Friday, April 17, 2009

Attacks on the CIA Continue

Terrorist rights supporters continue to attack the CIA. Today lawyers for Al Qaeda member Abd Al-Rahim Hussain Mohammed al-Nashiri, planner of the Cole bombing and other attacks, sent a letter to the current CIA director, demanding that the agency preserve evidence of his "mistreatment" at black sites where he was held. According to his lawyers,
Evidence held by the CIA "is exculpatory evidence" and Al-Nashiri "will be entitled to it."

Here we have a significant Al Qaeda figure, an openly hostile alien, an individual that respects no laws, has signed no treaties, and who should be entitled to no rights whatsoever. He shouldn't even be alive. Yet his legal team acts like he's some sort of victim. The very fact that he has lawyers working on his behalf at all is ridiculous on its face. Apparently the CIA held Al-Nashiri at secret locations where he was waterboarded and subjected to various other interrogation techniques, some of which, like the waterboarding, amounted to torture.

So basically the CIA did what it was supposed to do. It held a notorious terrorist captive and attempted to extract information from him by various methods. Because terrorist rights supporters don't like those methods, that makes the CIA the bad guy, and an Al Qaeda terrorist a victim who is entitled to a legal defense -- never mind that he's an alien, a terrorist, and a enemy of the U.S. We are now allowing terrorists to use our legal system against us, to attack the very intelligence agency that is on the front line of defense against terrorism. 

The CIA did make some serious mistakes. First, they allowed information to leak out about the black sites. The whole point of having secret detainment and interrogation facilities is that they allow you to operate in secret. If their existence becomes public knowledge, the usefulness of such sites is severely compromised. Their other major mistake was in leaving people like Al-Nashiri alive. No doubt CIA leaders never imagined that their country would be so unbelievably stupid as to allow terrorist enemies access to lawyers and the court system, or that a whole terrorist rights movement would take up the cause of our enemies; but they should have erred on the side of caution. In the future the CIA needs to take better care to preserve the secrecy of its operations. If terrorists need to be tortured for information, they should be eliminated when they are no longer useful.  Given the current legal climate, the benefits of keeping them alive are not worth the possible costs.

4 comments:

  1. Sounds to me like his legal team is doing what they're supposed to do.

    Whether they have a legitimate case on mistreatment, I can't say without knowing particulars.

    Even if it means guilty people go free or get off easy because their prosecutors/jailors/interrogators denied them due process, it may be the correct result.

    Just because someone is alien, openly hostile, disrespectful of laws, or hails from a state that has signed no treaties does not mean they've forfeited all rights or that we are not sill bound by our own laws of war and treaties.

    "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you." —Nietzsche

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  2. "Sounds to me like his legal team is doing what they're supposed to do."

    The very fact that someone like that even has a legal team at all is a travesty.

    "Even if it means guilty people go free or get off easy because their prosecutors/jailors/interrogators denied them due process, it may be the correct result.'

    Letting a known terrorist go free because of some legal technicality that shouldn't even apply to him in the first place -- not such a good idea.

    "does not mean they've forfeited all rights"

    They have none, or should have none.

    "we are not sill bound by our own laws of war and treaties."

    Which have little to do with individuals like Al Nashiri. Our treaties were never intended to afford rights to non-state terrorists. And the clandestine section of the CIA operates in a legal gray area and always has. It is specifically designed to carry out illegal activities outside the U.S. That's kind of the point of all the secrecy.

    "Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster."

    Torturing some terrorists hardly makes us monsters.

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  3. Earlier you posted some criticism of Bush for not taking steps to ensure due process for separating the innocent from the guilty.

    Are you only in favor of ensuring legal representation for those we've predetermined are innocent, and if so what's the point?

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  4. "Are you only in favor of ensuring legal representation for those we've predetermined are innocent, and if so what's the point?"

    My arguments here apply only to those who are clearly not innocent. Al Nashiri is not equivalent to some guy we picked up based on little or no evidence in Afghanistan.

    As I argued before, suspected terrorists should have their home countries notified of their capture, and they should act on their behalf.

    I'm not arguing that things shouldn't be tightened up, in that we need to be a lot more selective in using extended detentions, let alone questionable techniques or torture. But in the case of known terrorists of the type that the latest memos are talking about, I think the CIA should have wide latitude.

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