When you do something in a panic, you do it badly.
As always, take this Washington Post story with a grain of salt. It's hard to tell, from one short account, whether Mohammed Mansour Jabarah was a really good liar, or his jailers really wanted to believe in his cooperation.
The gullibility of FBI agents, or the guile of someone with serious Al Qaeda connections, may not be the most revealing part of the story. Instead, the year US officials took Jabarah into custody, 2002, is telling. That's when American military and intelligence forces in Afghanistan were vacuuming up a dubious collection of "enemy combatants," to be dumped at Guantanamo Bay for the indefinite future. Most of those jailed were no threat to the United States, not being part of Al Qaeda or the Taliban at all. However, given the climate of the times, US officials clearly thought it was better to err--massively, inhumanely err--on the side of "caution."
Meanwhile, someone willing to talk, like Jabarah, got special attention, got rock star treatment, by comparison. Unfortunately, while he was enjoying life in a minimum security facility and glad-handing his captors, he was also collecting home-made weapons and planning to kill his new-found FBI friends.
Mull that over for a moment: while innocent captives in Guantanamo Bay couldn't even speak to a lawyer, a nasty piece of work like Jebarah gets a dangerous degree of special treatment. That's how the United States kicked off the "War on Terror." Six years later, Guantanamo Bay is still in business.
I'm beginning to wonder if the only proper reaction to these stories is amusement -- the kind of scathing derision that, in the end, wears away the legitimacy of the garrison, er, "security" apparatus.
On a brighter note, the WaPo has departed from its usual standards and introduced some sanity into its op-ed page: Andrew Bacevich on the latest "surge" disinfo.
Posted by: sglover | 01/19/2008 at 22:32