Tom Hayden: New York Times Lends Legitimacy To Pentagon Policy on Iraq Inmate Abuse

[babylonsister]

New York Times Lends Legitimacy To Pentagon Policy on Iraq Inmate Abuse

Posted June 2, 2008 | 06:13 PM (EST)


The New York Times today failed to accurately describe the Iraqi prison and judiciary systems while reporting that "the American-run detention system in Iraq has improved, even its critics say."

The Times' story is based on a guided tour provided to one of its reporters, Alyssa Rubin, who marveled at detainees sitting in the sunshine reading the Koran, playing volleyball and making yogurt. But these scenes appear to be Pentagon window-dressing for a system which is deeply flawed.

It is unclear who Rubin's unnamed "human rights critics" are, but they become part of the window-dressing, and are sure to be cited by the Pentagon again. Yet her rosy picture is contradicted by the same unnamed advocates who point out to Rubin that there are "underlying legal problems with the detentions themselves and the lack of legal rights afforded to detainees."

In these "improved" US-run facilities, the vast majority of detainees are rounded up on little or no evidence, have no rights to lawyers nor any basis to challenge their detention. These are the same policies followed by the British in Malaysia and Kenya, by the French in Algeria, by the apartheid regime in South Africa, and by the US in South Vietnam and Central America. On a larger scale, they are consistent with the inner city policing strategies that result in America now holding twenty percent of the world's inmates, most of them young, black and brown.

In these "improved" conditions, the Times goes on: 85-90 percent of the detainees will never stand trial, their internment will last 333 days on average, 80 percent of them are Sunni youth, and all are sent through "psychological assessments", described by one former detainee as waging "psychological war on you." Fully two-thirds are not considered by their captors as "imperative security risks", the United Nations criterion for internment without trial.

Those are the "improved" facilities, a public relations response to the Abu Ghraib scandal of three years ago. In the facilities controlled by the Interior Ministry, some 25,000 other detainees face severe and secret daily abuses. Human rights groups are reduced to lobbying the Americans not to send any more detainees to the Iraqi facilities.

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-hayden/new-york-emtimesem-lends_b_104778.html