Obama Planning To Release Taliban Leaders

Top Obama administration officials briefed eight senior Senate leaders Tuesday on a pending deal to transfer as many as five Taliban prisoners from the U.S. detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to Qatar.

The Cable staked out the classified briefing in the basement of the Capitol building Tuesday afternoon. The eight senators who attended the briefing were Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid(D-NV), Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Senate Intelligence Committee heads Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), Senate Armed Services chiefs Carl Levin (D-MI) and John McCain (R-AZ), and Senate Foreign Relations Committee leaders John Kerry (D-MA) and Richard Lugar (R-IN).

The identities of the administration briefers were not shared, but we were told it was a high-level interagency briefing team.

All of the senators refused to discuss the contents of the briefing as they exited the secure briefing room in the Senate Visitors’ Center. But Levin and McCain both discussed the issue in question before entering the briefing, namely the administration’s negotiations with the Taliban over transferring the Taliban prisoners into Qatari custody.

Levin told reporters Tuesday that the briefing was “about the ongoing Taliban reconciliation efforts.” Levin is open to the idea of transferring Taliban members to Qatar, but said the devil was in the details.

“It depends on what assurances we have from the [Qatari] government that they are not going to be released,” Levin said. “But I also think the Afghans have to be very much involved in any discussions and any process. They weren’t for a while.”

“We’re not releasing them. As I understand it they will be imprisoned in Qatar,” Levin continued. But can the Qataris be trusted to keep them behind bars? “That’s the question,” Levin said.

Levin said he didn’t know what the United States was getting in exchange for transferring the prisoners to Qatar, where the Taliban are preparing to open an office. But he said the possible transfer was not a significant concession to the Taliban, provided the prisoners remain in custody. “If that’s what [the Taliban] are getting, it’s not much of a gain [for them], going from one prison to another.”

McCain, talking to reporters before the briefing, lashed out at the idea that the prisoners would be moved to Qatar in a possible exchange for a Taliban statement renouncing international violence, as has been reported.

“The whole idea that they’re going to ‘transfer’ these detainees in exchange for a statement by the Taliban? It is really, really bizarre,” McCain said. “This whole thing is highly questionable because the Taliban know we are leaving. I know many experts who would say they are rope-a-doping us.”

McCain said that Congress probably can’t stop the administration from going ahead with the transfer if that’s what it decides.

“I don’t think right now we can do anything about it, but these people were in positions of authority. One of them was responsible for deaths of several Americans,” said McCain, referring to reportsthat the prisoners being considered for transfer include Mullah Khair Khowa, a former interior minister, Noorullah Noori, a former governor in northern Afghanistan, and former army commander Mullah Fazl Akhund.

Is McCain confident that the Qataris will keep the Taliban prisoners locked up? “No I am not. And the Taliban don’t think so either, otherwise the Taliban wouldn’t want them transferred,” he said.

McCain said he was last briefed about the potential deal in December.

Some of the confusion about the negotiations was caused when the State Department’s Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Marc Grossman said on Jan. 22 that talks with the Taliban were a long way off and that no deal to transfer prisoners had been finalized. Grossman was in Kabul when he made the statements and he traveled to Qatar the next day.

On Jan. 28, several former members of the Taliban government said that talks with the United States had begun over the prisoner transfer. “Currently there are no peace talks going on,”Maulavi Qalamuddin, the former minister of “vice and virtue” for the Taliban, told The New York Times. “The only thing is the negotiations over release of Taliban prisoners from Guantánamo, which is still under discussion between both sides in Qatar.”

At Tuesday morning’s open hearing of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Chambliss pressed Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director David Petraeus, and National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) Director Matthew Olsento confirm that the Taliban under consideration for transfer were still viewed as too dangerous to release by the U.S. intelligence community.

“It appears from these reports that in exchange for transferring detainees who had been determined to be too dangerous to transfer by the administration’s own Guantánamo review task force, we get little to nothing in return. Apparently, the Taliban will not have to stop fighting our troops and won’t even have to stop bombing them with IEDs,” Chambliss said. “I have also heard nothing from the IC[intelligence community] that suggests that the assessments on the threat posed by these detainees have changed. I want to state publicly as strongly as I can that we should not transfer these detainees from Guantánamo.”

Clapper said he stood by the original intelligence community assessments, which concluded that the Taliban prisoners at Guantanamo were too dangerous to be released.

“I don’t think anyone in the administration harbors any illusions about the potential here,” said Clapper. “And of course, part and parcel of such a decision if it were finally made would be the actual determination of where these detainees might go and the conditions in which they would be controlled or surveilled.”

Olsen, who led the review task force that evaluated the Guantanamo detainees in 2009, confirmed that the 5 prisoners being considered for transfer “were deemed too dangerous to release and who could not be prosecuted,” but Olsen said he had not evaluated those five prisoners since then.

Petraeus said that his staff had been asked for a more recent evaluation of the five prisoners and that the CIA completed risk analyses based on different possible conditions for the Taliban prisoners’ transfer.

“In fact, our analyst did provide assessments of the five and the risks presented by various scenarios by which they could be sent somewhere, not back to Afghanistan or Pakistan, and then based on the various mitigating measures that could be implemented, to ensure that they could not return to militant activity,” Petraeus said.

{The Cable/Matzav.com Newscenter}