SUMMARY:The military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, took its first 20 detainees in 2002. Despite various calls to shutter it, it still stands almost twenty years later. A new movie now tells the story of Mohamedou Slahi, who spent 14 years within its walls, suffering abuse, even though he was never charged. Amna Nawaz takes a look at "The Mauritanian" for our arts and culture series, CANVAS.
SUMMARY:Adm. William McRaven oversaw the covert special operations team that stormed a compound in Pakistan in 2011 and killed Osama bin Laden. Now, the Navy veteran chronicles his 37-year military career in a new book, “Sea Stories: My Life in Special Operations.” Adm. McRaven talks to Judy Woodruff about his adventurous spirit, the one thing Navy SEALS must do to survive training and the value of NATO.
SUMMARY:The U.S. has been fighting in Afghanistan for more than 16 years, and mostly against the Taliban, a group that exists in large part due to the intelligence services of Afghan neighbor Pakistan. Steve Coll's new book "Directorate S" is perhaps the definitive story of the war's aftermath and tense U.S. relations with Pakistan. Coll joins Nick Schifrin for a conversation.
SUMMARY: Many books have covered the war in South Asia, but Steve Coll's “Directorate S: The CIA and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 2001–2016” reveals new information about military mistakes, missed diplomatic opportunities, failed negotiations with the Taliban and Pakistan's support for the Taliban. Nick Schrifin talks to Steve Coll about his new book.
SUMMARY: Investigators say they have "very important" clues to what drove an attacker to bomb a concert in Manchester, England. But they face an unwelcome obstacle; intelligence leaks to the American press, fueling a diplomatic fight, and a pause in intelligence sharing. Ciaran Jenkins of Independent Television News reports, and William Brangham talks to former FBI counterterrorism investigator Ali Soufan.
SUMMARY: What does the deadly attack at an Ariana Grande concert in the United Kingdom mean for the global fight against terrorism? Hari Sreenivasan gets analysis from Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens of George Washington University, and Michael Leiter former director of the United States National Counterrorism Center.
IMHO: Those who think military power will end all terrorism are, sadly, mistaken. They are failing to recognize that terrorists operate in small groups or are loners. And the most dangerous are terrorists from their own country, not outsiders.
Military action can only defeat armies. In the case of al-Shabab, they have never attacked the U.S.
SUMMARY: On the campaign stump, Donald Trump promised to give the U.S. military more freedom to strike terrorist targets around the world. Now the President has approved the Pentagon's plan to intensify its targeting of al-Shabab strongholds in Somalia. Hari Sreenivasan speaks with former State Department official Sarah Sewall about the new changes for military operations.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): Among the countries where the U.S. is fighting terrorism are Iraq, Yemen and Somalia. Now the President has approved the Pentagon's plan to beef up its targeting of Al-Shabaab in Somalia, giving the military greater latitude to decide when and where to strike.
For more on all of this, we turn to Sarah Sewall. She served as undersecretary of state for civilian security, democracy and human rights during the Obama administration. She's written extensively about military operations and civilian casualties. She's now at Johns Hopkins University.
Ms. Sewall, I want to first ask — just walk us through what the changes are that the Pentagon just announced.
SARAH SEWALL, Former State Department Official: Well, essentially, President Obama had created two categories for thinking about the use of force in the context of the war on terror.
One was more like targeted killing with more restricted types of targets that you could both choose and were forced to identify, and it controlled the effects of those uses of force more closely. The other is more like what Americans would understand as war, general hostilities.
And what has happened is, the President — the current President has now moved, according to reports, moved the Somalia engagement of U.S. forces from the category of more targeted uses of force to that of general hostilities.
COMMENT: Yah, we are suppose to warn Pakistan about our attacks on the Taliban. Just ignore the sympathy and support of some government officials, and some of their army. Pakistan has a whole area/province where the Taliban rule and hide. No, we are not about to warn the Taliban.
Excerpt
SUMMARY: On Saturday, a U.S. drone strike killed Mullah Mansour, the leader of the Taliban and architect of the group's bloody reconquest of Afghanistan this past year. Chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Warner reports on the killing, and Hari Sreenivasan talks to former Pakistani diplomat Riaz Mohammad Khan and former State Department official Barnett Rubin about what lies ahead for the Taliban.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): The man who led the Afghan Taliban for the past year was killed in a U.S. operation over the weekend. The group had been gaining ground and waging a bloody war against the Afghan government.
So, what's next for the Taliban, and the countries who fight it?
Chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Warner begins our coverage.
MARGARET WARNER (NewsHour): Smoldering wreckage on a Pakistani roadside was all that remained of the Taliban commander's vehicle hours after he died in it Saturday.
Today, in Vietnam, President Obama officially announced a U.S. drone strike killed Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA:It has been confirmed that he is dead. And he as an individual who, as head of the Taliban, was specifically targeting U.S. personnel and troops inside of Afghanistan.
MARGARET WARNER:Mullah Mansour took over the Afghan Taliban last summer, after the group finally announced that longtime leader Mullah Omar had died in 2013. The new leader faced down rivals, in part by rejecting Afghan- and U.S.-backed peace talks.
Under his direction, Taliban forces briefly seized the Northern Afghan city of Kunduz last September, and carried out a bloody assault in Kabul itself in April, killing 64.
Word of his death was welcomed by Afghan chief executive Abdullah Abdullah:
ABDULLAH ABDULLAH, Chief Executive, Afghanistan (through interpreter): He was in charge of all terrorist attacks in Afghanistan, and he had direct contact with other terrorist networks. This will bring a big change in the Taliban condition. His death is a blow to their abilities in carrying out terrorist attacks against the Afghan people.
MARGARET WARNER: Afghan President Ashraf Ghani signaled that the Taliban leader's death could also open the door to renewed peace talks. The drone strike that killed Mansour was the first by the U.S. inside Baluchistan, in Southwestern Pakistan. It's long been a Taliban stronghold.
In London yesterday, Pakistan's Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif condemned the attack, saying the U.S. gave no advance warning.
NAWAZ SHARIF, Prime Minister, Pakistan (through interpreter): We are protesting strongly. This is a violation of the sovereignty of Pakistan.
MARGARET WARNER: But Afghanistan's government accuses the Pakistanis of harboring a veritable who's-who of most wanted terrorists.
GEN. DAWLAT WAZIRI, Spokesman, Afghan Defense Ministry (through interpreter): The Haqqani Network is in Pakistan. Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden were in Pakistan, and now Mullah Mansour was killed in Pakistan's Baluchistan. It would be better if Pakistan cooperated with Afghanistan and didn't give shelter to these people who are continuing the war in Afghanistan.
MARGARET WARNER:Pakistani authorities say a passport found near the drone strike wreckage shows Mansour had just returned from Iran. Officials there denied the claim.
Meanwhile, the already-fractured Taliban is scrambling to close ranks. Senior leaders met today, and speculation over a successor centers on Mansour's deputy, Sirajuddin Haqqani, a warlord seen as even more brutal than Mansour.
SUMMARY: Extremists armed with guns and grenades stormed a luxury hotel in Bamako, Mali, early Friday morning, shooting dozens. Witnesses said they went room by room, letting guests go if they could recite verses of the Koran. Malian special forces stormed the hotel, freeing hostages and battling the Islamist attackers into the night. Judy Woodruff talks to Rudolph Atallah of the Atlantic Council.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): The siege today in the capital city of Mali lasted all day before ending this evening. Islamist gunmen burst into a hotel and seized up to 170 hostages, many of them foreigners. In the end, scores of hostages were rescued or escaped, but the estimates of the dead ranged from 19 to at least 27, plus two attackers.
And the State Department said one American was among those killed.
The attack on the Radisson Blu brought security forces on the run early this morning. Mali’s Defense Ministry said extremists armed with guns and grenades stormed the luxury hotel in Bamako just as guests were beginning their day.
MAN (through interpreter): At this moment, this morning around 7:30, individuals not yet identified, about three or four, we believe, so far, attacked the Radisson Blu hotel. Sadly, there are deaths. People must remain calm.
JUDY WOODRUFF: By some accounts, the attackers carjacked a diplomatic vehicle, drove up to the hotel, and stormed inside. Witnesses said they shouted Islamist slogans and went room by room, asking guests if they could recite verses of the Koran. Those who could were let go.
Early on, the owner of the hotel said the assailants locked in as many as 140 guests and 30 employees. Hours later, Malian special forces stormed the hotel themselves, freeing hostages one floor at a time.
MAN (through interpreter): The soldiers were very professional. They took good care of us. They came to us. They knocked. They said: “It’s the security forces.” And then I looked. It was them. I left the room. They cleared the whole floor.
MAN (through interpreter): I heard gunshots very early in the morning. I thought it was firecrackers and didn’t realize it was a hostage situation. At one point, the Malian forces came to get us. They knocked on our doors and evacuated us in small groups. Thank God we’re safe.
JUDY WOODRUFF: At least six Americans were evacuated during the operation, with U.S. and French special forces assisting the Malians.
A jihadist group previously affiliated with al-Qaida, al-Murabitun, claimed responsibility for the attack.
In Paris, French President Francois Hollande vowed to help the former French colony.
SUMMARY: Authorities in the West African nation of Mali say armed Islamic terrorists killed 19 people in Friday’s attack on a Radisson hotel in the capital city of Bamako. Among the victims were hotel guests from Russia, China, Belgium, Israel -- and one American. Wall Street Journal reporter Drew Hinshaw joins Megan Thompson via Skype from Ghana with the latest.
SUMMARY: The attacks in Paris have raised concern about the threat posed by the Islamic State around the world, and how to counter it. Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff talk with William McCants, author of “The ISIS Apocalypse,” Juliette Kayyem, former assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Hassan Hassan of Chatham House and Richard Barrett, a former British intelligence official.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): We focus now on the changing nature of the threat from the Islamic State group and how to counter it.
For that, we turn to four people with deep expertise.
Juliette Kayyem was an assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security during the Obama administration. She now has her own security consulting firm. William McCants is director of the Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic world at the Brookings Institution. His most recent book is “The ISIS Apocalypse: The History, Strategy, and Doomsday Vision of the Islamic State.”
Richard Barrett is a former director of global counterterrorism operations for the British government. He’s a founder of the United Nations’ Counter-Terrorism Task Force. And Hassan Hassan is a Middle East analyst at Chatham House in London. He co-authored the book “ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror.”
And we welcome you all to the program.
Will McCants, I’m going to start here in Washington with you.
What have we learned from the Islamic State group from these attacks? What new do we know about them now?
WILLIAM MCCANTS, Brookings Institution:Well, they seem to have shifted and taken on a strategy of global jihad.
They have always had the rhetoric of global jihadism, similar to Al Qaeda. They have always talked about hitting the far enemy, the United States, France, and others. But for most of their history, they have focused on state-building. And for the past few years, they have been pretty successful at it.
But with the attacks over the past two weeks, taking down the Russian airliner, the attack in Beirut, and now in Paris, we believe that its attention has shifted abroad.
SUMMARY: From the campaign trail to the halls of Congress, leaders weighed in on the fallout of the Paris attacks. Gwen Ifill speaks to Amy Walter of the Cook Political Report and Tamara Keith of NPR about how responses to the tragedy are playing out in the presidential race, calls from some lawmakers to change U.S. policy toward Syrian immigrants, as well as takeaways from the Democratic debate.
SUMMARY: How would Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders handle terror threats at home and abroad, in light of the Paris attacks and the shifting threat of the Islamic State? Sanders joins Gwen Ifill to discuss his views on combating terrorism and the anti-refugee backlash in the U.S.
SUMMARY: What’s Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson’s views on bringing Syrian refugees to the U.S., in light of the Paris attacks and the shifting threat of the Islamic State? Carson joins Judy Woodruff to discuss his stance on fighting the militant group.
SUMMARY: Terror has struck again in Paris, where multiple shootings and bombings across the city, leaving as many as 120 dead. Police say scores were killed at a concert hall, where attackers also took hostages. Judy Woodruff gets an update from Kate Moody of France 24.
SUMMARY: Who is capable of conducting the multiple-target attack that terrorized Paris on Friday night? Judy Woodruff talks to Lorenzo Vidino of George Washington University.
SUMMARY: Secretary of State John Kerry met with counterparts from Russia, Turkey and Saudi Arabia to work on finding a political settlement for the Syrian conflict, following a Moscow meeting between Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Warner joins Judy Woodruff to discuss the state of play between the U.S. and Russia.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Secretary of State John Kerry met in Vienna today with his counterparts from Russia, Turkey and Saudi Arabia in a renewed quest to find a political settlement for the war in Syria.
He spoke to reporters afterwards.
JOHN KERRY, Secretary of State: Today, we came here aware of all of the pitfalls, aware of all of the hurdles. Every foreign minister here has been wrestling with this issue for a period of time. But we came here with a commitment to try to find new ideas for how to break the impasse and end the conflict.
JUDY WOODRUFF: This came after an agreement Monday between the U.S. and Russian militaries on how to avoid accidental midair collisions as both countries bomb Syria. And also that day, Syrian President Assad met with President Putin in Moscow. It was the first time Assad has left Syria since the war began in 2011.
For more on the state of play between the U.S. and Russia over Syria, we turn to NewsHour chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Warner, who has been following all of this.
Margaret, thank you.
So, we know that the U.S., Russia and these other countries have been trying for two years, at least, to talk about, to find a political settlement. No results. Today any different?
MARGARET WARNER (NewsHour): It’s very hard to tell, Judy.
The one thing that indicates there maybe progress is that they agreed they are going to meet again next week, at the end of next week. Well, when Secretary Kerry said, well, people brought a lot of new ideas, publicly, we heard no new ideas. What we heard was the same mantra: We all agree it should be a united Syria, it should be democratic, and secular, and be diverse.
But there was no resolution of this huge hump over Assad’s future. And, you know, Turkey and Saudi want him gone now. Russia wants — afraid of the chaos that could result if he were to fall precipitously and wants him to stay. The U.S. is the only one that has shown nay leg on that. It was pretty clear from what Kerry said today that the U.S. is willing to consider a transition in which Assad may remain for a while.
SUMMARY: Officials are describing their case on the shooting rampage by Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez on members of the U.S. military as a terror investigation. Hari Sreenivasan speaks to Michael Leiter, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, about what we know about the shooter and whether he may have been influenced by groups like the Islamic State, which has called for lone wolf attacks.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): Now we take a deeper look at what we know about the attack in Chattanooga and the current threats against Americans.
Hari Sreenivasan picks up the story.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): Investigators are combing through clues to find out why Mohammad Youssuf Abdulazeez went on a shooting rampage yesterday in Chattanooga.
Officials describe the case that targeted members of the U.S. military, taking the lives of four Marines, as a terror investigation.
For more, we turn to Michael Leiter, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center.
So, Michael, on the one hand, we have federal authorities saying we do not have a direct link yet to ISIS. On the other hand, this is exactly the type of attack that ISIS and al-Qaida are trying to inspire around the world.
MICHAEL LEITER, Former Director, National Counterterrorism Center: That’s exactly right.
And I think federal officials are being appropriately cautious. It is only 24 hours after the event and much evidence that will be uncovered is not yet open or public. All that being said, it’s quite clear, I think by all of the indications, that there was some inspiration from al-Qaida or ISIS ideology.
Exactly what those links are back to those organizations, that’s what we still have to figure out.
SUMMARY: In 2001, Mohamedou Slahi was arrested in Mauritania for suspected connections to a bomb plot. He wound up at Guantanamo, and remains there without ever being charged. After a legal battle over his journal, "Guantanamo Diary" has been published, detailing isolation, beatings, sexual abuse and humiliation. Hari Sreenivasan interviews editor Larry Siems and Slahi's attorney Nancy Hollander.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): Some two weeks after 9/11, Mohamedou Slahi, a 30-year-old electrical engineer, was arrested at his home in the North African country of Mauritania. He was questioned by FBI agents and then released.
In November of that year, he was re-arrested for suspected connections in a plot to bomb the United States. What followed was a harrowing journey through the American national security apparatus post-9/11, from Mauritania to Jordan to Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, finally to the U.S. prison site at Guantanamo Bay. He remains there today, 13 years later, with no charges filed against him.
In 2005, he began a journal, which was confiscated by prison guards and deemed classified. After a seven-year legal battle, a federal judge declassified the material, although some sections remain redacted.
Last week, Little, Brown and Company published “Guantanamo Diary,” in Slahi details those first years of imprisonment, including isolation, beatings, sexual abuse, and humiliation.
Joining me now are Slahi’s lawyer, Nancy Hollander, and the book’s editor, Larry Siems.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): During the past week, there have been at least three separate attacks launched by what are referred to as lone wolf terrorists, who are often inspired by propaganda from groups like ISIS.
Last Monday in Quebec, a man who had converted to Islam and had become radicalized purposely crashed his car into two soldiers, killing one of them, before he was shot dead.
Two days later, another gunman with a similar story killed a soldier standing guard at a war memorial in Ottawa. He later raced into the Parliament building, before being shot dead.
Then Thursday, in Queens, New York, a man who had posted comments sympathetic to the jihadists used a hatchet to attack four rookie police officers posing for a picture on the street. He, too, was shot dead.
Today, on the Sunday talk shows, the heads of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees commented on the attacks.
CHARLIE ROSE (talk show host): What kind of threat does that pose to our own national security?
REP. MIKE ROGERS: Huge, and getting worse.
SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN: These attacks and the multiplicity of attacks in 2014 show that their propaganda is having some effect.
HARI SREENIVASAN: For more about all this, we are joined now from Boston by Jytte Klausen. She is a professor at Brandeis University and the Founder of the Western Jihadism Project, which tracks the activity of Islamist extremists in the West.
So, I want to ask, what is behind these lone wolf attacks?
JYTTE KLAUSEN, Brandeis University: Well, we call them lone wolves, but, in most cases, they have been connected to networks and peer groups and militants for some time.
And they carry out the attacks by themselves, but they are not actually lone wolves, in the sense that they had just become radicalized off the Internet or something like that. It — of course, there are exceptions to this general rule.
But, right now, there is a call out from the Islamic State group, sometimes referred to as ISIL, to carry out attacks on — on people who represent the Western states.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): A short time ago, I spoke via Skype to Sydney-based journalist Stuart Cohen, who’s been covering the story and the ongoing politics investigation.
Stuart Cohen, thank you for talking with us.
What evidence, first of all, did police have before they arrested these suspects?
STUART COHEN, Freelance Journalist: Well, obviously, as with any sort of intelligence operation, they’re playing their cards very close to the vest.
But one thing that they did let out was that the raids that took place in Sydney were based on an intercepted phone call between that senior ISIS militant, that senior Australian ISIS militant that Tony Abbott mentioned in the piece before, and Omarjan Azari, who was the 22 year old who is the only person that has actually been charged in these arrests so far.
So that’s the one piece of intelligence that they did let slip, that they had intercepted a phone call, and that was what sort of put this whole operation in motion, realizing that they were close to possibly carrying out these attacks.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And what made them think that these individuals were actually going to carry them out?
STUART COHEN: Well, they have been having these people under surveillance for a while. That’s the best that the police would say. They have been watching these people.
Obviously, they had reason ever since the terror alert was raised last week to high, which means that the terror alert is now — or a terror attack is now likely in Australia, they have been putting some increased scrutiny on people. They know where the radical Islamic element is in Sydney, and they keep a lot of these people under surveillance. And they figured the time was right.
It was time to get in there and start making arrests before the worst thing could happen and they could carry out some sort of an attack.
Ordinary Internet users, American and non-American alike, far outnumber legally targeted foreigners in the communications intercepted by the National Security Agency from U.S. digital networks, according to a four-month investigation by The Washington Post.
Nine of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations, which former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided in full to The Post, were not the intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else.
Many of them were Americans. Nearly half of the surveillance files, a strikingly high proportion, contained names, e-mail addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or residents. NSA analysts masked, or “minimized,” more than 65,000 such references to protect Americans’ privacy, but The Post found nearly 900 additional e-mail addresses, unmasked in the files, that could be strongly linked to U.S. citizens or U.S. residents.
The surveillance files highlight a policy dilemma that has been aired only abstractly in public. There are discoveries of considerable intelligence value in the intercepted messages — and collateral harm to privacy on a scale that the Obama administration has not been willing to address.
Among the most valuable contents — which The Post will not describe in detail, to avoid interfering with ongoing operations — are fresh revelations about a secret overseas nuclear project, double-dealing by an ostensible ally, a military calamity that befell an unfriendly power, and the identities of aggressive intruders into U.S. computer networks.
Months of tracking communications across more than 50 alias accounts, the files show, led directly to the 2011 capture in Abbottabad of Muhammad Tahir Shahzad, a Pakistan-based bomb builder, and Umar Patek, a suspect in a 2002 terrorist bombing on the Indonesian island of Bali. At the request of CIA officials, The Post is withholding other examples that officials said would compromise ongoing operations.
Many other files, described as useless by the analysts but nonetheless retained, have a startlingly intimate, even voyeuristic quality. They tell stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes. The daily lives of more than 10,000 account holders who were not targeted are cataloged and recorded nevertheless.
In order to allow time for analysis and outside reporting, neither Snowden nor The Post has disclosed until now that he obtained and shared the content of intercepted communications. The cache Snowden provided came from domestic NSA operations under the broad authority granted by Congress in 2008 with amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. FISA content is generally stored in closely controlled data repositories, and for more than a year, senior government officials have depicted it as beyond Snowden’s reach.
The Post reviewed roughly 160,000 intercepted e-mail and instant-message conversations, some of them hundreds of pages long, and 7,900 documents taken from more than 11,000 online accounts.
The material spans President Obama’s first term, from 2009 to 2012, a period of exponential growth for the NSA’s domestic collection.
Taken together, the files offer an unprecedented vantage point on the changes wrought by Section 702 of the FISA amendments, which enabled the NSA to make freer use of methods that for 30 years had required probable cause and a warrant from a judge. One program, code-named PRISM, extracts content stored in user accounts at Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, Google and five other leading Internet companies. Another, known inside the NSA as Upstream, intercepts data on the move as it crosses the U.S. junctions of global voice and data networks.
No government oversight body, including the Justice Department, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, intelligence committees in Congress or the president’s Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, has delved into a comparably large sample of what the NSA actually collects — not only from its targets but also from people who may cross a target’s path.
Scores of pictures show infants and toddlers in bathtubs, on swings, sprawled on their backs and kissed by their mothers. In some photos, men show off their physiques. In others, women model lingerie, leaning suggestively into a webcam or striking risque poses in shorts and bikini tops.
“None of the hits that were received were relevant,” two Navy cryptologic technicians write in one of many summaries of nonproductive surveillance.
SUMMARY: The exchange of five Taliban prisoners for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl has raised larger questions about prisoners being transferred from Guantanamo Bay. In all, 149 detainees from 19 countries still remain at the prison camp. For debate on what’s preventing the closure of the detention facility, Judy Woodruff turns to Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institution and Baher Azmy of the Center for Constitutional Rights.
JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour): So, where do things stand at Guantanamo today? In all, 149 detainees still remain at the prison camp from 19 different countries; 78 have been cleared for transfer or repatriation to their homelands. Of the 71 detainees not cleared for transfer, the Department of Defense expects 20 will be prosecuted before military commissions.
The 51 remaining prisoners have been deemed by the administration as too dangerous to release; however, there is not enough evidence to charge them with specific crimes.
To sort through these numbers, and the complications of closing the detention facility at the Naval base, we get two different views.
Benjamin Wittes is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of the book “Detention and Denial: The Case for Candor After Guantanamo.” And Baher Azmy, he is legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights. It’s an organization that currently represents 10 detainees at the prison.
Is this a 'will we never learn from history' moment. Remember we trained and supplied the people that later became the core of Al Qaeda in their war against Russian occupation of Afghanistan. So, will the troops we train in Africa become the core of anti-American movement in the future?
United States Special Operations troops are forming elite counterterrorism units in four countries in North and West Africa that American officials say are pivotal in the widening war against Al Qaeda’s affiliates and associates on the continent, even as they acknowledge the difficulties of working with weak allies.
The secretive program, financed in part with millions of dollars in classified Pentagon spending and carried out by trainers, including members of the Army’s Green Berets and Delta Force, was begun last year to instruct and equip hundreds of handpicked commandos in Libya, Niger, Mauritania and Mali.
The goal over the next few years is to build homegrown African counterterrorism teams capable of combating fighters like those in Boko Haram, the Islamist extremist group that abducted nearly 300 Nigerian schoolgirls last month. American military specialists are helping Nigerian officers in their efforts to rescue the girls.
“Training indigenous forces to go after threats in their own country is what we need to be doing,” said Michael A. Sheehan, who advocated the counterterrorism program last year when he was the senior Pentagon official in charge of Special Operations policy. Mr. Sheehan now holds the distinguished chair at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point.
As the United States military seeks to extend its counterterrorism reach in Africa, President Obama is expected to appear at West Point on Wednesday to emphasize a foreign policy that would avoid large land wars, like those in Afghanistan and Iraq, and instead stress the training of allied and partner nations to battle militants on their own soil.
Since the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the United States has slowly built a multipronged counterterrorism strategy in Africa: It has carried out armed drone strikes in Somalia from its only permanent base on the continent, in Djibouti; backed African proxies and French commandos fighting Islamist extremists in Somalia and Mali; and increasingly trained African troops to combat insurgents.
Under the new Africa plan, the Pentagon is spending nearly $70 million on training, intelligence-gathering equipment and other support to build a counterterrorism battalion in Niger and a similar unit in nearby Mauritania that are in their “formative stages,” a senior Defense Department official said.
In a cautionary note about operating in that part of Africa, troubled by a chronic shortage of resources and weak regional partners, the effort in Mali has yet to get off the ground as a new civilian government recovers from a military coup last year. In Libya, the most ambitious initial training ended ignominiously last August after a group of armed militia fighters overpowered a small Libyan guard force at a training base outside Tripoli and stole hundreds of American-supplied automatic weapons, night-vision goggles, vehicles and other equipment.
As a result, the training was halted and the American instructors were sent home. Libyan and American officials have been searching for a more secure training site in Libya to restart the program. But last summer’s debacle and the political upheaval in Libya since then have caused American officials to rethink how they select local personnel.
“You have to make sure of who you’re training,” said Maj. Gen. Patrick J. Donahue II, the commander of United States Army soldiers operating in Africa. “It can’t be the standard, ‘Has this guy been a terrorist or some sort of criminal?’ but also, ‘What are his allegiances? Is he true to the country, or is he still bound to his militia?’ ”
The American military uses conventional troops and elite Special Operations forces to train foreign armies all over the world. The tasks range from teaching basic marksmanship to more advanced counterterrorism tactics and techniques.
In the past decade, the Bush and Obama administrations put a premium on training and equipping foreign troops to combat terrorists and other Islamist extremists and persuaded Congress to approve funding for those programs.
The new program to train small counterterrorism forces in Africa resembles larger efforts by American Special Operations troops carried out in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pentagon officials declined to comment publicly on the new program, but budget documents reveal some details.
In Libya, the Pentagon has allotted just over $16 million from a train-and-equip fund to develop two companies of elite troops and their support elements “to counter terrorist and extremist threats in Libya,” according to budget documents. For the aborted training outside Tripoli, the Defense Department also tapped into a classified spending account called Section 1208, devised to aid foreign troops assisting American forces conducting counterterrorism missions.
For Mauritania, about $29 million has been set aside for logistics and surveillance equipment in support of the specialized unit.
For Niger, where the United States launches unarmed surveillance drones to fly over Mali in support of French and United Nations troops, the Pentagon is spending nearly $15 million on the country’s new counterterrorism unit. The funds are part of $39.5 million this year to train and equip the West Africa nation’s army as it struggles to stem a flow of insurgents across Niger’s lightly guarded borders with Mali, Nigeria and Libya.
Maman S. Sidikou, Niger’s ambassador to the United States, said he could not comment on the counterterrorism unit, but he added in an email, “Training remains a critical part of our needs to further increase our men’s readiness to face the many challenges of our regional environment.”
Mr. Sheehan, the former Pentagon official, said a 12-member Army Special Forces team could train about 50 soldiers initially, and expand after that. “It can be done,” said Mr. Sheehan, who conducted similar training in Latin America in the 1980s as a Special Forces commander.
J. Peter Pham, director of the Africa Center of the Atlantic Council, a policy research group in Washington, said the United States must make tough political judgments before investing in ambitious counterterrorism training programs. Mr. Pham cited the lessons of Mali, where American-trained commanders of elite army units defected to Islamic insurgents that seized the north last year.
“The host country has to have the political will to fight terrorism, not just the desire to build up an elite force that could be used for regime protection,” Mr. Pham said. “And the military has to be viewed well or at least neutrally by a country’s population.”
American counterterrorism officials also warn that without a commitment to support the specialized units, training can stall. “It’s very difficult, very challenging dealing with African forces,” said Rudy Atallah, the former director of African counterterrorism policy for the Pentagon. “You train them to a certain level, and then they can run short on gear, communications, even tires for their vehicles.”
American officials say trainees must be carefully screened and monitored for possible human rights violations or shifting allegiances. “Any unit we train could be used to go after political opponents rather than Al Qaeda,” said Frederic Wehrey, a senior policy analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who has visited Libya frequently.
No episode is a more sobering reminder of these risks than the collapse of the American counterterrorism training mission last August at Base 27, also called Camp Younis, a Libyan military installation about 15 miles from Tripoli, the capital.
The American trainers issued the Libyans M4 automatic rifles, night-vision goggles, Glock pistols and armored vehicles. The Libyans took custody of the weapons and equipment and were responsible for safeguarding them in a warehouse at the camp, American military officials said.
In a predawn raid on Aug. 4, gunmen believed to be from one of the local militias overpowered the Libyan guards and seized the weapons and equipment in the storage area, American officials said.
The American trainers were not at the training camp when the raid occurred because they regularly stayed at a nearby villa that served as a safe house at night, American officials said.
The episode abruptly ended a weeks-long training course that American and Libyan officials had hoped would restart broader training efforts that were suspended after the attack on the American Mission in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012.
A former American Special Operations officer said there was a broader lesson for any future Libya training mission: “The take-away here is they’re going to take a lot more adult supervision to make sure the checks and balances are in place, so you don’t have outside militia taking over.”
GWEN IFILL (NewsHour): The United States has been fighting in Afghanistan for 13 years, but have we been going after the right enemy? The author of a new book says no.
Hari Sreenivasan has more.
HARI SREENIVASAN (NewsHour): This coming Saturday, Afghans will go to the polls to elect a new president. It will be the third popular election since 2001, when the United States invaded the country following attacks on September 11.
One reporter who has covered the war in that country from the beginning is New York Times correspondent Carlotta Gall. She’s also the author of the new book “The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014.”
I’m marking the 12th anniversary of the abomination that is Guantanamo with a couple of repostings related to how the Bush administration, with the connivance of key members of the press and the human rights community, sold a continuation of torture as an end to torture.
Such a reposting seems necessary as the entire press, human rights groups, and blogging world continues to ignore the ongoing issue of torture via interrogations. While indefinite detention, forced cell extractions aka beatings, and the painful forced-feeding of hunger strikers still garners attention, and rightly so, the fact the U.S. continues to have an official policy of torture in its interrogation manual continues to be ignored, even though it is the most important issue about torture facing America today.
Eschewing the worst-looking forms of torture, like waterboarding, in 2006, at the same time that “high-value detainees” like Khalid Sheik Muhammad and Abu Zubaydah were transferred out of the CIA black sites and sent to Guantanamo, the U.S. put out a new Army Field Manual (AFM) with instructions on interrogations that claimed to be “humane.”
Origin of AFM Rewrite Out of Ashes of Abu Ghraib Scandal
Only recently have I found the possible origin of the new AFM’s drafting in the August 2005 recommendations of a Joint Chiefs of Staff panel subsequent to the military investigations into the Abu Ghraib scandal. (See pg. 315-16 of this document)
Recommend a policy-level review and determination of the status and treatment of all detainees, when not classified as EPWs [Enemy Prisoners of War]. This review needs to particularly focus on the definition of humane treatment, military necessity, and proper employment of interrogation techniques. (e.g. boundaries or extremes)….
Recommend study of the DoD authorized interrogation techniques to establish a framework for evaluating their cumulative impact in relation to the obligation to treat detainees humanely.
The study of “authorized interrogation techniques” was tasked to the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, Stephen Cambone.
But a number of the new techniques that ultimately showed up in the newly written AFM were not humane at all. In fact, they amounted to torture and/or cruel, inhumane and degrading behavior. Over the years various human rights groups recognized this and came out publicly for changes to the AFM.
The AFM made changes to its text that allowed wider latitude in use of drugs in interrogations, while eliminating prohibitions against sleep deprivation and stress positions that had been in the pre-2006 AFM. Even worse, a category of prisoners that were not considered subject to Geneva Convention POW protections was singled out for a special kind of interrogation “technique,” as described in the manual’s Appendix M.
Appendix M allowed for use of isolation for 30 days, and potentially indefinitely; sleep deprivation for up to 30 days, but potentially indefinitely; manipulation of environment and diet (so long as it wasn’t “extreme”); and forms of sensory deprivation, so long as every form of sensory input wasn’t affected.
There was very little interest in whether or not or how these new techniques were being used. In fact, no one had apparently even thought to ask the government until I did in January 2010 whether or not Appendix M had even been used. Not surprisingly, the Department of Defense confirmed it was using Appendix M interrogations at Guantanamo.
More surprising was my discovery, confirmed by a DoD spokesman, that the use of the Appendix M torture techniques was approved in a Bush-era Office of Legal Council memorandum, and left in place by the Obama administration despite claims that all such memos were withdrawn in January 2009. Even to this day, in a massive political failure, not one human rights group or legal organization has recognized this fact.
The Torture Never Stopped
Intense abusive interrogations continue. We know from a filing by Omar Khadr in his Canadian court case that prior to release from Guantanamo to Canadian authorities, and shortly after his plea deal with Military Commissions authorities in October 2010, Khadr was subjected to prolonged interrogation that likely was conducted, given the key presence of the use of isolation, to Appendix M parameters: “Following the Pre-Trial Agreement, the Americans transferred Omar to a maximum security detention facility restricted for prisoners convicted of offenses. Omar was thrown back into solitary confinement and continued to be subjected to months of prolonged interrogations consisting of a sequence of 9 hours of interrogation per day for 9 days at a time.”
With an even dozen years of crimes at Guantanamo — fully over 1/3 of them under the auspices of the Obama administration — I think it’s time to review just how consensus around torture takes place in actuality. As we shall see, it is a complex story, involving media manipulation, psychological effects such as denial, and subordination of human rights to party politics and an achingly slow platform of reformist change. I say “consensus” because silence about all this amounts to consensus.
The following was published at Alternet and my own blog, Invictus, in January 2009. (My first writingrecognizing torture in the AFM goes back to the introduction of the new manual in September 2006, when I wrote under my pseudonym Valtin) In a day or two, I will publish part two, which will look at how the foreign press saw through what DoD was doing, and how a major blogging news and opinion site helped cover that up.
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How the Press, the Pentagon, and Even Human Rights Groups Sold Us an Army Field Manual that (Still) Includes Torture
A January 17 [2009] New York Times editorial noted that Attorney General designate Eric Holder testified at his nomination hearings that when it came to overhauling the nation’s interrogation rules for both the military and the CIA, the Army Field Manual represented “a good start.” The editorial noted the vagueness of Holder’s statement. Left unsaid was the question, if the AFM is only a “good start,” what comes next?
The Times editorial writer never bothered to mention the fact that three years earlier, a different New York Times article (12/14/2005) introduced a new controversy regarding the rewrite of the Army Field Manual. The rewrite was inspired by a proposal by Senator John McCain to limit U.S. military and CIA interrogation methods to those in the Army Field Manual. (McCain would later allow an exception for the CIA)
According to the Times article, a new set of classified procedures proposed for the manual “was pushing the limits on legal interrogation.” Anonymous military sources called the procedures “a back-door effort” to undermine McCain’s efforts at the time to change U.S. abusive interrogation techniques, and stop the torture.
I am Retired U.S. Navy (22yrs) and a Vietnam Veteran. After my Navy retirement I was in the computer related industry, now retired. In 2000 I was a registered Republican and voted for George W. Bush. Six months of having Bush in the Whitehouse forced me to re-evaluate my political stance. I had always thought of myself as a Moderate Republican, but was a Republican by "default" NOT because of close examination of the GOP. Due to what has happened in America since 2000, I now consider myself a progressive, and registered as a Non-Affiliated voter.
*Anti-First Amendment policies that attempt to turn America into a theocracy by enshrining ANY religious belief as law.
* Any attempt to suppress human or Constitutional rights.
* Any law or policy that supports discrimination based on religion, ethnicity, race/color, gender, sexual orientation, or any law that does NOT support Equal Treatment under the law.
*Any law or policy that attempts to suppress Freedom of the Press or Free Speech.
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