Afghanistan. “The issue is,” the participant said, “What are the options left open to a future president?”
Mr. Obama did not specify how he intended to deal with Guantánamo detainees who posed a threat and could not be tried, nor did he share the contents of Thursday’s speech, the participants said.
He will deliver the speech at a site laden with symbolism — the National Archives, home to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Across town, his biggest Republican critic, former Vice President Dick Cheney, will deliver a speech at the American Enterprise Institute.
Mr. Cheney and other hawkish critics have sought to portray Mr. Obama as weak on terror, and their argument seems to be catching on with the public. On Tuesday, Senate Democrats, in a clear rebuke to the White House, blocked the $80 million Mr. Obama had requested in financing to close the Guantánamo prison.
The lawmakers say they want a detailed plan before releasing the money; there is deep opposition on Capitol Hill to housing terrorism suspects inside the United States.
“He needs to convince people that he’s got a game plan that will protect us as well as be fair to the detainees,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, who agrees with Mr. Obama that the prison should be closed. “If he can do that, then we’re back on track. But if he doesn’t make that case, then we’ve lost control of this debate.”
But Mr. Obama will not use the speech to provide the details lawmakers want.
“What it’s not going to be is a prescriptive speech,” said David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s senior adviser. “The president wants to take some time and put this whole issue in perspective to identify what the challenges are and how he will approach dealing with them.” |
Things that make you go hmmmm... |
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| Q5echo |
| putting aside the hypocricy of the previous committments of "most open congress ever" and "most transparent executive administration ever" all in the spirit of a new cooperative government, is a 15% recidivism rate that bad? |
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| Capitalizt |
| It's also impossible to calculate the number of people who weren't "terrorists" going in..but become so on the way out. I know if I were wrongfully imprisoned and possibly tortured for several years, I'd sure as hell become radicalized by the process and determined to get revenge. I read a story the other day of an innocent man released after 8 YEARS in detention without trial. Can you imagine how you would feel towards America if they cost you 8 years of your life? |
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| Shakka |
| quote: | Originally posted by Capitalizt
It's also impossible to calculate the number of people who weren't "terrorists" going in..but become so on the way out. I know if I were wrongfully imprisoned and possibly tortured for several years, I'd sure as hell become radicalized by the process and determined to get revenge. I read a story the other day of an innocent man released after 8 YEARS in detention without trial. Can you imagine how you would feel towards America if they cost you 8 years of your life? |
I understand that sentiment and I'm not going to argue with it either way. I just found it interesting that the concept of "preventative detention" sounds an awful lot like "preemptive war" in many ways. |
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| pmoisse |
| quote: | Originally posted by Q5echo
putting aside the hypocricy of the previous committments of "most open congress ever" and "most transparent executive administration ever" all in the spirit of a new cooperative government, is a 15% recidivism rate that bad? |
Exactly! This is what I was thinking too. One in seven isn't bad odds at all.
Also, the fact that there's no outrage about bringing these baddies back to the US is something I find funny as hell. I can't see how there's a danger to the public of holding these guys in various supermax prisons around the country.
Hell, they could throw them into the general prison population and you'd probably find enough of these guys get shanked anyways, thus eliminating the need for more of these tribunals [/sarcastic, but it would probably happen because some biker tough guy partiot took justice into his own hands] |
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| Fir3start3r |
| Big. Frackin'. Surprise. Not. |
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| Lebezniatnikov |
| quote: | Originally posted by Shakka
I understand that sentiment and I'm not going to argue with it either way. I just found it interesting that the concept of "preventative detention" sounds an awful lot like "preemptive war" in many ways. |
Not to change the subject, but international law defines preemption and prevention very differently. Preventive war is unquestionably legal; whereas up til 2003, preemptive war was generally perceived as ambiguous at best and outright illegal at worst. |
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| Clovis |
| quote: | Originally posted by pmoisse
I can't see how there's a danger to the public of holding these guys in various supermax prisons around the country.
Hell, they could throw them into the general prison population and you'd probably find enough of these guys get shanked anyways, thus eliminating the need for more of these tribunals [/sarcastic, but it would probably happen because some biker tough guy partiot took justice into his own hands] |
Even your sarcasm holds pretty true.
The FBI director thinks they will be able to plot terrorist attacks from the inside. :rolleyes: |
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| MisterOpus1 |
I call bull.
| quote: | | The Pentagon has provided no way of authenticating its 45 unnamed recidivists, and only a few of the 29 people identified by name can be independently verified as having engaged in terrorism since their release. Many of the 29 are simply described as associating with terrorists or training with terrorists, with almost no other details provided. |
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/21/u...gitmo.html?_r=1[/QUOTE]
just trust us........... |
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| Arbiter |
Putting aside the question of the substantive accuracy of the report, I'm not sure what the implication of the report is supposed to be.
Six out of seven "detainees" hasn't returned to terrorism, therefore we shouldn't have released them?
If that's the implication, then our government is even further gone than I had feared... |
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| pkcRAISTLIN |
| What would be more interesting would be to see how many of the 1 in 7 previously had no links to terrorists or terrorism until they were illegally kidnapped. |
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| Krypton |
| If government can't charge them, then they should be immediately released. |
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