In the run-up to the war on Iraq, a top Pentagon official pushed a highly unorthodox plan to deploy one of the U.S. government’s most controversial legal tactics—the designation of suspected terrorists as “enemy combatants”—in hopes of finding new evidence of alleged connections between Saddam Hussein’s regime and Al Qaeda, NEWSWEEK has learned.
The proposal, pressed by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, called for President George W. Bush to declare Ramzi Yousef, the convicted mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, as an enemy combatant in the war on terror. This would have allowed Yousef to be transferred from his cell at the U.S. Bureau of Prison’s “supermax” penitentiary in Florence, Colo., to a U.S. military installation.
Wolfowitz contended that U.S. military interrogators—unencumbered by the presence of Yousef’s defense lawyer—might be able to get the inmate to confess what he and the lawyer have steadfastly denied: that he was actually an Iraqi intelligence agent dispatched by Saddam to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993 as revenge for the first Persian Gulf War.
note the implication of this. wolfowitz advocated declaring yousef to be an "enemy combatant," not because he posed any imminent danger to the u.s. (the official reason for creating this unique designation) but for purely political reasons to sell the war on iraq to the american public.
note the other implication, specifically in this sentence: "unencumbered by the presence of Yousef’s defense lawyer—might be able to get the inmate to confess what he and the lawyer have steadfastly denied: that he was actually an Iraqi intelligence agent dispatched by Saddam to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993 as revenge for the first Persian Gulf War"
is it just me or does this implicitly mean that the u.s. government tortures enemy combatants to get them to say whatever the government wants them to say? maybe it's just me, but that seems to be the clear implication from that sentence.
i can't think of a clearer demonstration that when you allow a single official to unilaterally take away all of a person's rights, you're only inviting abuse. both this week and next week the supreme court is hearing arguments on the unlawful combatant issue. (this week was about one's in guantanamo and next week's arguments are about jose padilla, an american citizen declared an unlawful combatant). the legal implications of a bad decision in either those cases is truly frightening.
