On April 24, 2011, WikiLeaks released a trove of sensitive documents about the United States-led War on Terror, the first such group of documents to be made public since the diplomatic cables leak. The New York Times, the National Public Radio, and The Guardian were the first news organizations to obtain the dossiers. The more than 700 classified documents, written between 2002 and 2009, were internal Department of Defense reports regarding Guantanamo Bay prisoners. The leaked archive reveals not just information about the prisoners themselves but also the conflicting opinions and uncertainties of the American officials in charge of them.
In the 704 documents, the military intelligence officials recorded many details about the prisoners, including their confessions, personal belongings, actions under detention, threats made to the officials, and other miscellaneous information. The intelligence officials also wrote what they thought of the stories presented by the prisoners and the potential threat level posed by prisoners if they were to be released. The documents show that intelligence officials of many countries, such as China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and Algeria, came to question the detainees, and that one of the people held at Guantanamo Bay was a cameraman for Al Jazeera. For all the personal details, the stories, and the information that the documents provide about many of the detainees, there is also a great deal of uncertainty that comes through the pages, with the word “possibly” being used 387 times.
This rare glimpse into what the prisoners said and what the American officials thought provides some basis for understanding the mysterious black box that is the Guantanamo Bay. The officials faced a difficult task of determining the risk presented by each suspect and deciding whether the suspect was telling the truth. It cannot be an easy task to determine the accuracy of a confession
Courtesy of the Guardian
and to figure out how useful and actionable a piece of intelligence provided by a suspect is. The officials certainly made some mistakes, detaining some innocent people as suspects due to confusion in identity or due to circumstances, while one of the first 158 to be released went back to Pakistan and became a suicide bomber. So for all that can be said about the uncertainties and doubts expressed on the documents, one thing is for certain: these officials had to make the difficult calls between imprisoning someone who may be an innocent shepherd from Afghanistan or who may be a terrorist waiting to strike America or its troops and allies upon return home.
All of this means that Guantanamo Bay remains an exceedingly difficult subject for America and its national security. Because it is about a relatively new threat, no one knows the best solution, and everyone gets excited voicing what he/she believes is the right thing to do. The Left assails it as the inerasable black mark on America’s leadership on human rights without presenting a real clear alternative for dealing with the prisoners. Some on the Right, on the other hand, would just rather leave it alone and not think about it, letting the men of Guantanamo, some of whom are innocent but cannot return home due to instability in those countries, rot there. Our country needs to settle on a long-term solution for holding terrorists, interrogating them, and bringing them to justice. As the documents, which classified most of the 172 currently remaining prisoners as “high risks” to the United States, show, this is not an easy task.
We must acknowledge that Guantanamo Bay is not a permanent solution to the enemy combatant problem. The prison has served its purpose, providing our intelligence officials with important information that has allowed the United States and its allies to continue fighting the War on Terror. However, the ad-hoc arrangement cannot last forever, and a more permanent solution for holding terrorist suspects and bringing them to justice must be found. We cannot rehabilitate all of the suspects, and terror suspects will continue to be a problem for America. As of October 2010, the Department of Defense has confirmed that 81 of the 598 already transferred out of Guantanamo have re-engaged in terrorist activity, while another sixty-nine are suspected of doing so. This recidivism of some of the detainees, as well as the continued existence of terrorist networks plotting attacks against the United States and its allies, means that we will have to continue dealing with terror suspects for a long time. The Bush administration eventually came to this realization, with both President Bush and then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice both expressing a desire to eventually replace Guantanamo with a permanent solution. No new prisoner has arrived at Guantanamo since 2007.
When the Obama administration announced early in 2009 that it was going to close down Guantanamo within a year, I was incredulous, but also intrigued. I hoped that during the year, the administration would be able to find a long-term solution to the problem of how to deal with terror suspects. Unfortunately, the administration decided to treat them as regular prisoners and seek convictions in civilian courts. The experiment failed due to both political and legal pressures, and the administration was forced to settle for the status quo.
I disagreed with the Obama administration’s initial attempts to deal with this issue. Terror suspects are neither regular criminal suspects nor traditional prisoners of war; they lie somewhere in between due to the asymmetric nature of terrorism. They, therefore, should neither be tried in civilian courts nor be held in regular prisons. I agree with the administration with regards to the Obama administration’s second attempt: trying the suspects before military tribunals as the Bush administration had done. The Obama administration, however, seems to have run out of ideas on what to do with the issue of Guantanamo Bay prison itself.
In the end, the documents released by WikiLeaks show another view of just how complicated the issue of terror suspects’ detention may be. Terrorism, as something that the United States has to fight against, is something relatively new, and the United States has not yet found a permanent solution to the problem of what to do with terror suspects. However, it is imperative to find that permanent solution. It is an issue that America will continue to face as we fight the War on Terror, and the sooner that we move away from a temporary arrangement like Guantanamo, the better it is for our national security. In the meantime, we also have to deal with the fact that there are 172 men, many of them deemed dangerous, imprisoned in legal and political limbo. It is a tough problem all around: figuring out who has actually done what and who has important pieces of intelligence, determining what to do with those about whom we know little, and finding countries to take these people once we decide to transfer them out. However, as difficult as it may be, the Obama administration must find a way to solve this issue in a responsible manner so that we can move shut down Guantanamo and find a permanent solution to the issue to terror suspect detention.
By John Lim
