BAGHDAD, Iraq - 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 often interrogated around the clock, then
>released months or years later without apology,
>compensation or any word on why they were taken.
>
>Blow to war on terror?
>Defenders of the system 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 and
>lawmakers, human rights activists, lawyers and
>scholars in Iraq, Afghanistan and the United States
>interviewed by The Associated Press said the detention
>system often is unjust and hurts the war on terror by
>inflaming anti-Americanism in Iraq and elsewhere.
>
>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.
>
>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 prison, Afghanistan) and you have
>absolutely no way of clearing your name,” said John
>Sifton of Human Rights Watch in New York.
>
>The U.S. government has contended it can hold
>detainees until the “war on terror” ends — as it
>determines. “When we get up to ’forever,’ I think it
>will be tested” in court, said retired admiral John D.
>Hutson, former top lawyer for the U.S. Navy.
>
>Undefined prisoners
>In Iraq, the Army oversees about 13,000 prisoners at
>Camp Cropper near Baghdad airport, 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,” said command spokesman Curry,
>using language from an annex to a U.N. Security
>Council resolution authorizing the U.S. presence here.
>
>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.
>
>At the Justice Ministry, Deputy Minister Busho Ibrahim
>told the AP it has been “a daily request” that the
>detainees be brought under Iraqi authority.
>
>
>>
>
>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. 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 almost always
>men — or even whether they’re in American hands.
>
>Building a new hatred
>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.”
>
> Beyond legal reach
>
>The U.S. prison network abroad holds more than 14,000
>detainees: 13,390 in Iraq, an estimated 500 in
>Afghanistan and 455 in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Use the
>tabs at left to view the network's evolution.
>
>
>Al-Qaida, Taliban prisoners arrive at U.S. prison in
>Guantanamo Bay, Cuba
>
>
>
>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 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.
>
>Few charges filed
>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
>members. 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.
>
>The Navy is planning long-term at Guantanamo Bay,
>Cuba. 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.
>
>The clandestine jails are now empty, Bush announced,
>but will remain a future option for CIA detentions.
>
>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 are secret, she
>noted.
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