Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Gitmo report shows dangers of al Qaeda

LA Times:

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The new report appears to buttress the military's claim that it should be allowed to run Camp Delta without outside intervention because the camp has become "the single best repository of Al Qaeda information."

The declassified summary cites more than 4,000 interrogation reports and says that some indicated Al Qaeda operatives were pursuing chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. The summary does not elaborate on what that information is or how close the terrorist organization might be to getting such weapons.

According to the report, captives have described how Al Qaeda trained them to spread deadly poisons, and at other times armed them with grenades stuffed inside soda cans, bombs hidden in pagers and cellphones and wristwatches that could trigger remote control explosions on a 24-hour countdown.

The report also showed that not all those being held were suspected of being front-line soldiers and that 1 in 10 of the captives were well-educated — often at U.S. colleges — in fields such as medicine and law.

More than 20 detainees have been positively identified as Osama bin Laden's personal bodyguards and one as his close "spiritual advisor," according to the report. Another is listed as the "probable 20th 9/11 hijacker" — a Saudi man named Mohamed al-Kahtani who made it to Orlando, Fla., before being deported just a month before the Sept. 11 attacks.

One detainee vowed to his captors that U.S. citizens in Saudi Arabia "will have their heads cut off." Another prisoner, this one with strong ties to Bin Laden, the Taliban and the Chechen mujahedin leadership, said of Americans everywhere: "Their day is coming…. One day I will enjoy sucking their blood."

The information gleaned from prisoners has been shared with U.S. intelligence agencies and top military officials. It also is designed to get the Pentagon message out to the public that the interrogations at Guantanamo Bay have been valuable and should not be interrupted by the courts.

Administration officials have maintained that it is more important to keep the interrogations on track to help prevent future terrorist strikes than it is to afford constitutional safeguards to non-U.S. citizens captured as enemy combatants. The classification was created by the administration to cover adversaries ranging from Taliban soldiers to Al Qaeda members and others suspected of threatening the United States.

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The Guantanamo task force summary said many of the detainees remained too dangerous for release.

For instance Al-Kahtani, the presumed 20th hijacker, told interrogators that more than 20 fellow detainees were Bin Laden bodyguards who all received terrorist training at the infamous Al Farouq camp in Afghanistan. Al-Kahtani is also the captive who identified another detainee as Bin Laden's spiritual advisor, what the report called "a significant role within Al Qaeda."

The summary also outlines possible new intelligence on terrorist financing.

A detainee who helped run an international humanitarian aid group said he spent $1 million between November 2000 and November 2001 in Afghanistan, but also "admittedly purchased $5,000 worth of weapons utilizing the organization's funds" to support the Taliban's fight against the Northern Alliance and its ally, the United States, according to the summary.

A second detainee described traveling to Cambodia for relief efforts at an orphanage there. The summary adds, "By his own admission this detainee [also] met [Bin Laden] as many as four times during July 2001 and is believed to have substantial ties to Al Qaeda."

More than a dozen captives had the U.S. cash equivalent of as much as $10,000 when they were apprehended. Two had more than $40,000.

And more than 10% of those housed at Guantanamo Bay, it turns out, have college degrees, many from U.S. schools, and were educated as physicians, pilots, engineers, translators and lawyers.

One detainee, who "has threatened guards and admits enjoying terrorizing Americans," studied at Texas A&M University for 18 months and also took courses in English at the University of Texas in Austin, the summary said.

The Aggies are not going to be happy to find that this guy had to go to Austin to learn English, but it raises the question of what he did for 18 months at Texas A&M? The story spends a good bit of pixels on "lawfare" aspects of the detainees' cases getting into the courts. It is wortht he read.