The Unasked Question in the Domestic Spying Debate

A must-read article in the National Journal this week should remind the media to seriously question every administraton claim that only al-Qaeda operatives and their allies are getting the spook treatment.
Editor and Publisher
Feb. 08, 2006

(February 08, 2006) -- Amid the honest debate, partisan posturing and blatant obfuscation surrounding the domestic spying controversy, hardly anyone in the media or in Congress ever mentions the elephant in the room. Surely they know it is there but few have the nerve to point it out.

It’s one thing to argue the legalities of the National Security Agency eavedropping or wiretapping or data mining (or whatever it is), but critics will always be on the defensive if they continue to accept the administration’s assertion that no matter who the spooks are spying on in the U.S. (maybe you or me) there’s always a terrorist or Al Qaeda bad guy on the other end of the phone line or email. No wonder a majority of the American public in polls seem to back the idea, at least on these stated terms.

Given the administration’s track record on accuracy, why does anyone, let alone everyone, in the major media go along with this instead of saying, “Why should we believe these guys know an al-Qaeda operative when they see one?”

Until proven otherwise, they should be considered The Gang That Couldn't Spook Straight.

This was driven home this week, if not before, by a must-read cover story in the non-partisan National Journal by Corine Hegland. It’s much too exhaustive to detail here, so let me stick to the useful summary provided by the Journal’s much-respected senior writer and columnist Stuart Taylor.

He declares flatly that the Hegland article shows that President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Press Secretary Scott McClellan have repeatedly made false statements about the “terrorists” locked up at Guantanomo. And these assertions came “long after the evidence of their falsity should have been manifest to Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their subordinates.”

Hegland’s article, he writes, “provides powerful evidence confirming what many of us have suspected for years.” This is part of his summary:

--A high percentage, perhaps the majority, of the 500-odd men now held at Guantanamo were not captured on any battlefield, let alone on "the battlefield in Afghanistan" (as Bush asserted) while "trying to kill American forces" (as McClellan claimed).

--Fewer than 20% of the Guantanamo detainees, the best available evidence suggests, have ever been Qaeda members.

--Many scores, and perhaps hundreds, of the detainees were not even Taliban foot soldiers, let alone Qaeda terrorists. They were innocent, wrongly seized noncombatants with no intention of joining the Qaeda campaign to murder Americans.

--The majority were not captured by U.S. forces but rather handed over by reward-seeking Pakistanis and Afghan warlords and by villagers of highly doubtful reliability. These locals had strong incentives to tar as terrorists any and all Arabs they could get their hands on as the Arabs fled war-torn Afghanistan in late 2001 and 2002 -- including noncombatant teachers and humanitarian workers.

--And the Bush administration has apparently made very little effort to corroborate the plausible claims of innocence detailed by many of the men who were handed over.

Taylor adds: “The tribunal hearings, based largely on such guilt-by-association logic, have been travesties of unfairness. The detainees are presumed guilty unless they can prove their innocence -- without help from lawyers and without being permitted to know the details and sources of the evidence against them. This evidence is almost entirely hearsay from people without firsthand knowledge and statements from other detainees desperate to satisfy their brutally coercive interrogators. …

“The administration's unspoken logic appears to be: Better to ruin the lives of 10 innocent men than to let one who might be a terrorist go free. This logic would be understandable if the end of protecting American lives justified any and all means, including the wrecking of many more innocent non-American lives….

“Last July, the Pentagon elaborated in a report of an investigation into complaints by FBI agents of abusive interrogation methods. Many of these methods -- such as shackling detainees to the floor for hours in painful positions, keeping them shivering cold during interrogations, grilling them for 16 hours nonstop, waking them up by moving them every few hours, using loud music and strobe lights -- had been officially approved as ‘humane,’ the Pentagon report explained.

“Bush has also pledged that the Guantanamo detainees are treated ‘humanely.’ At the same time, he has stressed, ‘I know for certain ... that these are bad people’ -- all of them, he has implied.

“If the president believes either of these assertions, he is a fool,” Taylor concludes. “If he does not, choose your own word for him.”

Yet the media, and critics in Congress, still largely refuse to press the question: “Why should we believe there are terrorists on the other end of those phone calls and emails from abroad?”