Meant to post this yesterday, got sidetracked for obvious reasons. This is what’s happening in our country’s name:
In Afghanistan, the CIA’s secret U.S. interrogation center in Kabul is known as “The Pit,” named for its despairing conditions. In Iraq, the most important prisoners are kept in a huge hangar near the runway at Baghdad International Airport, say U.S. government officials, counterterrorism experts and others. In Qatar, U.S. forces have been ferrying some Iraqi prisoners to a remote jail on the gigantic U.S. air base in the desert.
The Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where a unit of U.S. soldiers abused prisoners, is just the largest and suddenly most notorious in a worldwide constellation of detention centers — many of them secret and all off-limits to public scrutiny — that the U.S. military and CIA have operated in the name of counterterrorism or counterinsurgency operations since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
These prisons and jails are sometimes as small as shipping containers and as large as the sprawling Guantanamo Bay complex in Cuba. They are part of an elaborate CIA and military infrastructure whose purpose is to hold suspected terrorists or insurgents for interrogation and safekeeping while avoiding U.S. or international court systems, where proceedings and evidence against the accused would be aired in public. Some are even held by foreign governments at the informal request of the United States.
“The number of people who have been detained in the Arab world for the sake of America is much more than in Guantanamo Bay. Really, thousands,” said Najeeb Nuaimi, a former justice minister of Qatar who is representing the families of dozens of prisoners.
The largely hidden array includes three systems that only rarely overlap: the Pentagon-run network of prisons, jails and holding facilities in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo and elsewhere; small and secret CIA-run facilities where top al Qaeda and other figures are kept; and interrogation rooms of foreign intelligence services — some with documented records of torture — to which the U.S. government delivers or “renders” mid- or low-level terrorism suspects for questioning.
All told, more than 9,000 people are held by U.S. authorities overseas, according to Pentagon figures and estimates by intelligence experts, the vast majority under military control. The detainees have no conventional legal rights: no access to a lawyer; no chance for an impartial hearing; and, at least in the case of prisoners held in cellblock 1A at Abu Ghraib, no apparent guarantee of humane treatment accorded prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions or civilians in U.S. jails.
— snip —
CIA employees are under investigation by the Justice Department and the CIA inspector general’s office in connection with the death of three captives in the past six months, two who died while under interrogation in Iraq, and a third who was being questioned by a CIA contract interrogator in Afghanistan. A CIA spokesman said the hiding of detainees was inappropriate. He declined to comment further.
None of the arrangements that permit U.S. personnel to kidnap, transport, interrogate and hold foreigners are ad hoc or unauthorized, including the so-called renditions. “People tend to regard it as an extra-judicial kidnapping; it’s not,” former CIA officer Peter Probst said. “There is a long history of this. It has been done for decades. It’s absolutely legal.”
In fact, every aspect of this new universe — including maintenance of covert airlines to fly prisoners from place to place, interrogation rules and the legal justification for holding foreigners without due process afforded most U.S. citizens — has been developed by military or CIA lawyers, vetted by Justice Department’s office of legal counsel and, depending on the particular issue, approved by White House general counsel’s office or the president himself.
There’s much more. Go read it. And then tell yourself that the abuses of Abu Ghraib can be blamed on seven lowly guards.
Abu Ghraib is just a brief peek into the darkness. God knows what else is happening out there.
It’s facile to pretend to know what the terrorists “really” want — but I can’t shake the sneaking suspicion that Osama couldn’t be happier right now. If it was our intention, after 9/11, to mess things up even worse, to pour gasoline on the flames, to take a bad situation and really, really fuck it up…well, then we should be very proud.