"'USA considers Murat Kurnaz's innocence to be proven,' a German intelligence officer wrote that year in memo to his colleagues. 'He is to be released in approximately six to eight weeks.'" That was in 2002. And that's how the Washington Post fronts an infuriating story of an innocent man held in captivity at Guantanamo Bay for four years after his innocence had been established.
Why then, did his captors not release him? Partly because of the rubber stamp pseudo-tribunals the Bush administration created, in which prisoners can be tried and convicted without knowing the evidence against them, which in Kurnaz's case "cited intelligence on a suicide bombing by someone Kurnaz allegedly knew — an account later found to be incorrect — in concluding that Kurnaz was 'properly classified as an enemy combatant' and was a member of al-Qaeda." And partly because of a memo by Brigadier General David B. Lacquement to Donald Rumsfeld, about which we know the following:
But besides noting Kurnaz's prayers during the U.S. national anthem, the newly declassified portions also state that he "asked how tall the basketball rim was" in the prison yard, which Lacquement said revealed a desire to escape. In addition, Kurnaz "attempted to obtain information concerning detainee transfers" and "to discuss the current work schedule of the guards," the memo notes.
Repeat: Kurnaz, a German citizen of Turkish origin who was arrested for being in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong name, was disappeared for four years because of an abortion of a judicial process and because of the paranoid tough-guy antics of Donald Rumsfeld and his subordinates. Moreover, were it not for Angela Merkel's personal intervention on Kurnaz's behalf, he would in all likelihood still be rotting in a Guantanamo cell (Gerhard Schröder, spineless on this matter as he was on all others, apparently applied no such pressure).
Nor, of course, is Kurnaz's case an isolated one: Khaled al Masri and Maher Arar are German and Candian citizens, respectively, and innocent men, who were picked up by the CIA and shipped to middle-Eastern dungeons to be tortured; 15 Chinese Muslims were held incommunicado in appalling conditions at Guantanamo for years after they had been cleared of ties to terrorism, for no reason other than to spare the government the embarrassment of admitting a mistake; and on and on.
Let's not mince words: the men responsible for these travesties are criminals who should be tried as criminals. To my neoconservative friends who remind me that the rendition program began under the Clinton administration: good point, there's no reason not to broaden the scope of the war crimes trials that justice demands.
Not, to be sure, that I'm sanguine about the prospects for such trials ever to take place. Not, certainly, when the debate in this country over torture, detention, and rendition is so thoroughly saturated with rhetorical deceit. Consider that, because the government invokes state secrets powers to prevent the bulk of Guantanamo and international black site cases from being subject to open review, we have no reliable statistics for how many innocent people are in US or US-proxy custody, including innocent people who have already been cleared of charges, and other innocents who will not be cleared because the judicial process that has inculpated them is an obvious and limpid fraud. However, it would take an extraordinary credulity to suppose that the only miscarriages of justice in the US detention program are those that have already come to light.
In other words, the Bush administration policy is one that ensures the indefinite detention and torture of innocent people as a simple statistical matter. You wouldn't know that, however, from the fact that one of our major political factions frames the issue as a debate between giving proven terrorists rights and protecting the homeland, and that the other major political faction, as well as much of the media, supinely accede to that framing.
So let me close with a question to any readers who support the Bush detention policy. You know innocents have been subject to bestial abuses under the Bush policy, and that innocents all but certainly still are subject to bestial abuses. To endorse the policy with a fully-informed and clear-eyed understanding of what it is, you must endorse this consequence. Are you willing to concede as much? If not, why should anyone take your justifications of the policy seriously?
(Hat tip to Bean at LGM.)