TotalAnarchy
04-22-2002, 05:19 AM
US plans new rules for Cuba prisoners
By Neil Lewis in Washington
April 22 2002
David Hicks
The United States, unsure how it can prosecute many of the nearly 300 people held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, is considering a new legal doctrine that would let prisoners be brought before military tribunals without specific evidence of war crimes.
The new approach would make it an offence to have been a senior member of an al-Qaeda unit that was involved in any of the regular crimes of war, such as mistreating civilians.
One US official said the effort came out of increasing uneasiness that interrogation of the prisoners, who were taken from Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay, had not yielded enough information to charge many with traditional war crimes.
The official said the questioning was going slowly. None of the prisoners, who include the Australian David Hicks, has confessed to any atrocity or violation of the laws of war. Nor have the interrogators had much success in extracting information that could be used against other captives.
Another official said the new approach would allow military prosecutors to charge some captives even without evidence from witnesses or documents that they committed war crimes.
"It could be enough to show that they were part of a group and furthered its aims," the official said. "They would be shown to be a part of a group that did things like killing civilians and non-combatants, attacked targets with no military value or took or killed hostages" - the traditional roster of war crimes. "Also engaging in torture," the official said.
The new doctrine, lawyers said, is an effort to comply with rulings that require not only membership in a group but also some identifiable connection to its aims. In this case, the new guidance would probably require a finding that a prisoner was not only a member of al-Qaeda but also that he furthered its aims.
Sources say the effort to obtain information from alleged al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters has been hampered by inexperienced interrogators and linguists and military bureaucracy.
The military, with many of its best interrogators and speakers of Middle Eastern dialects deployed in Afghanistan, has had to rely on some underqualified officers who have found themselves overmatched by captives trained in evasion.
"Some of the interrogators are very inexperienced, nervous," said one linguist at Guantanamo Bay. "They twist their pen 2000 times a minute. The detainee is in full control. He's chained up, but he's the one having fun."
Compounding the problem is a lack of familiarity with Middle Eastern terrorism among officers of the military's Miami-based Southern Command, which at times had impeded the flow of key intelligence to Guantanamo Bay interrogators, sources said. That had occasionally limited questioners' ability to pursue lines of inquiry with the detainees.
Moreover, two companies that have supplied linguists for some of the interrogations had squabbled bitterly with each other, sources said.
The New York Times and The Washington Post
By Neil Lewis in Washington
April 22 2002
David Hicks
The United States, unsure how it can prosecute many of the nearly 300 people held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, is considering a new legal doctrine that would let prisoners be brought before military tribunals without specific evidence of war crimes.
The new approach would make it an offence to have been a senior member of an al-Qaeda unit that was involved in any of the regular crimes of war, such as mistreating civilians.
One US official said the effort came out of increasing uneasiness that interrogation of the prisoners, who were taken from Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay, had not yielded enough information to charge many with traditional war crimes.
The official said the questioning was going slowly. None of the prisoners, who include the Australian David Hicks, has confessed to any atrocity or violation of the laws of war. Nor have the interrogators had much success in extracting information that could be used against other captives.
Another official said the new approach would allow military prosecutors to charge some captives even without evidence from witnesses or documents that they committed war crimes.
"It could be enough to show that they were part of a group and furthered its aims," the official said. "They would be shown to be a part of a group that did things like killing civilians and non-combatants, attacked targets with no military value or took or killed hostages" - the traditional roster of war crimes. "Also engaging in torture," the official said.
The new doctrine, lawyers said, is an effort to comply with rulings that require not only membership in a group but also some identifiable connection to its aims. In this case, the new guidance would probably require a finding that a prisoner was not only a member of al-Qaeda but also that he furthered its aims.
Sources say the effort to obtain information from alleged al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters has been hampered by inexperienced interrogators and linguists and military bureaucracy.
The military, with many of its best interrogators and speakers of Middle Eastern dialects deployed in Afghanistan, has had to rely on some underqualified officers who have found themselves overmatched by captives trained in evasion.
"Some of the interrogators are very inexperienced, nervous," said one linguist at Guantanamo Bay. "They twist their pen 2000 times a minute. The detainee is in full control. He's chained up, but he's the one having fun."
Compounding the problem is a lack of familiarity with Middle Eastern terrorism among officers of the military's Miami-based Southern Command, which at times had impeded the flow of key intelligence to Guantanamo Bay interrogators, sources said. That had occasionally limited questioners' ability to pursue lines of inquiry with the detainees.
Moreover, two companies that have supplied linguists for some of the interrogations had squabbled bitterly with each other, sources said.
The New York Times and The Washington Post