PLW wrote: if the posited state of affairs was really true, I would still let them go and just keep a very close eye on them.
After returning them home to Pakistan, Afghanistan, or Yemen? Good luck with that. I don't think they're going to wear an ankle bracelet and check in with a parole officer.
I agree with you in principle; being a nation of laws makes us better than our adversaries and flouting those laws lowers us. Turning that principle into a practical reality gets hairy. If a freed inmate goes back to evildoing 5 or 10 years later, do you want to be the guy who took a chance on him? Or is that a risk we should simply accept as a consequence of our principles?
PLW wrote: if the posited state of affairs was really true, I would still let them go and just keep a very close eye on them.
Or is that a risk we should simply accept as a consequence of our principles?
Ding ding ding.
Except after their treatment at our hands in Gitmo, it's less a risk and more a certainty.
" Hey OP, listen to my advice alright." -Tha General "No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer." -Stigler's Law of Eponymy, discovered by Robert K. Merton MYT
PLW wrote:
Nothing's certain. They could get hit by a car the day they are released. This isn't the minority report.
Ok, I'll grant you that wetwork gets us out of it in a neat and tidy way. But then we're right back to the moral issue.
Basically when you stick someone in a hole for 6 years and treat them to "enhanced interrogation techniques" 24-7, you've either completely broken them or you've made an enemy for life. You either suck it up and say, "Well, we blew that one" and lock them up or you say, "Well, we blew that one" and let them go, accepting any future actions by them as the price you pay for returning to the supposed fundamental principles you hold dear.
" Hey OP, listen to my advice alright." -Tha General "No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer." -Stigler's Law of Eponymy, discovered by Robert K. Merton MYT
PLW wrote:
Nothing's certain. They could get hit by a car the day they are released. This isn't the minority report.
Ok, I'll grant you that wetwork gets us out of it in a neat and tidy way. But then we're right back to the moral issue.
That's not what I meant at all. I mean that no one knows that releasing some guy would definitely hurt Americans, including the person that you release. He may believe that he would try to harm the US, but that's quite different.
PLW wrote:
Nothing's certain. They could get hit by a car the day they are released. This isn't the minority report.
Ok, I'll grant you that wetwork gets us out of it in a neat and tidy way. But then we're right back to the moral issue.
That's not what I meant at all. I mean that no one knows that releasing some guy would definitely hurt Americans, including the person that you release. He may believe that he would try to harm the US, but that's quite different.
OK, gotcha on the non-assassination thing.
Still, actually hurting Americans themselves isn't the certainty I'm talking about. Having some of the detainees (it only takes some if the policy is to release all) go out into the world as icons of American mistreatment is the certainty. That's what administrations and the rest of the government are scared of. Revelations and bad PR and "bulliten board" material for any number of anti-American groups. If we release them, we'll be facing a Wikileaks leak level event. With certainty.
" Hey OP, listen to my advice alright." -Tha General "No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer." -Stigler's Law of Eponymy, discovered by Robert K. Merton MYT
I agree. We're like the kid with the bad grade card that needs to be signed by his parents. We're going to get spanked sooner or later, and we deserve it, so we should go ahead and take our licks now. It's the responsible thing to do.
LawBeefaroni wrote:Still, actually hurting Americans themselves isn't the certainty I'm talking about. Having some of the detainees (it only takes some if the policy is to release all) go out into the world as icons of American mistreatment is the certainty. That's what administrations and the rest of the government are scared of. Revelations and bad PR and "bulliten board" material for any number of anti-American groups. If we release them, we'll be facing a Wikileaks leak level event. With certainty.
Are you suggesting we hold them forever, or just outright kill them, because that is our fear? Or are you just stating what you see as the government's viewpoint?
In either case, we can't let that fear stop us from doing what is right. We were bad to them. I would go so far as to say they should tell their story. And we should hold our leaders accountable to make sure it doesn't happen again.
Besides, it's not like the people they are going to be talking to hold us in very high regard anyway. I'm not sure how much worse our rep is going to/can get in those circles.
LawBeefaroni wrote:Still, actually hurting Americans themselves isn't the certainty I'm talking about. Having some of the detainees (it only takes some if the policy is to release all) go out into the world as icons of American mistreatment is the certainty. That's what administrations and the rest of the government are scared of. Revelations and bad PR and "bulliten board" material for any number of anti-American groups. If we release them, we'll be facing a Wikileaks leak level event. With certainty.
Are you suggesting we hold them forever, or just outright kill them, because that is our fear? Or are you just stating what you see as the government's viewpoint?
Just stating what I see as the government's motivation and conundrum. I'm not proposing a solution, just saying why we're between a rock, a hard place, the devil, and the deep blue sea. Personally I'm on the release side because at least we keep the high ground. However, the clusterbomb thing I linked above indicates that we will probably go for the "bury it" approach. Or I'm sure we'll find someone who was released who did something bad and use that as a reason to lock everyone else away.
stessier wrote:In either case, we can't let that fear stop us from doing what is right. We were bad to them. I would go so far as to say they should tell their story. And we should hold our leaders accountable to make sure it doesn't happen again.
Besides, it's not like the people they are going to be talking to hold us in very high regard anyway. I'm not sure how much worse our rep is going to/can get in those circles.
Agreed to the first paragraph. As for the second, true, but living examples are usually more powerful than rhetoric.
" Hey OP, listen to my advice alright." -Tha General "No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer." -Stigler's Law of Eponymy, discovered by Robert K. Merton MYT
Just release ten prisoners at a time after each successful op to kill one of the terrorist leaders and have our folks on the ground over there start spreading rumors that these were the guys that gave the U.S. the intel to do it.
PLW wrote:
Nothing's certain. They could get hit by a car the day they are released. This isn't the minority report.
Ok, I'll grant you that wetwork gets us out of it in a neat and tidy way. But then we're right back to the moral issue.
That's not what I meant at all. I mean that no one knows that releasing some guy would definitely hurt Americans, including the person that you release. He may believe that he would try to harm the US, but that's quite different.
OK, gotcha on the non-assassination thing.
Still, actually hurting Americans themselves isn't the certainty I'm talking about. Having some of the detainees (it only takes some if the policy is to release all) go out into the world as icons of American mistreatment is the certainty. That's what administrations and the rest of the government are scared of. Revelations and bad PR and "bulliten board" material for any number of anti-American groups. If we release them, we'll be facing a Wikileaks leak level event. With certainty.
But the world already knows, they've always known and they've always decried the practice(despite some doing in their own borders) . Doubling down doesn't make us look strong, it makes us look even more hypocritical. (the ability to wipe out other countries makes us look strong.)
Biyobi wrote:Just release ten prisoners at a time after each successful op to kill one of the terrorist leaders and have our folks on the ground over there start spreading rumors that these were the guys that gave the U.S. the intel to do it.
Or we could just publicly execute them and say the same thing and the quick death is what terrorists earn for cooperation.
Combustible Lemur wrote:
But the world already knows, they've always known and they've always decried the practice(despite some doing in their own borders) . Doubling down doesn't make us look strong, it makes us look even more hypocritical. (the ability to wipe out other countries makes us look strong.)
Sure, but since when have we shown a propensity to abandon stubborness and take the least hypocritical route? And being aware of something is different than seeing eye-witness and victim testimony. It's different when the guy comes back to your country or even your village.
" Hey OP, listen to my advice alright." -Tha General "No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer." -Stigler's Law of Eponymy, discovered by Robert K. Merton MYT
Combustible Lemur wrote:
But the world already knows, they've always known and they've always decried the practice(despite some doing in their own borders) . Doubling down doesn't make us look strong, it makes us look even more hypocritical. (the ability to wipe out other countries makes us look strong.)
Sure, but since when have we shown a propensity to abandon stubborness and take the least hypocritical route? And being aware of something is different than seeing eye-witness and victim testimony. It's different when the guy comes back to your country or even your village.
Are you saying these countries don't have access satellite TV? But yes having pow's return home is galvanizing.
In September, U.S. State Department officials invited a foreign delegation to the Guantanamo Bay detention center to persuade the group to take detainee Tariq Ba Odah to their country. If they succeeded, the transfer would mark a small step toward realizing President Barack Obama's goal of closing the prison before he leaves office.
The foreign officials told the administration they would first need to review Ba Odah's medical records, according to U.S. officials with knowledge of the episode. The Yemeni has been on a hunger strike for seven years, dropping to 74 pounds from 148, and the foreign officials wanted to make sure they could care for him.
For the next six weeks, Pentagon officials declined to release the records, citing patient privacy concerns, according to the U.S. officials. The delegation, from a country administration officials declined to identify, canceled its visit. After the administration promised to deliver the records, the delegation traveled to Guantanamo and appeared set to take the prisoner off U.S. hands, the officials said. The Pentagon again withheld Ba Odah's full medical file.
Today, nearly 14 years since he was placed in the prison and five years since he was cleared for release by U.S. military, intelligence and diplomatic officials, Ba Odah remains in Guantanamo.
In interviews with multiple current and former administration officials involved in the effort to close Guantanamo, Reuters found that the struggle over Ba Odah's medical records was part of a pattern. Since Obama took office in 2009, these people said, Pentagon officials have been throwing up bureaucratic obstacles to thwart the president's plan to close Guantanamo.
The Bush administration faced no political opposition on transfers and was able to move 532 detainees out of Guantanamo over six years, 35 percent of whom returned to the fight, according to U.S. intelligence estimates. The Obama administration has been able to transfer 131 detainees over seven years, 10 percent of whom have returned to the fight.
"What? What?What?" -- The 14th Doctor
It's not enough to be a good player... you also have to play well. -- Siegbert Tarrasch
Isgrimnur wrote:A new way forward for our for-profit prison model.
Nuh-uh. Those fancy for-profit prisons are for American citizen-convicts, who cannot be exposed to dangerous Gitmo detainees.
Even if Obama manages to transfer all low-risk detainees to other countries, closing Guantanamo won't be easy. Several dozen prisoners considered too dangerous to release would have to be imprisoned in the U.S., a step Republicans in Congress adamantly oppose because, they say, it would endanger American lives.
"What? What?What?" -- The 14th Doctor
It's not enough to be a good player... you also have to play well. -- Siegbert Tarrasch
Oh, I didn't mean cross pollinating the prisoners, just those wonderful techniques that reduce recidivism to 10%.
Bureau of Justice Statistics studies have found high rates of recidivism among released prisoners. One study tracked 404,638 prisoners in 30 states after their release from prison in 2005.[1] The researchers found that:
Within three years of release, about two-thirds (67.8 percent) of released prisoners were rearrested.
Within five years of release, about three-quarters (76.6 percent) of released prisoners were rearrested.
Of those prisoners who were rearrested, more than half (56.7 percent) were arrested by the end of the first year.
Property offenders were the most likely to be rearrested, with 82.1 percent of released property offenders arrested for a new crime compared with 76.9 percent of drug offenders, 73.6 percent of public order offenders and 71.3 percent of violent offenders.
Isgrimnur wrote:Oh, I didn't mean cross pollinating the prisoners, just those wonderful techniques that reduce recidivism to 10%.
Bureau of Justice Statistics studies have found high rates of recidivism among released prisoners. One study tracked 404,638 prisoners in 30 states after their release from prison in 2005.[1] The researchers found that:
Within three years of release, about two-thirds (67.8 percent) of released prisoners were rearrested.
Within five years of release, about three-quarters (76.6 percent) of released prisoners were rearrested.
Of those prisoners who were rearrested, more than half (56.7 percent) were arrested by the end of the first year.
Property offenders were the most likely to be rearrested, with 82.1 percent of released property offenders arrested for a new crime compared with 76.9 percent of drug offenders, 73.6 percent of public order offenders and 71.3 percent of violent offenders.
Wowzers, those numbers are a lot higher than I would have guessed. Yeah, maybe methods like waterboarding aquatic recreation, forced feeding irresistible cuisine and decades-long detention-without-charges long-term rehabilitation would have an impact.
"What? What?What?" -- The 14th Doctor
It's not enough to be a good player... you also have to play well. -- Siegbert Tarrasch
When Ibrahim al Qosi was released from Guantanamo Bay in 2012, a lawyer for the former Usama bin Laden aide said he looked forward to living a life of peace in his native Sudan.
Three years later, Qosi has emerged as a prominent voice of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, appearing in a number of AQAP propaganda videos -- including a 50-minute lecture calling for the takeover of Saudi Arabia.
hepcat wrote:We should just kill people if we even think they might do bad things later. Minority Report should be a documentary, damn it!
When al Qosi was transferred to Sudan on July 11, 2012, his lawyer Paul Reichler said al Qosi will enter a Sudan government "re-integration program:"[6]
“One of the main reasons the United States was willing to return him to Sudan was the U.S. confidence in the government of Sudan’s program and its confidence that Mr. al-Qosi would not represent any kind of threat to the United States. If they had considered him a threat, they would not have released him.”
Spanish and Moroccan police on Tuesday detained four people suspected of recruiting jihadists for the Islamic State group, one of whom was a former Guantanamo prisoner who received military training in Afghanistan.
The four -- three Spaniards and one Moroccan -- were "willing to commit terrorist acts on Spanish soil," police said, adding they had allegedly made contacts to acquire weapons and substances used to make explosives.
They were detained in Spain's north African exclave of Ceuta and the Moroccan city of Nador, and police said the brother of one of the cell members had committed a suicide attack in Syria for the Islamic State group (IS).
"One of the leaders of the cell received military and combat training in camps in Afghanistan under the authority of terrorist jihadist organisations," police added.
"In 2002 he was detained and later put in the Guantanamo detention camp.
The Trump White House is nearing completion of an order that would direct the Pentagon to bring future Islamic State detainees to the Guantánamo Bay prison, despite warnings from national security officials and legal scholars that doing so risks undermining the effort to combat the group, according to administration officials and a draft executive order obtained by The New York Times.
White House officials have detailed their thinking about a new detainee policy in an evolving series of drafts of an executive order being circulated among national security officials for comment. While previous versions have shown that the draft has undergone many changes — including dropping language about reviving C.I.A. prisons — the plan to add Islamic State detainees to the Guantánamo population has remained constant.
The latest version of the draft, which circulated this week, would direct Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to use Guantánamo to detain suspected members of “Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces, including individuals and networks associated with the Islamic State.”