User:Geo Swan/Guantanamo/Iqinn replies

See User:Geo Swan/Stale drafts#Scaffolding

User:Iqinn has deleted my last two attempts to engage them in a civil discussion dialog, [1] and [2]. They excised them with the edit summary: "Remove uncivil comment - the included content issues have and will be discussed on the related talk pages where i have extensively and will take part in content related discussions"

I am going to put comments I would normally address to Iqinn on their talk page here on this page, and merely leave them a link to the comment on their talk page. Geo Swan (talk) 13:02, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

Your explanations for your questionable redirects

I am adding to this comment I made at {{rfd}} here. I am not putting these comments on the {{rfd}} because I don't want to write something in a public forum that you might find embarrassing, or that you might misinterpret as a provocation.

This justification for your redirections is your first. As I noted on the {{rfd}} I believe your justification is based on misunderstanding and misinterpreting policy.

I spent about three times as long as I normally would when I left this comment on your talk page eleven days ago. It was necessary to make that effort because I wanted to stick to the issues. We are supposed to confine discussions to the issues, and keep personalities out of it. I'd like ot suggest that it would have conserved time and effort if you had offered your justification for the redirections back then, on August 7th. Geo Swan (talk) 13:21, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

Response to questions about "under suspicion"

I was asked some questions about captives "under suspicion". I am responding here, rather than on the talk page, because my reply wound have waandered off-topic for an article's talk page.

Short version -- captives were held because they were, officially, suspected of engaging in or supporting terrorism. Unfortunately, they are likely to remain under suspicion for the rest of their lives, and beyond.

Long version:

1. Everyone who was held in Bagram, Kandahar, or several smaller detention facilities, and everyone who was transferred to CIA custody or was transferred to Guantanamo was said to be suspected of engaging in hostile activities, or to have supported or associated with terrorists. That was the official line. So, anyone who was held, and not officially cleared, remains under suspicion. About two hundred captives were repatriated from Guantanamo, after their CSR Tribunals confirmed they were enemy combatants, in 2004/2005. With the exception of the couple of dozen whose habeas corpus petitions resulted in reversals of the their CSR Tribunals "enemy combatant" designation they were all considered to remain "enemy combatants", when they were repatriated.
2. See above.
3. By the criteria used by the captors, and sometimes by their home governments, when they are repatriated.
4. Most Guantanamo captives weren't charged.
   1. Many Guantanamo captives were repatriated to their home countries, who promptly put them in their own detention facilities. The Saudi rehabilitation program, while being hosted at a former resort, with shuffleboard, and loose security, was a form of extrajudicial detention. If you read the 66 McClatchy interviews you will read that many former captives are under a form of house arrest, or something similar to parole -- where they have to check in with the local police, daily, weekly, monthly. I suggest that it would be misleading to describe them as "now living as a free person".
   2. Why didn't the USA charge these captives? Various reasons.
      1. President Bush announced early -- captives taken in Afghanistan would not be accorded the protections of the Geneva Conventions, and would not be treated as POWs. The Geneva Conventions, in a nutshell, say that there are things soldiers do, in wartime, like killing people, that would be considered crimes, in peacetime, if they were done by civilians. But us signatories to the Conventions won't prosecute your soldiers for killing our soldiers, provided they obey the laws of war, and you won't prosecute ours. The Geneva Convention definition of a "combatant" is more limited than the Bush Presidency definition of an "enemy combatant". Some of the captives would be considered "combatants", even under the Geneva Conventions -- but they would not be considered terrorists.
         • Do you know how many casualties the USSR took during WW2? 20,000,000 was the official figure. But it wasn't the official figure during the war, and for the first few years after it. Stalin was a very ruthless guy. Stalin didn't believe in fair trials, and famously said, "Better to shoot ten innocent men, than let one guilty man go free." He regarded the lives of criminals and dissidents in the Soviet Union's slave labor camps as worthless. And one technique the Soviets used, to clear German minefields, was to send for a couple of box-cars of dissidents from the nearest slave labor camp, and force them to charge across the German minefields. They would blow up all the mines, and could be followed by the real soldiers. A few years after the War Stalin decided to promote these guys from civilians to soldiers -- more than doubling the number of soldier the USSR reported died during the war. Well, in some areas, the Taliban planned to do something similar, After 9-11 they press-ganged civilians, locked them up, with no training, no weapons, knowing that when the final assault came they would be used as cannon-fodder, to soak up casualties, so the Taliban's real soldiers could be held in reserve. Luckily for these guys their lock-ups were captured prior to them being forced, against their wills, to martyr themselves. Is the hapless victim of a press-gang a terrorist? Of course not. Should he be considered a combatant? The officers on the CSRT didn't agree. Some CSRTs determined that guys rounded up by a press-gang weren't really combatants. Other CSRTs determined they were.
         • Yes, I know various senior Bush officials, and a lot of commentators, asserted that neither Al Qaeda or the Taliban would qualify for the protections of the Geneva Conventions.
           • The Taliban didn't sign the Geneva Conventions? Doesn't matter. A US President doesn't have to ratify every foreign treaty the USA has ever signed for them to remain in effect during his administration. Unless treaties are for a fixed term, they remain in effect until rescinded. A previous Afghan administration signed the Geneva Conventions, so it remained in effect in Afghanistan.
           • Al Qaeda is not a "state actor", and thus couldn't sign the Geneva Conventions? During the Spanish Civil War Americans fought beside the regular Spanish brigades in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Gurkha battalions fight beside UK battalions. When foreigners fight in a unit attached to and under the orders of the chain of command of a regular army they get the same protections under the Geneva Conventions as the soldier-citizens in that army. The OARDEC memos refer, several times, to how the al Qaeda fighters were integrated into the Taliban army as the 55th Arab Brigade.
           • But could the Taliban's army be called a real army? Did it have the "chain of command" the Geneva Conventions required? Yes, look at the 2nd allegation Khirullah Khairkhwa faced. There could be no more classic description of a "chain of command".
           • But, to be considered POWs wouldn't the Taliban have to wear a uniform? Actually, what Geneva Conventions say is that a combatant is supposed to wear a "fixed distinctive marking, visible from a distance." Note, several captives were being held, at least in part, because they stood accused of having been issued a "Taliban uniform". In their testimony some of the Afghans, and some of foreigners testified as to the distinctive dress of a Taliban. Loose off-white pants and tunic, covered by a loose, knee length, light grey vest, topped by an oversize black turban.
           • The third specific criteria in articles 3, 4 and 5 of the Third Geneva Convention is that the combatant has to "carry arms openly". I watched a show on PBS a few years ago where Attorney General Alberto Gonzales debated another guy, a Iraq and Afghanistan. The issue of whether Guantanamo captives would have carried arms openly came up. Gonzales graciously acknowledged that in a country where civilians routinely went around as well armed as soldiers this was a moot point.
           • The Geneva Conventions also allow a combatant to be stripped of POW status for not following the laws and customs of war. And it was often argued that since the Taliban had a reputation for committing atrocities they didn't qualify for POW treatment. But I think that this means only that those members of the Taliban who committed atrocities, and their officers should be stripped of POW status, if captured. A handful of incidents where American GIs committed war crimes have come to light. No one suggests their war crimes should strip all GIs of POW status.
             • The Geneva Conventions require captors to convene something called a "competent tribunal" in order to determine whether a captive is a legitimate combatant, entitled to be treated as a POW. The Geneva Conventions don't go into much detail, leaving the details for the procedures up to each country. The USA has a document Army Regulation 190-8, which lays out the details. The USA convened these tribunals in every other recent conflict. When an AR-190-8 tribunal is convened it is empowered to determine that a captive falls into one of three classes: (1) innocent civilian bystanders; (2) lawful combatants, entitled to POW status, who can't be prosecuted for anything they did on the battlefield; (3) combatants not entitled to POW status, who, potentially, can be charged and tried for acts on the battlefield.
      2. So, as per above, to charge a captive with something, you have to first establish that the captives wasn't a legitimate combatant, entitled to POW status. If he acted like a soldier, and stood guard duty, armed with a rifle, you can hold him, until hostilities cease. But you can't prosecute him for that. Practically none of the captives are accused of actually firing a weapon when any Americans were around, or even post-9-11. At most, most of those who would be considered a combatant under the GC, merely guarded a fox hole, until told to surrender.
      3. Many of the captives took no role in the Taliban's administration, pre-911, and took no role in helping the Taliban or al Qaeda post-911. But they acknowledged fighting against Afghanistan's invaders, during the Soviet occupation 1979-1989. I guess the theory was that if they were willing to fight against one invader they might be willing to fight against another.
      4. Over a dozen of the captives were suspected of traveling to Bosnia, during its war of cessation from Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, and fighting to help the muslim minority there to defend its muslim enclaves. This is a very sad story, one that would be laughable if it weren't so tragic.
         • There are long-standing, established muslim communities in Yugoslavia, dating back to when the whole region was part of the Turkish empire. Although these European muslims were generally highly westernized, they were targets of terrible ethnic violence. The term "ethnic cleansing" dates to this conflict. Some -- an unknown number -- of muslim volunteers traveled to Bosnia to fight to help protect the muslim communities. (FWIW I have read that, although they were grateful, there was tension between the Europeanized, secularized Bosnian muslims, and the more religious of the foreign muslim volunteers, who regarded the Bosnians as not properly observant.) Some (an unknown number) of these volunteers were veterans of the fight against the Soviets.
         • Following its successful cessesion the new Bosnian republic set up a new Immigration department. Because there were long established enclaves of secularized muslims living in Bosnia some muslims from Arab lands who wanted to live in Europe, live a more secularized life, tried to immigrate to Bosnia. Over a dozen of these guys who applied to immigrate to Bosnia eventually ended up in Guantanamo. And, in Guantanamo they learned that their name was listed on a list of "Bosnian Mujahideen". Al but one these guys had never hear of this list, and couldn't explain how their name came to be placed on it.
         • One guy did know. He traveled to Bosnia, post secession, as a worker for a Muslim charity. He fell in love with a Bosnian woman, and they got married. This is when he undertook to become a Bosnian citizen. Just like every other country, there was an application fee for potential citizens, which he paid. He learned however that (1) Bosnia had a special exemption from the citizenship application fee for any foreigner who volunteered on their side, during the war of secession. He learned (2) that corrupt citizenship clerks, who were processing applications from individuals with Arabic names, routinely forged affidavits from the applicants, requesting a fee exemption, because they had been foreign volunteers, then quietly pocketed the application fee, with the applicant none the wiser. Thus, on paper, it looked like thousands of committed jihadists had immigrated to Bosnia. A tiny fraction of those immigrants may have actually been jihadists. But it seems like the vast majority of them were among the most Europeanized Arabs.
   3. When could the "under suspicion" cloud be raised from these men? Most likely most of these men will live under a cloud of suspicion for the rest of their lives. I think President Obama, or whoever succeeds him, would take a big political hit if he or she were to apologize to those former captives who, in hindsight, should never have been held at all, or who should only have been held for the brief time required to confirm their alibis. Geo Swan (talk) 20:11, 26 December 2009 (UTC)