The Dark Side: Jane Mayer on the Inside...
AMY GOODMAN: Jane Mayer, you also report that back in 2002, the CIA warned that up to a third of the prisoners at Guantanamo may have been imprisoned by mistake.
JANE MAYER: Isn’t that—to me, this is one of the amazing anecdotes in this book. It’s not the ACLU. It’s not, you know, some kind of outside human rights group. It’s the CIA that warned the government. They sent—the CIA sent a particular expert down to Guantanamo in the summer of 2002 to figure out what’s going on. Why are we not getting better intelligence out of these detainees down in Guantanamo? And he was an Arab speaker and an expert in Islamic fundamentalism.
He interviewed a number of the detainees in Guantanamo, and he came back saying, “Bad news. The reason we’re not getting better intelligence, part of the reasoning anyway, is that about a third of the people are innocent.” From what he could tell, they were just mistakes. They were locked up—you know, they were just brought in by—herded in by mistake. And—
AMY GOODMAN: Mistake, like, for example, bounty hunters.
JANE MAYER: Right, sure. Bounty hunters who were—you know, and people who were put—there were people put in to—because of personal grudges. There was one—one detainee was there because he had been a teacher of somebody and given them a bad grade, and the person that he’d flunked pointed him out as a terrorist, and he was rounded up.
So there were all kinds of stories, but—and it’s not to say, you know, that there aren’t people down there who are probably serious suspects. It’s just that they mix them all in together, which was a consequence of when they got rid of the Geneva Conventions, they got rid of the screening process. And so, there was—it’s just kind of collective guilt instead of individual guilt. They didn’t give people a chance to say whether they were innocent or not.
Jul 18th