By Patrick Quinn
The Associated Press
September 18, 2006
BAGHDAD, iraq . During the few short years since the first shackled
Afghan shuffled off to Guantanamo Bay, 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 drawn
rebuke from leading voices, including the U.N. secretary-general and
the U.S. Supreme Court. But the most bitter 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 said 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 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.
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 detainee in Iraq "is detained because
he poses a security threat to the government of Iraq, the people of
Iraq or coalition forces," said 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 prisons -- their
numbers and locations are secret -- remain available for future use.
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 Adm.
John D. Hutson, former top lawyer for the U.S. Navy.
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 is 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 four-month-old Iraqi
government say the U.S. detention system violates Iraq's national
rights.
At the Justice Ministry, Deputy Minister Busho Ibrahim said 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.
One 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 hidden as the Iraq lockups are, the Afghan situation is even less
known. Accounts of abuse and deaths emerged in 2002-04. The U.S.
military is thought to be holding about 500 detainees -- most
Afghans, but also apparently Arabs, Pakistanis and Central Asians.
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.
Charges are expected against 14 other al-Qaida suspects flown to
Guantanamo from secret prisons on Sept. 4. Their trials are on hold,
however, because of a Supreme Court ruling against the Bush
administration's plan for military tribunals.
The court held the tribunals were not authorized by the 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 an acceptable trial plan.
Since the court decision, and after four years of confusing claims
that terrorist suspects were "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 for the long term at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. This
fall it expects to open a $30 million maximum-security wing, a
concrete-and-steel structure replacing more temporary camps.
In Iraq, Army jailers are a step ahead. Last month they opened a $60
million detention center at Camp Cropper, near Baghdad's airport.
Copyright C 2006, South Florida Sun-Sentinel
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