Our security will require all Americans to be forward-looking and resolute, to be ready for preemptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives.
President George W. Bush at June 2002 West Point graduation, broadcasting US intentions to pursue an illegal doctrine of wars of aggression.
I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.
President Barack Obama in January 11, 2009 on ABC announcing US intentions not to look back at US war crimes and human rights violations.
Scott Horton has a piece up at Harpers which takes a look back at a March 2009 article by retired Army colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former right-hand man to Colin Powell at State, in light of the recently released wikileaks documents on Guantanamo. The leaks fill in details concerning the “mosaic philosophy” described by Wilkerson in the Washington Note, which is to say, the leaks describe the effects of the ineptly waged “war on terror” on the lives of individuals.
In 2009, Wilkerson wrote
This [mosaic] philosophy held that it did not matter if a detainee were innocent. Indeed, because he lived in Afghanistan and was captured on or near the battle area, he must know something of importance (this general philosophy, in an even cruder form, prevailed in Iraq as well, helping to produce the nightmare at Abu Ghraib). All that was necessary was to extract everything possible from him and others like him, assemble it all in a computer program, and then look for cross-connections and serendipitous incidentals–in short, to have sufficient information about a village, a region, or a group of individuals, that dots could be connected and terrorists or their plots could be identified.
Thus, as many people as possible had to be kept in detention for as long as possible to allow this philosophy of intelligence gathering to work. The detainees’ innocence was inconsequential. After all, they were ignorant peasants for the most part and mostly Muslim to boot.
The US reserves the right to invade countries on the grounds of suspicion. It only follows that “we” reserve the right to hold people in custody for years on the same grounds. And not looking back means not releasing people even after we know that they never did pose a threat to any other human being on the planet. Wilkerson described this:
There are several dimensions to the debate over the U.S. prison facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba that the media have largely missed and, thus, of which the American people are almost completely unaware….
The first of these is the utter incompetence of the battlefield vetting in Afghanistan during the early stages of the U.S. operations there. Simply stated, no meaningful attempt at discrimination was made in-country by competent officials, civilian or military, as to who we were transporting to Cuba for detention and interrogation.
snip
The second dimension that is largely unreported is that several in the U.S. leadership became aware of this lack of proper vetting very early on and, thus, of the reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value, and should be immediately released.
But to have admitted this reality would have been a black mark on their leadership from virtually day one of the so-called Global War on Terror and these leaders already had black marks enough: the dead in a field in Pennsylvania, in the ashes of the Pentagon, and in the ruins of the World Trade Towers. They were not about to admit to their further errors at Guantanamo Bay. Better to claim that everyone there was a hardcore terrorist, was of enduring intelligence value, and would return to jihad if released. I am very sorry to say that I believe there were uniformed military who aided and abetted these falsehoods, even at the highest levels of our armed forces.
For those of us who are looking back, we see plenty of blame to go around. Wilkerson gives special attention to Donald Rumsfeld and his demands to "just get the bastards to the interrogators."
The wikileaks dump confirms Wilkerson’s somewhat gently hurled accusations. By the accounting of those waging Bush's preemptive "war," 150 of the 779 prisoners at Guantanamo were indeed, not “the worst of the worst.” Horton cites some examples now made public with the wikileaks release:
• One young Afghan was seized by security forces in 2003 after a bomb detonated by the side of the road, simply because he was nearby. He insisted that he was a shepherd, and the intelligence analysts at the CIA believed him, confirming that he lacked even rudimentary knowledge of military and political concepts. He was nevertheless classified as an “enemy combatant” and held until 2006.
• Another man was dragged off to Guantánamo because he was a mullah in Kandahar, a fact that placed him in a “position to have special knowledge about the Taliban,” as the file observes.
• The youngest prisoner, a fourteen-year-old Afghan boy, was seized because he might have “possible knowledge about local Taliban leaders,” according to his file.
• A reporter for Al Jazeera was held in captivity for six years so that interrogators could gather information about the internal workings of the Al Jazeera network, including information on how it had secured an interview with Osama bin Laden—information Al Jazeera had freely and immediately shared with the U.S. government before the interview was ever aired.
People were picked up on the basis of bounties, of vague feelings they might provide information on some esoteric local topic, on the basis of where they happened to be tending their sheep. Later, as US officials scrambled for justifications, some were charged on the basis of information obtained from other detainees through an incentive program.
The US now claims the right to invade foreign countries on the basis of suspicion. We have shown a willingness to pick up any person, anywhere in the world, and hold them as long as we want on the basis of no evidence whatsoever. The US has shown itself unwilling to investigate even gross injustices acknowledged to have been committed as a result of these actions.
These are not mere innocents, these are among the worst of the worst.
Ari Fleischer, January 23, 2002 White House press briefing
They are bad guys. They are the worst of the worst, and if let out on the street, they will go back to the proclivity of trying to kill Americans and others.
Rear Adm. John D. Stufflebeem, January 28, 2002 Pentagon briefing on operations in Afghanistan.
We need to stop populating Guantanamo Bay (GTMO) with low-level enemy combatants.
Donald Rumsfeld in 2003 memo to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.