At 8:14 AM -0700 19/2/09, Chris Gehlker wrote:
>On Feb 18, 2009, at 11:58 PM, David Cake wrote:
>
>> For the most part those in Gitmo were those picked up
>> actually in Aghanistan, but exactly what they were doing there is
>> another question. There are certainly organisations which proclaim
>> humanitarian goals that Cheney at least would consider terrorist.
>
>I agree that the absolute numbers don't matter all that much. What
>does matter is the quality of the evidence that the administration
>used to justify incarcerating these people in the first place.
>'Evidence' obtained through 'confessions' extracted under torture and
>from paid informants is no evidence at all. Cheney is arguing that the
>fact that he has 'good evidence' that 12% of those incarcerated were
>back in the "business of being terrorists" somehow proves that they
>were all terrorists before they were incarcerated.
Not particularly.
>Apparently you and
>Chuck find this argument convincing.
No, I merely find your arguments against it irrelevant and
pointless. US forces would have to be massively incompetent not to
pick up *some* captives with a direct connection to Al-Qaeda.
Speculating about what exact percentage of those incarcerated are
completely innocent, what percentage of inmates were actively
involved in terrorist activity, and what percentage are somewhere in
between , based mostly on a single remark of the deeply deceitful
Cheney, seems like a pointless exercise.
>I'm merely asserting that it says
>nothing at all about the 88% that didn't engage in terrorist acts
>subsequent to their release and is not even conclusive concerning the
>12%. They could well have been radicalized during their incarceration.
Well, many of them were picked up working with Taliban
forces. I don't think we need to rely on Cheneys say so to assume
that many of them were radicalised before being captured, given they
were willing to, in many cases, travel to Afghanistan to support the
Taliban. But radical isn't the same as terrorist, except in Cheneys
world.
>I think it has been documented that the majority of those incarcerated
>weren't doing anything at all that a rational person would consider
>terrorism and that the US personnel in Afghanistan knew it.
Many of them were, by Cheneys definition, illegal combatants
(ie troops of the Taliban, a non-state actor). I still contend there
is no such category in any meaningful legal sense, but in
Cheney-world virtually all Taliban troops were in that category.
> Very few
>were actually apprehended by US or allied forces. The vast majority
>were turned in by rival clans for the reward of $1,000 which was
>riches by local standards. There are even documented cases of local
>sheiks driving into villages populated by rival clans, scooping up a
>few men and then driving to the local NATO base, stopping to fire a
>few mortar rounds toward the base, and turning their captives in as
>the ones who fired the rounds.
Of course relying on such a system of rewards is a bad idea,
of course many people picked up were not actually guilty of what was
claimed in such a system.
But as I said, the issue is that the system is
indiscriminate, and is prepared to grab a few innocent along the way
-- the exact percentages are a foolish argument, especially as
guilt/innocence is in large part defined by legal sophistry.
You mentioned the Stuarts, and how they became unpopular
through overuse of paid informants - of course, the US isn't
operating in Afghanistan the same way it is in its own country. The
US under Bush/Cheney just straight out didn't give a crap whether
anyone in Afghanistan *liked* them - possibly in part due to the same
sort of massive disconnect and arrogance that made them think that
the people of Iraq would automatically welcome them as liberators.
Cheers
David
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