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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