User:Geo Swan/Guantanamo/How do we know which documents were used to prepare the OARDEC memos?

How do we know which documents were used to prepare the OARDEC memos?

In a discussion on the reliable sources noticeboard User:Iqinn asked me to explain:

1. How I knew OARDEC relied on documents drafted by other agencies;
2. How I knew that some of the documents they relied upon were also secondary documents themselves, not raw, undigested field reports;
3. How I knew that the memos were the result of teamwork, not single authors.

The short answer is I know this from the many documents I read, including other OARDEC documents, documents published during the captives' habeas corpus petitions and their DTA appeals, and press reports of the same, and from whistleblower Stephen Abraham.

Stephen Abraham is a reservist, who is a lawyer in civilian life. But, unlike many lawyers who serve as JAG officers in uniform he specialized in intelligence. Although he is a reservist, he served several active hitches, as an intelligence officer, during the 1991 Gulf War, in Kosovo, and during the invasion of Iraq. He served a six month hitch with OARDEC, when it was most active in late 2004 and early 2005.

He sat on a Tribunal panel -- one that was only allowed to review a single captive's status. This panel determined the captive in question had not been an enemy combatant after all. Following this determination he was reassigned to serve as a liason with the intelligence community, as part of a team drafting memos.

We know what his role in OARDEC was because, after hearing his former superior testify

before Congress he decided to draft an affidavit about his experience with OARDEC. Subsequently he has given a number of interviews, including on nationwide mainstream American news shows.

Over on the reliable sources noticeboard User:Iqinn wrote: ""They [OARDEC] can not be a secondary source for their own findings." I suggest this assertion incorporates serious misconceptions -- as the OARDEC memos are based on analysis and synthesis of documents prepared by other agencies, not upon their own documents.

User:Iqinn asked how I know what documents the OARDEC author rely upon.

1. Because other OARDEC documents explicitly listed them. The ARB decision memos, drafted by each Board, after their hearings, were considered classified, and were heavily redacted many of them did leave the section headings above the sections in the clear, including the section headings above the sections that discussed the documents from the DASD-DA, State Dept, FBI, CIA, CITF, JTF-GTMO -- and sometime SouthComm and other agencies.
2. Because the captive's habeas proceedings have resulted in the release of documents that make clear which other agencies documents were relied upon.
3. Whistleblower Stephen Abraham has written about what it was like to serve within OARDEC.
4. There was a period of approximately two years, between the passage of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, and the Supreme Court's ruling in Boumediene v. Bush, when the captives' habeas corpus appeals were shut down, when they had to fall back upon the more limited review made available by the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005. The press coverage of these DTA appeals described how the DoJ's position was that the Judges reviewing the appeals should rely entirely on the documents in classified CSRT dossiers. The DoJ argued that the Summary of Evidence memo, and the other dozen, or two dozen documents in the classified dossier were all that the original officers who sat on the Board had available to them, and they were all that the Judges needed to review, to make a determination as to whether the officers on the original CSRT Board had reached the right conclusion. The DoJ claimed that they could not supply the background documents the OARDEC authors had relied upon, without months of effort. The DC appeals court ruled that they had to be provided with all the source documents. As the DoJ predicted, this imposed a huge delay. Anyhow, I relied, in part, on my reading of the press coverage of this controversy for my statement about which other agencies supplied documents.

Iqinn asks how I know that the memos were team efforts? Stephen Abraham was a member of the team that drafted the memos.

Abraham was highly critical of the whole OARDEC process. He went on record with his opinion that his colleagues were insufficiently trained and experienced in intelligence. Given that he was experienced in intelligence his opinion carried a lot of weight in the conclusions I drew personally.

But, I believe it is important if we are going to fully comply with WP:NPOV, to set aside the conclusions we draw personally. I recognize that for some readers Abraham is just one opinion, that he is a possible malcontent whose opinion is not to be relied upon due to a personality conflict with his boss.

Over on the WP:RSN discussion many respondents seem to be asserting that the OARDEC documents were unreliable due to what might be called "common sense" analysis, where we know the OARDEC documents aren't reliable, because we know some of the captives were innocent, etc.

I don't think our decisions of what is and isn't reliable should be based on what we think we know.

The great Will Rogers is reported to have said "It is not what we don't know that gets us in trouble, it is what we know that just ain't so."

Consider fringe beliefs, like Homeopathy. There are people out there who would like the wikipedia to give a more sympathetic, (less neutral), coverage of wikipedia. They know that homeopathy really works. Well, our policies, when they work, keep followers of Homeopathy from placing anything in Homeopathy related articles that isn't neutrally covering an WP:RS.

But, the flip side of this is that those of us who personally think Homeopathy is nonsense, nevertheless have to be fair to its followers, when they manage to find WP:RS that talk about Homeopathy. We can't arbitrarily dismiss references because we know that what they assert is incorrect.

There are occasions when both "common sense" and accepted scientific belief, are superceded. Consider continental drift -- this was once considered a crackpot fringe belief, at odds with both common sense and accepted scientific belief. If we were working on a wikipedia that predated the general acceptance of continental drift I'd like us to be fair to the references that supported the theory. I think it is a feather in our cap when the records shows we were fair to what was considered a fringe belief, when new evidence emerges, and that theory enters the mainstream. This is what our policy requires.

I have read all the Guantanamo captives documents, all their allegation memos, and all the transcripts. I read them before many of these captive were repatriated, or before we knew they had been repatriated. I read Said Ali al Shiri's documents, and I thought he was probably an aid worker, like he said. There were what seemed to me to be some discrepancies in the allegations against him. Well, he has since emerged as the 2nd in command of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.