U.S. preparing for lifetime jailing of terror suspects
By Dana Priest
The Washington Post
WASHINGTON — 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, also
would 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 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 is the transfer of large numbers of Afghan, Saudi and
Yemeni detainees from the military's Guantánamo 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 Guantánamo 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, defense officials
said.
The new prison, dubbed Camp 6, would allow inmates more comfort and
freedom than they have now, and would be designed for prisoners whom
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," Pentagon
spokesman Bryan Whitman said. "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
prisoners held by the CIA. The agency 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.
Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., vice chairman of the House intelligence
committee who has received classified briefings on CIA detainees and
interrogation methods, said "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, each detainee should be registered so that
their treatment can be tracked and monitored. "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-Qaida
leaders in prison. The agency holds most, if not all, of the top
captured al-Qaida leaders, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Ramzi
Binalshibh, Abu Zubaida and the lead Southeast Asia terrorist, 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 also has maintained a facility within the
Guantánamo Bay complex, although it is unclear whether it still is 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 military detainees
are guaranteed access to the International Committee of the Red Cross
and, as a result of a 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.
The CIA had floated a proposal to build a prison with the intent of
keeping it secret, one intelligence official said. That was dismissed
as impractical.
One approach used by the CIA has been to transfer captives to third
countries willing to hold them indefinitely and without public
proceedings, with access for interrogation by CIA and foreign liaison
officers.
The practice, called "renditions," has been criticized by
civil-liberties groups and others, who note that some of the countries
have human-rights records that are criticized by the State Department.
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