Marc Thiessen responds to Ben Wittes' observation that bringing new detainees to Gitmo, as Thiessen wants, would just give them access to lawyers:
But as I pointed out at yesterday's AEI panel, there is a simple solution for this problem: President Obama can restore secret detention. In 2009, Obama ordered that all captured terrorists must be declared to the Red Cross within two weeks of being taken into U.S. custody—no exceptions. That is insanity. In the past, the CIA has questioned captured terrorists for months before al Qaeda knew we had them, allowing us to track down other terrorists and wrap up cells planning attacks before they knew what hit them. But if the U.S. government announces to the world that we have a terrorist in custody, al Qaeda will immediately start covering his tracks—closing down safe houses, phones, emails, and cells he knows about, and drying up all the intelligence leads that a detainee can provide.
President Obama can fix this problem by restoring secret detention for limited periods—say, two or three months at a time—that can be renewed by the president. This would solve the habeas problem. Terrorists could be taken to Guantanamo covertly, and held in secret until we are done questioning them for intelligence purposes. Then they can be declared to the Red Cross, and given access to lawyers so they can file their habeas petitions.
By "in the past" what Thiessen means is during the Bush administration, since the CIA "had no real interrogation specialists" prior to 9/11. But this basically concedes the point I made earlier -- Thiessen wants Emperor Obama to create new black sites (but G_d forbid he levy a tax to ensure people buy health insurance!) because Gitmo is useless for its original purpose, which was to put detainees beyond the reach of the courts.
Guantanamo is far from ideal. But it is—in Donald Rumsfeld’s famous words—the “least worst place” to take captured terrorists. Habeas is a real problem, not because a federal judge is likely to order the release of Ayman Zawahiri or other senior al Qaeda leaders, but because once these terrorists get access to lawyers, it becomes impossible to effectively question them. Getting information out of captured terrorists requires exposing intelligence to them during questioning. This can only be done if the terrorists are completely cut off from the outside world. If the terrorists are going to meet with their lawyers a few hours after undergoing questioning, you can no longer expose intelligence to them for fear that information will get out and make its way back to their comrades in the field.
As fond as I am of Thiessen's Bruce Willis impression, the reality is that detainees can be interrogated without their attorneys present; that information just can't be used against them at trial. The notion that successful interrogations require subjects to be "cut off from the outside world" is also nonsense -- each subject is different and will respond differently to particular circumstances. The Bush administration cut Ali Saleh al-Marri off by sticking him into a military brig in South Carolina for years -- he didn't start talking until the Obama administration let him talk to his lawyer.
The overall objective here isn't intelligence collection -- it's preserving as much of the Bush-era national-security apparatus as possible. To that end, Gitmo has almost as much meaning to conservatives as a symbol that "Bush was right," as it does to the rest of the world as a reminder of America falling short of her own ideals.
