Gitmo Detainees Terrorists? Maybe Not.

[frodo]

It appears that any argument over closing down Gitmo and rehousing detainees is slghtly premature. You don't even know what you are holding in Gitmo because there aren't any case files.

It appears that the Bush Administration was even stupider than I thought. We all new Obama was going to discover a steaming pile of dog turds in the oval office, here's one even I didn't expect -They didn't prepare any case files for Gitmo inmates, probably because they knew that they would be very thin if they did.

Instead they applied Third world socialist standards, the Kafkaesque "well we captured you and put you in here, so you must have done something, so we will torture it out of you, whatever it is."

From the Washington Post:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...l?hpid=topnews

President Obama's plans to expeditiously determine the fates of about 245 terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and quickly close the military prison there were set back last week when incoming legal and national security officials -- barred until the inauguration from examining classified material on the detainees -- discovered that there were no comprehensive case files on many of them.

Instead, they found that information on individual prisoners is "scattered throughout the executive branch," a senior administration official said. The executive order Obama signed Thursday orders the prison closed within one year, and a Cabinet-level panel named to review each case separately will have to spend its initial weeks and perhaps months scouring the corners of the federal government in search of relevant material.
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Several former Bush administration officials agreed that the files are incomplete and that no single government entity was charged with pulling together all the facts and the range of options for each prisoner. They said that the CIA and other intelligence agencies were reluctant to share information, and that the Bush administration's focus on detention and interrogation made preparation of viable prosecutions a far lower priority.

From Digby's "Hullabaloo" website:

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2009/...lking-dog.html

The administration wanted to "send a message" by creating a myth that they were omnipotent gods who were capturing all the "bad guys," giving them drugs and forced enemas and putting them in a concentration camp. But it was, like most Mayberry Machiavelli marketing, not reality. There is very little "evidence" and a whole lot of hype. They did use a flurry of useless paperwork as their "metric" in the early years, but it was all derived from torture, threats and lies.

Daily Kos:

http://dailykos.com/

Just let that bolded part sink in a bit. Detention and interrogation (read, "torture") were a higher priority than figuring out which cases actually merited prosecution. In other words, locking them up and torturing them was more important than determining if they were actually guilty and prosecuting them for their crimes. Nothing that BushCo did should come as a surprise at this point, but that the Bush Pentagon wasn't even able to do one thing that the military has always been able to do--bureaucracy--is dumbfounding.

And my prediction folks is that when all this is cleaned up, we will be giving many of these so called "terrorists" very large summs of money to just go away.

[dyrt]

LOL! The Obama gang is laying the groundwork for their failure to close Gitmo. The only way out was to blame Bush. What they have learned in the last few days is that they too will need a place to interrogate prisoners of war.

We will be seeing a lot these type excuses from them. There are looking for any and every thing they can find to explain away their irrational campaign promises.

The goal of detaining those people was to get information and find out who was behind 9-11, what other plans they had and prevent other attacks. It was successful. The country had been brutally attacked and the Bush admin did not have the luxury of treating it like a criminal case. It is war, not Chicago gangster crime.

The Bush people and most Americans knew very well that there would be a later problem with the detainees. The general attitude was we will deal with that when the time comes. It is not pretty but they got the job done.

If Obama thinks the lawyers are going to fight this war for him then we are all in trouble. I predict that Obama will never close Gitmo because the odds of another attack on the US is going up. The Obamarama continues to show weakness with their statements. The Islamists will attack the US just like they did Spain and the Obamarama will need a place to interrogate.

[jason]

At Least One American Believed Killed by Freed Gitmo Prisoners
Friday , February 06, 2009

By Joshua Rhett Miller


If the Guantanamo prison base is shut down, critics say, some military combatants currently held there will be sent back to their home countries — where they will rejoin terrorist groups and ultimately kill Americans.

It's already happened.

A New York woman was killed in a terrorist attack at the U.S. Embassy in Sana, Yemen, in September. And U.S. counterterrorism officials have now confirmed that Said Ali al-Shihri, 35, who was released from the Guantanamo Bay prison center in 2007, is the deputy leader of Al Qaeda in that Mideast country and is a suspect in the attack.

State Department officials have identified Susan Elbaneh, 18, of Lackawanna, N.Y., as one of at least 16 people — including her Yemeni husband — who died in the coordinated strike.

Elbaneh was initially thought to be the first American victim of a freed enemy combatant, but a Defense Department source told FOXNews.com Friday that she was not the first American "possibly" killed by a former Guantanamo detainee.

"Due to classification, I cannot get into who or when other than to say it was before the Embassy attack," the source wrote in an e-mail to FOXNews.com.

Al-Shihri was seen in a video released last month with a man identified as Abu Hareth Muhammad al-Awfi, whose Guantanamo identification number reportedly matches that of a man identified in Pentagon documents as Mohammed Atiq Awayd al-Harbi, who was released in November 2007.

In the video, Shihri reportedly says, "By God, our imprisonment only increased our perseverance in the principles for which we went out, did jihad for, and were imprisoned for."

It is not known whether al-Awfi also is suspected in the embassy attack. But one analyst contacted by FOXNews.com believes neither al-Shihri nor al-Awfi could have been involved.

Gregory Johnsen, the editor of a forthcoming book, "Islam and Insurgency in Islam," said it's "nearly impossible," because they were likely in Saudi Arabia, the country to which they were both released, at the time.

"Based on what I've uncovered, the evidence doesn't support the allegations," Johnsen told FOXNews.com. ".... They couldn't have been in Yemen when this organization was planning the attack."

Johnsen believes the culprits were a group of seven jihadists identified in an Al Qaeda journal posted on a jihadist Web site in September.

"The leaders of Al Qaeda in Yemen may have given instructions to the group, but it does appear that these individuals had the operational details left up to themselves somewhat," he said. "And all of this is prior to when al-Shihri and al-Awfi would've arrived in Yemen."

Susan Elbaneh was well known in her upstate New York hometown. Peter Hazzan, principal of Lackawanna High School, said school officials intend to plant a tree in her memory in the spring.

"The kids keep her in their memory," he told FOXNews.com. "Susan was very personable, always had a smile on her face and had a lot of friends. She was a joy to be around."

Reached by phone Friday, her brother, Ahmed Elbaneh, described his sister as an engaging young woman who wanted to become a nurse.

"That was her goal," he said. "She was outgoing and wanted to help people."

He said the pain of losing his sister is overwhelming.

"You can't even imagine, this came out of nowhere for us," Elbaneh, 37, said. "Every morning now, I dread what the next phone call is going to be."

He said his father, Ali T. Elbaneh, has not recovered from Susan's death.

"My father is not the same," he said. "He was an outgoing person before and now he's just miserable. He's at the point where he'll just lock himself in a room."

In November 2006, Ali Elbaneh was sentenced by U.S. District Judge William Skretny to six months' home confinement for playing a minor role in an unlicensed money-transmitting company that illegally sent $5.5 million to Yemen.

Susan Elbaneh was related to Yemeni-American Jaber A. Elbaneh, who is on the FBI's "Most Wanted Terrorists" list for allegedly being the seventh member of the Lackawanna Six, a group of men convicted for providing material support to Al Qaeda. The State Department is offering a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to his arrest.

Ahmed Elbaneh confirmed the relationship yesterday, but declined to discuss the matter further.

"That has nothing to do with my sister," he said. "I haven't seen my cousin in 15 years."

His main concern, he said, is that his sister's murderers be brought to justice.

"It's not going to bring my sister back, but the ones who did this should be punished," he said. "I am very upset, but at least she went peacefully, at least she doesn't suffer like we do everyday."

http://www.foxnews.com/printer_frien...489473,00.html

[sandyd]

In every spy novel I ever read there seems to be ways to kill people when it's time. If Bush and Co. did such a poor job getting any true legal proceeding going, why are these people still alive. They had to know all this would come out.

Heck, just feeding the prisoners the right foods from China would have worked.

[SSG Rex]

A New York woman was killed in a terrorist attack at the U.S. Embassy in Sana, Yemen, in September. And U.S. counterterrorism officials have now confirmed that Said Ali al-Shihri, 35, who was released from the Guantanamo Bay prison center in 2007, is the deputy leader of Al Qaeda in that Mideast country and is a suspect in the attack.

That's the problem with releasing POWs, they go back to being combatants. Fortunately, due to the nature of this conflict, the detainees at Gitmo aren't really POWs since they were not uniformed or otherwise identified as to their Geneva Convention category - they can be most closely be classified as "spies and saboteurs", which means we can legally just shoot them.
Sucks that the Bush administration was just too squeamish to take the proper actions.

[dreadstalker]

Anyone who would claim that there isn't case files just doen't understand how the military works.

There is always paperwork. They record everything. The clearence might be sky high to read the files but they are indeed there. Even the article admits that there are case files.