Mid-East Meets Midwest

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Obama administration is looking to overhaul the way America interrogates terror suspects.

The new plan would call for a small team of professionals, from both spy services and law-enforcement agencies, to be used for “high-value” detainees. Under this new system the CIA would get the boot, no longer running the show like the last eight years. However, the Journal’s source did not specify who might be in charge of this new program.

One of the team’s first tasks would be to form a new set of interrogation methods drawing from scientific and academic studies, a notable break from the brutality permitted by the Bush administration. These new non-coercive procedures may differ from the 19 permitted in the Army Field Manual (lawmakers’ and human rights groups’ golden standard of interrogation) to include providing rewards for information and playing on a detainee’s anxiety or other emotions.

The interrogation unit would include people assigned to research, master and conduct non-coercive interrogations. The team would most likely be drawn agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, CIA and Pentagon.

If adopted, the new interrogation team would signify an attempt by the Obama administration to wipe the slate clean of the counterterrorism issues that have plagued the CIA and Justice Department since a U.S. network of secret prisons was exposed in 2005.

But don’t get your hopes up just yet. There could still be some similarities to the approach of the Bush administration. For starters, the team’s efforts will still focus more on gathering intelligence than on assembling evidence for use in a criminal trial. (Because all of those studies saying interrogation leads to unreliable evidence are wrong. Oh, and all of those people who were acquitted by a military tribunal because of insufficient evidence… well, that was just bad luck. Keep on doing what you’re doing!)

For the full story: U.S. Weighs Special Team of Terrorism Interrogators

Tuesday a representative of the Obama administration said that the U.S. could continue to detain non-U.S. citizens in facilities like Gitmo, even if they have been acquitted of terrorism charges by an American military commission.

The Defense Department’s chief lawyer, Jeh Johnson, told the Senate Armed Forces Committee that releasing a detainee who has been tried and found not guilty was a policy decision that officials would have to make based on their estimates of whether or not the accused posed a future threat.

But why should there be a different standard for Americans than non-U.S. citizens?  Hundreds of criminals who were probably guilty as sin have been acquitted only to return to society and harm others.  If a military commission cannot find enough evidence to convict an individual of terrorism charges, why should the American government be allowed continue to hold these people when any other justice system could not?

And it is safe to say that the Obama administration (or any other administration for that matter) would not stand by while another country implemented an equivalent policy.  Just weeks ago, injustices toward former Northwestern University student Roxanna Saberi topped the U.S. diplomatic agenda because she was being unfairly detained.  And she was found guilty in a court of law.  Admittedly, the court system of Iran does not have the same tradition of justice that its American counterpart has.  But Iran found Saberi to be a threat, just as the American government finds these Gitmo detainees to be threats.

If we are just going to hold these people anyway, maybe the American government should lose the pretenses of justice and skip the trial all together.  Either way, the standard of the American justice system is not being upheld.

Full Wall Street Journal article: Detainees, even if acquitted, might not go free