[lit-ideas] Re: Relapsed Already
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2006 05:10:03 -0700
Amazing how so many Leftists can get so worked up about rights they aren't
losing and not be worried about Religious fanatics who have sworn to kill
them.
_____
From: lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Mike Geary
Sent: Monday, September 18, 2006 1:44 AM
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [lit-ideas] Relapsed Already
Amazing how some of us can be so worked up about "Islamists" and so blythely
unconcerned about the Stasification of America.
From today's NY Times.
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- 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
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/united_
nations/index.html?inline=nyt-org> U.N. secretary-general and the
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/s/supreme
_court/index.html?inline=nyt-org> U.S. Supreme Court. But the bitterest
words come from inside the system, the size of several major U.S.
penitentiaries....
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....
Human rights groups count dozens of detainee deaths for which no one has
been punished or that were never explained. The secret prisons -- unknown in
number and location -- remain available for future detainees. The new manual
banning torture doesn't cover CIA interrogators. And thousands of people
still languish in a limbo, deprived of one of common law's oldest rights,
habeas corpus, the right to know why you are imprisoned.
''If you, God forbid, are an innocent Afghan who gets sold down the river by
some warlord rival, you can end up at Bagram and you have absolutely no way
of clearing your name,'' said John Sifton of
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/h/human_r
ights_watch/index.html?inline=nyt-org> Human Rights Watch in New York. ''You
can't have a lawyer present evidence, or do anything organized to get
yourself out of there.''
The U.S. government has contended it can hold detainees until the ''war on
terror'' ends -- as it determines....
Last month they [the U. S. Army] opened a $60-million, state-of-the-art
detention center at Camp Cropper, near Baghdad's airport. The Army oversees
about 13,000 prisoners in Iraq at Cropper, Camp Bucca in the southern
desert, and Fort Suse in the Kurdish north.
Neither prisoners of war nor criminal defendants, they are just ''security
detainees'' held ''for imperative reasons of security,'' spokesman Curry
said, using language from an annex to a
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/s/securit
y_council/index.html?inline=nyt-org> U.N. Security Council resolution
authorizing the U.S. presence here.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-In-American-Hands.html?pagewanted=3
<http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-In-American-Hands.html?pagewanted=
3&_r=1> &_r=1
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