Newsweek: WH to CIA lawyers re: Gitmo detainees: "...we don’t know what to do with these guys"

[sabra]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17630160/site/newsweek/

<snip>

The issue that the administration confronted after 9/11 was what to do with evil people like KSM. The Bush team decided that this was a war rather than a criminal matter—and a war unlike any other. Therefore, none of the previous rules of war, like the Geneva Convention protections, applied, in their view. That left culprits like KSM in a legal limbo for four years while they were ferried around to secret prisons, long after their intelligence value had been milked dry (a process that by the estimate of most interrogators should take no longer than a year). Even some CIA officials were privately upset by this, fearing that the agency would be the fall guy in the end (they were right). “Where’s the off button?” one retired CIA official said to me two years ago, in February 2005, before the military tribunals that KSM and others are being judged at—at long last—were created. Lawyers for the agency “asked the White House for direction on how to dispose of these detainees back when they asked for (interrogation) guidance. The answer was, ‘We’ll worry about that later.’ Now, we don’t know what to do with these guys.”

[izzie]

1. I guess I will laugh. What madness in the WH.

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