Peter Jennings Visits Guantanamo Base

June 25, 2004 — -- Two and a half years ago, the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay was little more than an aggravation to the regime of Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Today, Guantanamo Bay has become one of the most controversial facets of America's war on terror.

The day after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that shook the nation to its core, President Bush declared war on the terrorists who had done it. In an address to the nation, the president said, "Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done."

Less than a month later, the president ordered the United States to attack Afghanistan — to destroy Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terror network and its Taliban protectors.

The campaign against al Qaeda thrust the country into an unprecedented type of war. In Washington, the Department of Justice and the White House began to grapple with the legal dilemmas of fighting an enemy that did not operate in the open or abide by the recognized rules of war.

On Nov. 13, 2001, with no advance notice to Congress, President Bush signed a military order that gave the Pentagon the power to try, sentence and even execute anyone he identifies as an "illegal combatant" — a suspected terrorist who had violated the laws of war.

By the end of that month, the last Taliban stronghold in Afghanistan fell to the Afghan Northern Alliance and U.S. forces. Thousands of men surrendered to the Northern Alliance, and some of them were handed over to the Americans.

Lt. Col. Anthony Christino, a 20-year veteran of Army intelligence who was not directly involved in the Afghan campaign, says investigators would have had difficulty in determining which men posed threats to U.S. interests. "There are any number of legitimate reasons why someone of Arab descent may have been in Afghanistan. And there are also Arabs who were clearly in Afghanistan training to become terrorists. So, the question becomes, how do you discern one from the other," Christino said.

Mark Jacobson, a member of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's prisoner policy team, said the administration had been preparing to hold tribunals for the men who surrendered in Afghanistan back in September and October of 2001, which, he said, is standard procedure for the military when it captures persons on the battlefield.

But based on the president's military order, everyone taken into U.S. custody had already been deemed an illegal combatant. The tribunals never took place.

"Some people were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time," Jacobson said. "A lot of them were the flotsam and jetsam of the battlefield. That's what happens on a battlefield."

And Christino noted that no U.S. official wanted to let any potential terrorist slip through their fingers. "You don't want to be the one who had in his or her custody the next hijacker."

Getting information from the men who surrendered meant getting them away from the battlefield to a place where U.S. officials could interrogate them — Guantanamo Bay became the designated base.