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| U.S. War Prisons Legal Vacuum for 14,000 |
| 2006-09-17 |
| It's a sob story, but has lots of interesting details. In the few short years since the first shackled Afghan shuffled off to Guantanamo, the U.S. military has created a global network of overseas prisons, its islands of high security keeping 14,000 detainees beyond the reach of established law. Disclosures of torture and long-term arbitrary detentions have won rebuke from leading voices including the U.N. secretary-general and the U.S. Supreme Court. But the bitterest words come from inside the system, the size of several major U.S. penitentiaries. "It was hard to believe I'd get out," Baghdad shopkeeper Amjad Qassim al-Aliyawi told The Associated Press after his release - without charge - last month. "I lived with the Americans for one year and eight months as if I was living in hell." Captured on battlefields, pulled from beds at midnight, grabbed off streets as suspected insurgents, tens of thousands now have passed through U.S. detention, the vast majority in Iraq. Many say they were caught up in U.S. military sweeps, often interrogated around the clock, then released months or years later without apology, compensation or any word on why they were taken. Seventy to 90 percent of the Iraq detentions in 2003 were "mistakes," U.S. officers once told the international Red Cross. Defenders of the system, which has only grown since soldiers' photos of abuse at Abu Ghraib shocked the world, say it's an unfortunate necessity in the battles to pacify Iraq and Afghanistan, and to keep suspected terrorists out of action. Every U.S. detainee in Iraq "is detained because he poses a security threat to the government of Iraq, the people of Iraq or coalition forces," said U.S. Army Lt. Col. Keir-Kevin Curry, a spokesman for U.S.-led military detainee operations in Iraq. |
| Posted by:Anonymoose |
| #5 The kooks are blowing up about 50 innocent civilians per diem - about the best possible case for the suspention of the Writ of Habeas Corpus I have ever heard of. Certainly a better case than Abraham Lincoln had. |
| Posted by: Super Hose 2006-09-17 23:22 |
| #4 "Americans," he muttered in fear. "Oh, my God, don't say that name," and he bolted for a city bus, and freedom. Now if we could get the rest of the Arab world in that state... |
| Posted by: Pappy 2006-09-17 16:32 |
| #3 I can report that the AP writer who wrote this has expressed, in what seem to be frequent unguarded moments, exactly the sort of mind-boggling, anti-American, morally inverted sentiments one assumes but secretly hopes are not characteristic of the reporters who churn out this sort of thing. One would need lots of space and patience and time to catalogue the distortions and errors here, but this article does serve as a nice compendium of the slander that passes for "journalism" regarding US detention policies. No doubt the detention situation is fairly assed up, but by historic standards it's not bad at all, and of course one can completely dismiss the baseless "legal" arguments state or implied in the article. My favorite is the preposterous and illiterate yet breezy reference to habeas corpus - which of course is utterly irrelevant in a war-time detention operation against war criminals (which, ipso facto, the "insurgents" are - oh, that's if you take the Geneva Conventions seriously). I know it's a tired theme of mine, but the Conventions are being ripped to shreds by the "critics," the truly bizarre and laughable US Supreme Court and its risible hallucination on Common Article 3, and even by the ICRC, which can't bring itself to imagine that the most significant change in warfare in centuries merits, oh, a wee little examination of the Conventions that naturally took absolutely no account whatever of such warfare. I blame Bush - for his administration's five-year silence in the face of relentless, growing, high-impact distortion. The damage this administration is doing to the US, and to the civilized world, by refusing to even be a factor in discussion of US policy and world events, will be arguably its worst legacy. |
| Posted by: Verlaine in Iraq 2006-09-17 16:15 |
| #2 Rob - exactly, because ultimately anything that goes wrong anywhere on the planet (and possibly beyond) is George Bush's fault. |
| Posted by: DMFD 2006-09-17 14:14 |
| #1 Critics protest that penalties have been too soft and too little has been done, particularly in tracing inhumane interrogation methods from the far-flung islands of the overseas prison system back to policies set by high-ranking officials. In other words, the critics are whining that the people in charge -- who HAVEN'T approved any real abuse of anyone -- haven't been punished for crimes they didn't commit. |
| Posted by: Rob Crawford 2006-09-17 13:04 |