Life Sentence

The WaPo's Dana Milbank:

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.

[. . .]

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.

When the Supreme Court decided that the U.S. government had to grant "detainees" under their care access to the courts, the government (i.e., the Pentagon, the CIA, and the White House) was forced to endgame one inchoate aspect of the war on terror. The detainees—née Afghans, Saudi, Yemeni and others, Taliban and al Qaeda agents and sympathizers or innocents—were to either be prosecuted or released.

At the same time, data suggest that those who have been released from Gitmo have (re)turned to Iraq to fight the United States military, meaning either that releasing detainees encourages recidivism—or that being imprisoned in harsh conditions without legal representation or being charged with a crime is a surefire way to embitter a captive against his captor.

But the United States is poised to realize a loophole that grants the solution it seeks. Key to the Supreme Court either/or decision on detainee rights was the fact that Guantanamo Bay, while stationed in Cuba, is legally on U.S. soil. The "long-term" prison will not be:

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.

Camp 6—I'm sure that Milbank relishes the irony in his locution, "lifetime detentions." Maintained by the same host countries who offer to torture our these detainees, Camp 6 may offer all the social perks of a U.S. prison, but the detainee will always envy the U.S. prisoner his three unalienable luxuries: a trial by jury, a right to legal defense, and a discrete sentence for a crime. Camp 6 should make satirists jealous, too—they strive for the figure that will enter the lexicon as a symbol for regression, and Camp 6 comes along, two punctuated syllables, and no frictional energy lost to the remove of fiction, either.

Come on—the monolithic concept of national security can't be worth this. Frighteningly often in the United States, criminals leave courtrooms as free men because the state was unable to muster a sufficient prosecution to convict them. They make our lives less safe. We hazard this threat because imperfect justice is how we buffet our nation, our conception of liberty, against bad things like tyranny. At the risk of sounding strident, the war on terror is warping some of our core values some parties' understanding of our core values [okay, my first pass was, in fact, too strident. –ed.].

Posted by Kriston at January 5, 2005 12:55 AM