US War Prisons Legal Vacuum for 14,000
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Wed Sep 20 06:27:12 EDT 2006
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US War Prisons Legal Vacuum for 14,000
By Patrick Quinn / The Associated Press
Sunday 16 September 2006
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.
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 U.S. 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
U.S. 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.
"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
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.
"I don't think we've gotten to the question of how long," said
retired admiral John D. Hutson, former top lawyer for the U.S. Navy.
"When we get up to 'forever,' I think it will be tested" in court, he
said.
The Navy is planning long-term at Guantanamo. This fall it
expects to open a new, $30-million maximum-security wing at its
prison complex there, a concrete-and-steel structure replacing more
temporary camps.
In Iraq, Army jailers are a step ahead. Last month they 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 U.N. Security
Council resolution authorizing the U.S. presence here.
Questions of Law, Sovereignty
President Bush laid out the U.S. position in a speech Sept. 6.
"These are enemy combatants who are waging war on our nation," he
said. "We have a right under the laws of war, and we have an
obligation to the American people, to detain these enemies and stop
them from rejoining the battle."
But others say there's no need to hold these thousands outside of
the rules for prisoners of war established by the Geneva Conventions.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan declared last March that the
extent of arbitrary detention here is "not consistent with provisions
of international law governing internment on imperative reasons of
security."
Meanwhile, officials of Nouri al-Maliki's 4-month-old Iraqi
government say the U.S. detention system violates Iraq's national
rights.
"As long as sovereignty has transferred to Iraqi hands, the
Americans have no right to detain any Iraqi person," said Fadhil
al-Sharaa, an aide to the prime minister. "The detention should be
conducted only with the permission of the Iraqi judiciary."
At the Justice Ministry, Deputy Minister Busho Ibrahim told AP it
has been "a daily request" that the detainees be brought under Iraqi
authority.
There's no guarantee the Americans' 13,000 detainees would fare
better under control of the Iraqi government, which U.N. officials
say holds 15,000 prisoners.
But little has changed because of these requests. When the
Americans formally turned over Abu Ghraib prison to Iraqi control on
Sept. 2, it was empty but its 3,000 prisoners remained in U.S.
custody, shifted to Camp Cropper.
Life in Custody
The cases of U.S.-detained Iraqis are reviewed by a committee of
U.S. military and Iraqi government officials. The panel recommends
criminal charges against some, release for others. As of Sept. 9, the
Central Criminal Court of Iraq had put 1,445 on trial, convicting
1,252. In the last week of August, for example, 38 were sentenced on
charges ranging from illegal weapons possession to murder, for the
shooting of a U.S. Marine.
Almost 18,700 have been released since June 2004, the U.S.
command says, not including many more who were held and then freed by
local military units and never shipped to major prisons.
Some who were released, no longer considered a threat, later
joined or rejoined the insurgency.
The review process is too slow, say U.N. officials. Until they
are released, often families don't know where their men are - the
prisoners are usually men - or even whether they're in American hands.
Ex-detainee Mouayad Yasin Hassan, 31, seized in April 2004 as a
suspected Sunni Muslim insurgent, said he wasn't allowed to obtain a
lawyer or contact his family during 13 months at Abu Ghraib and
Bucca, where he was interrogated incessantly. When he asked why he
was in prison, he said, the answer was, "We keep you for security
reasons."
Another released prisoner, Waleed Abdul Karim, 26, recounted how
his guards would wield their absolute authority.
"Tell us about the ones who attack Americans in your
neighborhood," he quoted an interrogator as saying, "or I will keep
you in prison for another 50 years."
As with others, Karim's confinement may simply have strengthened
support for the anti-U.S. resistance. "I will hate Americans for the
rest of my life," he said.
As bleak and hidden as the Iraq lockups are, the Afghan situation
is even less known. Accounts of abuse and deaths emerged in
2002-2004, but if Abu Ghraib-like photos from Bagram exist, none have
leaked out. The U.S. military is believed holding about 500 detainees
- most Afghans, but also apparently Arabs, Pakistanis and Central
Asians.
The United States plans to cede control of its Afghan detainees
by early next year, five years after invading Afghanistan to
eliminate al-Qaida's base and bring down the Taliban government.
Meanwhile, the prisoners of Bagram exist in a legal vacuum like that
elsewhere in the U.S. detention network.
"There's been a silence about Bagram, and much less political
discussion about it," said Richard Bennett, chief U.N. human rights
officer in Afghanistan.
Freed detainees tell how in cages of 16 inmates they are
forbidden to speak to each other. They wear the same orange jumpsuits
and shaven heads as the terrorist suspects at Guantanamo, but lack
even the scant legal rights granted inmates at that Cuba base. In
some cases, they have been held without charge for three to four
years, rights workers say.
Guantanamo received its first prisoners from Afghanistan -
chained, wearing blacked-out goggles - in January 2002. A total of
770 detainees were sent there. Its population today of Afghans, Arabs
and others, stands at 455.
Described as the most dangerous of America's "war on terror"
prisoners, only 10 of the Guantanamo inmates have been charged with
crimes. Charges are expected against 14 other al-Qaida suspects flown
in to Guantanamo from secret prisons on Sept. 4.
Plans for their trials are on hold, however, because of a Supreme
Court ruling in June against the Bush administration's plan for
military tribunals.
The court held the tribunals were not authorized by the U.S.
Congress and violated the Geneva Conventions by abrogating prisoners'
rights. In a sometimes contentious debate, the White House and
Congress are trying to agree on a new, acceptable trial plan.
Since the court decision, and after four years of confusing
claims that terrorist suspects were so-called "unlawful combatants"
unprotected by international law, the Bush administration has taken
steps recognizing that the Geneva Conventions' legal and human rights
do extend to imprisoned al-Qaida militants. At the same time,
however, the new White House proposal on tribunals retains such
controversial features as denying defendants access to some evidence
against them.
In his Sept. 6 speech, Bush acknowledged for the first time the
existence of the CIA's secret prisons, believed established at
military bases or safehouses in such places as Egypt, Indonesia and
eastern Europe. That network, uncovered by journalists, had been
condemned by U.N. authorities and investigated by the Council of
Europe.
The clandestine jails are now empty, Bush announced, but will
remain a future option for CIA detentions and interrogation.
Louise Arbour, U.N. human rights chief, is urging Bush to abolish
the CIA prisons altogether, as ripe for "abusive conduct." The CIA's
techniques for extracting information from prisoners still remain
secret, she noted.
Meanwhile, the U.S. government's willingness to resort to
"extraordinary rendition," transferring suspects to other nations
where they might be tortured, appears unchanged.
Prosecutions and Memories
The exposure of sadistic abuse, torture and death at Abu Ghraib
two years ago touched off a flood of courts-martial of mostly
lower-ranking U.S. soldiers. Overall, about 800 investigations of
alleged detainee mistreatment in Iraq and Afghanistan have led to
action against more than 250 service personnel, including 89
convicted at courts-martial, U.S. diplomats told the United Nations
in May.
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 only 14 of 34 cases has anyone been punished for the confirmed
or suspected killings of detainees, the New York-based Human Rights
First reports. The stiffest sentence in a torture-related death has
been five months in jail. The group reported last February that in
almost half of 98 detainee deaths, the cause was either never
announced or reported as undetermined.
Looking back, the United States overreacted in its treatment of
detainees after Sept. 11, said Anne-Marie Slaughter, a noted American
scholar of international law.
It was understandable, the Princeton University dean said, but
now "we have to restore a balance between security and rights that is
consistent with who we are and consistent with our security needs."
Otherwise, she said, "history will look back and say that we took
a dangerous and deeply wrong turn."
Back here in Baghdad, at the Alawi bus station, a gritty, noisy
hub far from the meeting rooms of Washington and Geneva, women gather
with fading hopes whenever a new prisoner release is announced.
As she watched one recent day for a bus from distant Camp Bucca,
one mother wept and told her story.
"The Americans arrested my son, my brother and his friend," said
Zahraa Alyat, 42. "The Americans arrested them October 16, 2005. They
left together and I don't know anything about them."
The bus pulled up. A few dozen men stepped off, some blindfolded,
some bound, none with any luggage, none with familiar faces.
As the distraught women straggled away once more, one
ex-prisoner, 18-year-old Bilal Kadhim Muhssin, spotted U.S. troops
nearby.
"Americans," he muttered in fear. "Oh, my God, don't say that
name," and he bolted for a city bus, and freedom.
--------
The Associated Press staff in Baghdad and AP writers Andrew
Selsky in San Juan, Puerto Rico; Matthew Pennington in Kabul,
Afghanistan; Anne Plummer Flaherty in Washington, and Charles J.
Hanley in New York contributed to this report.
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