There are 14 names in the confidential Red Cross report that surfaced last week on the CIA's "ill treatment" of detainees.

But you will not find in it the name of Manadel al-Jamadi, an Iraqi who was picked up by U.S. Navy SEALS in Baghdad and interrogated by the CIA.

That's because Jamadi died in the care of Mark Swanner, a 44-year-old CIA interrogator who battered the prisoner at the ghastly Abu Ghraib in 2003. 

With the latest attempt to resettle Guantanamo prisoners stymied in court, a group of prominent American law enforcement, military, diplomatic, judicial and religious figures is urging President Obama to appoint a non-partisan commission to study the detention, treatment, and transfer of terrorist suspects.

A story in Sunday's Washington Post depicting Guantanamo prisoner files in "disarray" is wrong, says the former Pentagon official in charge of terrorist detainee affairs.

According to the Jan. 25 account, Charles D. "Cully" Stimson, who served as deputy assistant defense secretary for detainee affairs in 2006-2007, "said he had persistent problems in attempts to assemble all information on individual cases."

Only "threats to recommend the release or transfer of a detainee" persuaded the CIA to "cough up a sentence or two," Stimson was quoted as saying.

But in a brief interview to double-check his statement Monday afternoon, Stimson maintained, "I never said they were in disarray."

Pentagon Counterterror Teams Go Deep  

It's interesting to speculate on why the expanded operations of Pentagon counterterror teams surfaced in the New York Times today. But one of them has to be that the noses of CIA and State Department officials remain severely out of joint from an initiative launched right after the  9/11 attacks by President Bush and then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

"Shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Bush issued a classified order authorizing the C.I.A. to kill or capture Qaeda militants around the globe," write Times reporters Eric Schmitt and Mark Mazzetti.

"By 2003, American intelligence agencies and the military had developed a much deeper understanding of Al Qaeda's extensive global network, and Mr. Rumsfeld pressed hard to unleash the military's vast firepower against militants outside the combat zones of Iraq and Afghanistan."

According to the Times, a 2004 order identified "15 to 20 countries, including Syria, Pakistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and several other Persian Gulf states, where Qaeda militants were believed to be operating or to have sought sanctuary, a senior administration official said."  

Soon enough, American ambassadors, who are supposed to be the top U.S. official in a foreign country, grew increasingly annoyed by Pentagon "cowboys" zipping in and out, congressional committees heard.

But if only because the State Department, and the CIA, couldn't keep DoD out of their sandboxes, they have been supporting the operations, the Times said.

A number of CIA veterans, however, say that the military teams are too often ill equipped for the missions, in terms of language abilities and knowledge of local customs and mores.

And they wonder what will happen when - inevitably, they say - a solider in mufti is caught red-handed in a place like Pakistan or Turkey, where nationalist feelings run high. Show trials - and the threat of executions (not to mention waterboarding) - are not out of the question.

Not that CIA assassins or kidnappers would be treated any better - or  know their way around a foreign country better -- than a veteran Army Special Forces operative, they also concede.

In any event, there's plenty of work to go around to keep everybody busy.

"It is far too easy to criticize CIA," a longtime Special Forces and Delta operative told me last year, "but all their renditions have resulted in far less than 100 detentions.  For an outfit like al Qaeda, which trained tens of thousands in Afghanistan, that doesn't amount to many at all."

Manchurian Candidates, Saudi Style

Tucked into the back of Sunday's New York Times Magazine is a fascinating piece on the Saudi way of dealing with former al Qaeda operatives (some captures, some inherited from Guantanamo).

"Brainwashing lite," the Chinese might call it. Or "re-education," what the North Vietnamese termed the communist dogma they poured into the heads of the southern brethren they defeated in 1975, usually in brutal work camps.

The Saudies have a kinder, gentler way. They board their charges in comfortable seaside dormitories, give them electronic toys and stipends, and talk them out of jihad by challenging their religious rationales for choosing guns and bombs.   

It seems to work, by the students' accounts, anyway.

Writer Katherine Zoepf, who visited the classes, quotes Bernard Haykel, a professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton, who says the methods are "consistent with Saudi history, in that you try through nonviolent means to cajole, to bribe, to buy off the opposition."

If lying to FBI agents was enough to send Scooter Libby to jail, why isn't it enough to prosecute Alberto Gonzales?

Despite strong evidence in a today's Justice Department report that the former attorney general lied to federal investigators probing his careless handling of highly classified documents, the department declined to prosecute.

Indeed, initial news reports on the Inspector General's findings didn't even mention the evidence of perjury, focusing instead on Gonzales's "mishandling" of notes and more-than-Top Secret documents relating to the administration's secret wiretapping and terrorist detention programs,

Who's going to get upset about that?

Who doesn't "mishandle" -- i.e., misplace, loose, forget where they left -- the tuition check, the gas bill, keys, glasses, the grocery list, and yes, even take-home work  -- at least once in awhile?

To be sure, the kind of information Gonzales was shlepping between his office, home, limousines, airplanes and, for all we know, the local Safeway and the dry cleaner (or maybe he left it in the car?) was so sensitive its loss "could cause irreparable injury to the United States or be used to advantage by a foreign nation," according to the IG report.

At one point, according to White House counsel Fred Fielding, quoted in the IG report, Gonzales "wasn't sure where they were."  The AG duly confessed to the IG that he was "a little confused about where the notes were."  His briefcase wasn't always locked, he told investigators, and he didn't use a government safe in his house because . . .he had forgotten the combination.
    
He's only human.

For such trifles, the Justice Department "scolded" Gonzales, as the Associated Press characterized the IG's finger-wagging, and left it at that.

But the IG report shows that Gonzales did more than "mishandle" his notes, which included operational details on what he himself, somewhat ironically, called -- after it had leaked -- "one of the most highly protected [programs] in the United States ... a very, very secretive, protected program," and correspondence between congressional Intelligence Committee leaders and CIA chief Gen. Michael Hayden. 

In a statement that doesn't pass the laugh test, Gonzales told IG investigators he didn't know the documents were secret.

Gonzales said that he was unaware of the classification level and compartmented nature of the NSA program he referenced in the notes. Gonzales also stated he did not recall thinking that the notes themselves were classified.

But the IG found the smoking gun -- in Gonzales's hand, no less.

The envelope containing documents related to the NSA surveillance program bore the handwritten markings, "TOP SECRET - EYES ONLY - ARG" [the attorney general's initials] followed by an abbreviation for the SCI codeword for the program.

Inside the envelope, moreover, were "documents relating to a detainee interrogation program," which were all classified with cover sheets and markings in the top and bottom margins, as Top Secret/Sensitive Classified Information.

And yet Gonzales told the IG investigators "that he was unaware of the classification level and compartmented nature of the NSA program he referenced in the notes."

That is patently absurd.

Poor Scooter Libby, the national security aide to Vice President Cheney, who suffered million-dollar legal bills and lifetime disbarment for a perjury conviction related to the relatively trifling Valerie Plame affair, only to be snatched from the jaws of prison by a pardon from President Bush.   

Today, the Justice Department revealed that it had saved everybody the bother in the case of Alberto Gonzales.

It just let him skate.

(UPDATE: Inspector General Office spokesman Paul Martin called back late Wednesday afternoon after this blog item was filed and left a voice mail message to call back. Because of a medical appointment, I was not able to retrieve his message for almost 24 hours. When I finally reached him Thursday, he said he would have "no comment" for this story. I regret the delay, which had left the misimpression that the department had not bothered to reply.-js) 

Air Force Col. Morris D. Davis, who resigned last year after two years as chief prosecutor at Guantanamo, today described the military commissions system as fatally "tainted" by politics and designed to produce guilty verdicts, no matter what the costs.       

The possibility of the system delivering "credible verdicts is doubtful," Davis said Tuesday in a remarkable interview on NPR's Diane Rehm Show.

"The process has been so tainted, such a black eye to the country, that we have to make every effort possible to have an open trial...

"I'm afraid that what has happened, though, is that we've had a rush, in order to get things done before the election, rather than taking the time -- and getting evidence declassified in order to have an open trial is a frustrating, time consuming process, but in my view a necessary step if these things are going to have credibility.

Morris said the politicization of the system began at the top, with the appointment of  Susan Crawford, a "political appointee" with no time in uniform, to run the military commissions.

"A sobbing Canadian teenager begged for help as he was interrogated at the US 'war on terror' camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in the very first video glimpse of any such questioning released on Tuesday," AFP reports.

The video was posted online by attorneys for terror suspect Omar Khadr, who is shown being questioned at the prison by Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) agents in February, 2003. He was 16 years old.

Khadr, accused of killing a US soldier in a firefight in Afghanistan, has been held at Gitmo since his arrest in 2002, when he was 15 years old.

"Help me, help me, help me," Khadr says in the video, weeping, holding his head in his hands.