Chinese Mandarin - US war prisons legal vacuum for 14,000

WORLD / America

US war prisons legal vacuum for 14,000
(AP)
Updated: 2006-09-18 20:44

BAGHDAD, Iraq - In the few short years since the first shackled Afghan
shuffled off to Guantanamo, the US 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 UN secretary-general and the US Supreme
Court. But the bitterest words come from inside the system, the size of
several major US penitentiaries.

In this Jan. 11, 2002 file photo released by the US Navy, detainees in
orange jump suits sit in a holding area under the watchful eyes of
military police at Camp X-Ray at Naval Base Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, during
in-processing to the temporary detention facility. In the few short years
since the first shackled Afghan shuffled off to Guantanamo, the US
military has created a global network of overseas prisons, its islands of
high security keeping 14,000 detainees beyond the reach of established
law. [AP]

"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 US detention, the vast majority in Iraq.

Many say they were caught up in US 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," US 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 US detainee in Iraq "is detained because he poses a security threat
to the government of Iraq, the people of Iraq or coalition forces," said
US Army Lt. Col. Keir-Kevin Curry, a spokesman for US-led military
detainee operations in Iraq.

But dozens of ex-detainees, government ministers, lawmakers, human rights
activists, lawyers and scholars in Iraq, Afghanistan and the United
States said the detention system often is unjust and hurts the war on
terror by inflaming anti-Americanism in Iraq and elsewhere.

Building for the Long Term

Reports of extreme physical and mental abuse, symbolized by the notorious
Abu Ghraib prison photos of 2004, have abated as the Pentagon has
rejected torture-like treatment of the inmates. Most recently, on Sept.
6, the Pentagon issued a new interrogation manual banning forced
nakedness, hooding, stress positions and other abusive techniques.

The same day, President Bush said the CIA's secret outposts in the prison
network had been emptied, and 14 terror suspects from them sent to
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to face trial in military tribunals. The US Supreme
Court has struck down the tribunal system, however, and the White House
and Congress are now wrestling over the legal structure of such trials.

Living conditions for detainees may be improving as well. The US military
cites the toilets of Bagram, Afghanistan: In a cavernous old building at
that air base, hundreds of detainees in their communal cages now have
indoor plumbing and privacy screens, instead of exposed chamber pots.

Whatever the progress, small or significant, grim realities persist.

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.

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