By Tom Parker, Policy Director, (Counter) Terrorism and Human Rights
In what is becoming a very familiar story, a detailed review conducted by a senior American General has established that as many as 400 of the 600 detainees at the Bagram Theater Internment Facility have been detained in the absence of any compelling evidence that they pose a threat to coalition forces and should be released.
Major General Doug Stone, a Marine reservist who ran and reformed detainee operations in Iraq from 2007 to 2008, was dispatched to Afghanistan by CENTCOM Commander General David Petraeus to review US detention policy in the region. He and his team spent six weeks reviewing detainee practices and interviewing inmates at the Bagram facility.
General Stone has arrived at the same conclusion that intelligence analysts eventually reached interviewing detainees in Guantanamo Bay – that most of the detainees held in US custody should never have been detained in the first place.
Alarm bells should be ringing across the Obama administration. In Afghanistan and in Iraq those fighting armed groups have frequently picked up the wrong people. Again and again intelligence has proved to be an unreliable guide as to the guilt or innocence of an individual suspect.
Blame it on the 'fog of war' or put it down to tribal score-settling and political maneouvering but we have actually failed more often than we have succeeded when it comes to capturing genuine members of Al Qaeda.
This should give us pause when the administration talks about retaining the power to detain suspects indefinitely. Surely by now this policy has been completely discredited. As General Stone observed it has proved to be utterly counterproductive:
"Now you've got a bunch of moderates who really shouldn't be in there in the first place. And I can hold them forever but eventually they're going to say, 'Why are you holding me? What's the fairness in this?' And eventually they'll say something about America we don't want to hear. They'll say, 'You're not here to better the population. You're here to conquer us and you're taking me hostage.' "
The Stone Report should be the final straw. The procedures currently in place have failed utterly to protect innocent men from years of incarceration in deplorable conditions. Inevitably, our actions have alienated the very people we came to help.
The only true safeguard is our legal system. The sooner we return to the fundamental due process standard of 'charge or release', the sooner our counterterrorism policies will cease to be the most effective recruiting sergeant Al Qaeda has.