Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [306]
I instructed our commanders to develop a selection process to winnow down the number of detainees to be held for long periods. I wanted captured enemies to first be sorted out in the field according to predetermined intelligence and safety criteria rather than just being sent to Guantánamo. For all but a few of the most important and dangerous detainees, I wanted them to stay in the country and have the new Afghan government begin to exercise responsibility for them.37 I urged Powell and the State Department to encourage Afghans (and later Iraqis) to take on the responsibility for holding lower-level detainees captured in their country.38
I also called for an ongoing evaluation of the detainees. I knew we ran the risk of mistakenly releasing some people who might attack us in the future, just as is the case in our civilian prison system, but I saw this as a risk we had to take. Otherwise we risked alienating populations whose assistance we needed and do an injustice to individuals who were not actually involved in terrorism.
As the number of detainees at Gitmo rose, I pushed and prodded senior Pentagon officials on almost a weekly basis as to when and how detainees could be transferred to their home countries. “You have to get your arms around this detainee thing,” I wrote in one snowflake.39 “We need to get rid of more detainees,” I told Doug Feith five days later. “How do we do it?”40 And three months later I urgently wrote again, “I do want some people out of Guantánamo sent to their own countries. I really mean it. I want that done. I would like a report every two days on what is happening on this.”41
I repeatedly urged the State Department to try to persuade the detainees’ countries of origin to take responsibility for captured combatants under sensible conditions as soon as detainees began arriving in 2002.42 In the first several years the Guantánamo Bay detention facility was open, State Department officials had little success in pressing foreign governments on the matter. Most foreign governments did not want to take suspected terrorists any more than we wanted to hold them.* Despite my efforts to keep numbers down, Gitmo’s detainee population ballooned beyond 650 in its first two years.†
One of my biggest disappointments as secretary of defense was my inability to marshal the resources within our government to help persuade America and the world of the truth about Gitmo: The most heavily scrutinized detention facility in the world was also one of the most professionally run in history. Irresponsible charges leveled by human rights groups, by editorial pages, and, most shamefully, by members of the U.S. Congress who had every opportunity and reason to know better, unfairly tarnished Guantánamo’s reputation—and the reputations of our country and of the men and women of the American military who served at the facility. Even worse, the inaccurate allegations were exploited by terrorists to improve their fundraising and recruitment. This, in fact, was a component of the enemy’s propaganda strategy. In one al-Qaida training manual, the so-called Manchester document, the first lesson if captured was to “insist on proving that torture was inflicted on them by State Security before the judge.”43 Its second lesson was to “complain of mistreatment while in prison.”44 The hope, of course, was that some gullible people in the West would believe their repeated fabrications. Because of the stigma that clung to Gitmo, the terrorists found it an easy case to make.
In May 2005, Newsweek magazine wrote that U.S. guards at Gitmo had flushed a Koran down a toilet “in an attempt to rattle suspects” for interrogation purposes.45 Unnamed sources, Newsweek said, had verified the allegation. The story set off a firestorm of protest in a number