User:Geo Swan/opinion/By helping to make public information about Guantanamo suspects more accessible, aren't I "helping terrorists"

I wrote this essay several years ago. I recently corrected some minor formatting errors.

By helping to make the public information about Guantanamo suspects more accessible, aren't I "helping terrorists"?

I know some people think that by making public information about the Guantanamo suspects more available I am "helping terrorists", and making those of us in the developed world less safe.

I completely disagree. I think all of us in the developed world are more likely to be safe from terrorist attack if those we authorize to choose how to allocate our limited counter-terrorism resources make their decisions on how to allocate those resources through a sober, professional analysis that it isn't tainted by unprofessional ideological, religious, or emotional bias. I think we are more likely to be safe if they make those decisions based on the most reliable information possible. And, if they are to make those decisions based on reliable information, then those they choose to give them information have to acquire and filter the intelligence they gather in a similarly professional manner, untainted by unprofessional, ideological, religious or emotional bias.

Having read something like half of the thousands of almost all the 20,000 pages the DoD has released I have grave doubts about the professionalism, and intellectual honesty of most of the work done by the intelligence analysts who have interrogated the USA's captives in the "war on terror". I have the same doubts about those who provided the first levels of analysis of that intelligence.

The Guantanamo Bay detainment camps cost over $100 million per year to keep open. (A retired general who visited last year wrote that.) Shoot. That means it has costs something like $1,000,000 to keep each detainee. Read the transcripts and it is clear that very few of them are hardened terrorists. Read the transcripts and it is clear that most of the detainees were either completely innocent victims of mistaken identity, conscripts, recruited at gunpoint, or ignorant illiterates, who lacked the education to be able to attack the USA. (One captive, for instance, acknowledged that he had traveled to Afghanistan to help the Taliban fight the Northern Alliance -- in order to defend Islam. He was asked how he could be defending Islam, when the Northern Alliance were also Muslims. He replied that when he traveled to Afghanistan he thought the Northern Alliance was made up of Hindus.)

The Bush administration, and the DoD, has kept repeating the mantra that "invaluable intelligence" has been flowing from the Guantanamo interrogations. I frankly don't believe a word of these claims. Guantanamo contains a small number of jailhouse snitches, who are completely unreliable, and will happily denounce as many of their fellow captives as they can. Captives who cooperate during their interrogations are rewarded with the opportunity to watch movies with their interrogators, and snack on take-out fast food from the Naval base's fast food outlets. The lawyers for some of the detainees have analyzed who denounced their clients. One captive has denounced 270 other captives. One captive, who seemed to be seriously mentally ill, bragged to his Tribunal that his life was shitty prior to his arrival at Guantanamo, that he was happy to stay in Guantanamo for the rest of his life, and that he loved denouncing as many of his fellow captives as he possibly could.

Prior to Pope John-Paul's reforms, the Catholic church had an adversarial process where they tested the evidence that a potential saint deserved to be elevated to saint-hood. A priest was assigned the task of being the devil's advocate. It was his job to work as hard as he could to debunk the evidence that the potential saint really had lived a saintly life, really had engineered miracles.

In my opinion this kind of adversarial process was desperately needed in Guantanamo. Any vague innuendo got added to a captive's file. But they had no process to tune out the cruft. For instance, Faruq Ali Ahmed faced one new allegation during his Administrative Review Board hearing that he wasn't presented with during his Combatant Status Review Tribunal. He was told that "a source" had overheard someone he suspected was a member of the Taliban, or al Qaeda, utter the word "Faruq" when using a radio. No, I am not making this up. The Boston Globe pointed out that the cabinet members of several of America's allies were named Faruq. What it didn't point out was that Faruq was the name of the most widely attended of the al Qaeda training camps.

The Boston Globe, the Baltimore Sun, and various of the captive's lawyers, were able to find evidence that provided an alibi for a number of the captives, with very little effort. Saving a million bucks per innocent captive, by finding evidence that provided alibis for them is not the most important thing.

The most important step for keeping us all safe would be to provide adequate, professional, reliable testing of the evidence against the captives, to prune out all those who don't represent a threat, so that any remaining lying jailhouse snitches can't continue to pollute the pool of intelligence that those who make decisions about how to allocate our counter-terrorism resources relies on.

I want our decision-makers to have the most reliable intelligence on which to base their sober, professional choices. And, in order for that to happen, all the innocent captives must be cleared. And all the captives who don't pose a realistic threat should be sent home.