January 2, 2005
Long-Term Plan Sought For Terror Suspects
By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
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. |
