Here's the summarizing sentence from the article below:
The Pentagon and the CIA have asked the White House to decide
on a more permanent approach for potentially lifetime
detentions, including for hundreds of people now in military
and CIA custody whom the government does not have enough
evidence to charge in courts.
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http://www.truthout.org/docs_05/010305Y.shtml
Long-Term Plan Sought for Terror Suspects By Dana Priest The Washington
Post
Sunday 02 January 2005
Administration officials are preparing long-range plans for indefinitely
imprisoning suspected terrorists whom they do not want to set free or turn
over to courts in the United States or other countries, according to
intelligence, defense and diplomatic officials.
The Pentagon and the CIA have asked the White House to decide on a more
permanent approach for potentially lifetime detentions, including for
hundreds of people now in military and CIA custody whom the government does
not have enough evidence to charge in courts. The outcome of the review,
which also involves the State Department, would also affect those expected
to be captured in the course of future counterterrorism operations.
"We've been operating in the moment because that's what has been required,"
said a senior administration official involved in the discussions, who said
the current detention system has strained relations between the United
States and other countries. "Now we can take a breath. We have the ability
and need to look at long-term solutions."
One proposal under review is the transfer of large numbers of Afghan, Saudi
and Yemeni detainees from the military's Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention
center into new U.S.-built prisons in their home countries. The prisons
would be operated by those countries, but the State Department, where this
idea originated, would ask them to abide by recognized human rights
standards and would monitor compliance, the senior administration official
said.
As part of a solution, the Defense Department, which holds 500 prisoners at
Guantanamo Bay, plans to ask Congress for $25 million to build a 200-bed
prison to hold detainees who are unlikely to ever go through a military
tribunal for lack of evidence, according to defense officials.
The new prison, dubbed Camp 6, would allow inmates more comfort and freedom
than they have now, and would be designed for prisoners the government
believes have no more intelligence to share, the officials said. It would be
modeled on a U.S. prison and would allow socializing among inmates.
"Since global war on terror is a long-term effort, it makes sense for us to
be looking at solutions for long-term problems," said Bryan Whitman, a
Pentagon spokesman. "This has been evolutionary, but we are at a point in
time where we have to say, 'How do you deal with them in the long term?' "
The administration considers its toughest detention problem to involve the
prisoners held by the CIA. The CIA has been scurrying since Sept. 11, 2001,
to find secure locations abroad where it could detain and interrogate
captives without risk of discovery, and without having to give them access
to legal proceedings.
Little is known about the CIA's captives, the conditions under which they
are kept - or the procedures used to decide how long they are held or when
they may be freed. That has prompted criticism from human rights groups, and
from some in Congress and the administration, who say the lack of scrutiny
or oversight creates an unacceptable risk of abuse.
Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), vice chairman of the House intelligence
committee who has received classified briefings on the CIA's detainees and
interrogation methods, said that given the long-term nature of the detention
situation, "I think there should be a public debate about whether the entire
system should be secret.
"The details about the system may need to remain secret,"
Harman said. At the least, she said, detainees should be registered so that
their treatment can be tracked and monitored within the government. "This is
complicated. We don't want to set up a bureaucracy that ends up making it
impossible to protect sources and informants who operate within the groups
we want to penetrate."
The CIA is believed to be holding fewer than three dozen al Qaeda leaders in
prison. The agency holds most, if not all, of the top captured al Qaeda
leaders, including Khalid Sheik Mohammed, Ramzi Binalshibh, Abu Zubaida and
the lead Southeast Asia terrorist, Nurjaman Riduan Isamuddin, known as
Hambali.
CIA detention facilities have been located on an off-limits corner of the
Bagram air base in Afghanistan, on ships at sea and on Britain's Diego
Garcia island in the Indian Ocean. The Washington Post reported last month
that the CIA has also maintained a facility within the Pentagon's Guantanamo
Bay complex, though it is unclear whether it is still in use.
In contrast to the CIA, the military produced and declassified hundreds of
pages of documents about its detention and interrogation procedures after
the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.
And the military detainees are guaranteed access to the International
Committee of the Red Cross and, as a result of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling,
have the right to challenge their imprisonment in federal court.
But no public hearings in Congress have been held on CIA detention
practices, and congressional officials say CIA briefings on the subject have
been too superficial and were limited to the chairman and vice chairman of
the House and Senate intelligence committees.
The CIA had floated a proposal to build an isolated prison with the intent
of keeping it secret, one intelligence official said. That was dismissed
immediately as impractical.
One approach used by the CIA has been to transfer captives it picks up
abroad to third countries willing to hold them indefinitely and without
public proceedings. The transfers, called "renditions," depend on
arrangements between the United States and other countries, such as Egypt,
Jordan and Afghanistan, that agree to have local security services hold
certain terror suspects in their facilities for interrogation by CIA and
foreign liaison officers.
The practice has been criticized by civil liberties groups and others, who
point out that some of the countries have human rights records that are
criticized by the State Department in annual reports.
Renditions originated in the 1990s as a way of picking up criminals abroad,
such as drug kingpins, and delivering them to courts in the United States or
other countries. Since 2001, the practice has been used to make certain
detainees do not go to court or go back on the streets, officials said.
"The whole idea has become a corruption of renditions," said one CIA officer
who has been involved in the practice. "It's not rendering to justice, it's
kidnapping."
But top intelligence officials and other experts, including former CIA
director George J. Tenet in his testimony before Congress, say renditions
are an effective method of disrupting terrorist cells and persuading
detainees to reveal information.
"Renditions are the most effective way to hold people," said Rohan
Gunaratna, author of "Inside al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror." "The
threat of sending someone to one of these countries is very important. In
Europe, the custodial interrogations have yielded almost nothing" because
they do not use the threat of sending detainees to a country where they are
likely to be tortured.
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