The 800lb gorilla in American foreign policy

[donsu]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1270426,00.html

Alleged terror suspects are held incommunicado all over the world

-snip-

The Abu Ghraib photographs awakened many in the US to the abuses that lie beneath the rhetoric of the global war on terror but the institutions responsible have not taken the message on board. On the day the Congressional report into 9/11 was published, another document was quietly released - a military report that exonerated the high command for the Abu Ghraib abuses. The implications go beyond Abu Ghraib: without a repudiation of the administration's actions, there will be no remedy for the even more sinister treatment of the unknown number of prisoners not captured on camera - those who have been kidnapped and disappeared by US forces across the world.

Under military order No 1, issued by President Bush in November 2001, the president gave himself the right, in defiance of national and interna tional law, to detain indefinitely any non-US citizen anywhere in the world. Many ended up in Guantánamo where at least some of their names were discovered. Others simply vanished. They became in the US euphemism, "ghost prisoners", an unrecorded host held in secret, their detention denied, hidden from the Red Cross, legal or family access barred, their fate in the hands of unaccountable and unnamed US personnel.

-snip-

What are we to understand by this? That they have been murdered? That they are rotting in some torture cell in Jordan, or Egypt, or Diego Garcia? And, given the US record on "suspected terrorists" - who have included taxi drivers and their passengers, boys of 13, old men who could hardly walk and migrants whose crime was to overstay a visa - how can we trust a practice that disposes of people first and asks questions afterwards?

Nobody knows how many ghost prisoners there are. The US, as the Latin American dictatorships did, strains to ensure that we do not find out. In Iraq, of the roughly 12,000 detained after the US invasion, some appeared on lists, others vanished because of chaos and incompetence. Others died under interrogation.
-snip-
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the bushgang likes privately owned prisons in the US too.

[ugarte]

1. Like Jon Stewart said,

"The important thing is not that we torture people, but that we don't condone it." :)

[Moderator]

2. Duplicate. Please continue discussion here.

Thanks
Moderator


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