Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to then Secretary of State Colin Powell, has an important piece up at the Washington Note outlining various elements of our approach to fighting terrorism that have been largely underreported. Wilkerson discusses the lack of a vetting process in choosing detainees, and worse, that the Bush administration was aware of "the reality that many of the detainees were innocent of any substantial wrongdoing, had little intelligence value," but didn't care.
Wilkerson also discusses the "mosaic philosophy":
Simply stated, this philosophy held that it did not matter if a detainee were innocent. Indeed, because he lived in Afghanistan and was captured on or near the battle area, he must know something of importance (this general philosophy, in an even cruder form, prevailed in Iraq as well, helping to produce the nightmare at Abu Ghraib). All that was necessary was to extract everything possible from him and others like him, assemble it all in a computer program, and then look for cross-connections and serendipitous incidentals--in short, to have sufficient information about a village, a region, or a group of individuals, that dots could be connected and terrorists or their plots could be identified.Guilt or innocence has no meaning in this context, if you're working from the premise that everyone detained must know something of value, there is no reason to release those people, whether they actually have valuable information or not. This is all the more significant because, as Wilkerson points out, and as former military commissions prosecutor Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld explained in a declaration filed last September, "There was virtually no chain of custody, no disciplined handling of evidence, and no attention to the details that almost any court system would demand."Thus, as many people as possible had to be kept in detention for as long as possible to allow this philosophy of intelligence gathering to work. The detainees' innocence was inconsequential. After all, they were ignorant peasants for the most part and mostly Muslim to boot.
This is presumably what apologists for indefinite detention are referring to when they say civilian courts "can't handle" terrorist suspects; what they mean is no civilian court would allow people to be imprisoned on the basis of such tenuous evidence.
-- A. Serwer
