McGentrix wrote:<takes a deep breath>
No, they would have been held in the secret prisons that we have been talking about until all the actionable intelligence received has been acted upon. Once the prisoner no longer poses a threat because he has been captured, he is placed into a non-secret prison and given prisoner status.
[sarcasm]
And we trust them to do this without violating the Geneva Conventions so we don't need any sort of oversight or checks and balances. Those would be bad for the war on terror. [/sarcasm]
That's why they are secret.
Nah, they are secret because popular knowledge and democracy are inconvenient to certain military types and certain political types. Obviously, once you release anyone from such a secret facility back into the community you yanked him from, the big secret is foiled...except as regards the folks at the barber shop in Idaho.
But the beauty of having a known secret (I sound like Rumsfeld now!) facility is that no one knows who is there and who isn't. It may, or it may not actually exists. It could be nothing more than a scare tactic.
McGentrix wrote:But the beauty of having a known secret (I sound like Rumsfeld now!) facility is that no one knows who is there and who isn't. It may, or it may not actually exists. It could be nothing more than a scare tactic.
Isn't a 'known secret facility' a facility that people know exists but also know it is secret? Secrecy is for dirty people.
Knowing it exists, and knowing where it exists and who is in it are 2 very different things.
People know there are spies all over the place, but no one really knows who they are...
The good news is that folks who actually give a damn about the laws and codes governing civilized conduct in warfare are not about to let this travesty drop...
Quote:You seem to think that that responsibility should go to the Pentagon rather than to the commanders on the ground?
SCOTT HORTON: Well, it's not either or, Gwen. I think that clearly there is responsibility for those on the ground and I think these reports are very effective when they talk and they allocate responsibility on the ground. Where they fall short is when they deal with a responsibility at the policy level, and they seem to assume that the confusion that existed surrounding interrogation and detention policy was a matter of oversight, a failure to give clear guidance.
They exclude the possibility that indeed it was a conscious decision to create an atmosphere of ambiguity in which experimentation with interrogation techniques -- unlawful interrogation techniques -- could occur.
My involvement in all this began when I was visited by a number of military lawyers about 15 months ago who raised a very serious concern that senior policymakers in the Pentagon had actively embarked upon creating this atmosphere of ambiguity and they thought it was going to have terrible consequences. They were right.
And there is more evidence of this. On Monday, in Manheim, Germany, a memorandum surfaced in which an officer was recounting, and this is again surrounding the visits of Maj. Gen. Miller, a decision and a push coming from above to take the gloves off and get tough with the detainees.
I'm told that there are several other documents of this sort which are waiting to surface and have not yet come out. This really has not been properly developed in the reports yet and I'll wait and see what is to come in remaining reports, but certainly, you know the one that's coming from Vice Admiral Church dealing with the navy in Guantanamo, I don't think it is going to address this. It really should have been covered, I think in the Schlesinger report.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/military/july-dec04/abughraib_8-25.html
I agree. I also remember when they were building Guantanamo (for the express purpose of making sure that no laws applied to the detention of the prisoners there) and leaking things to the press about how the Geneva Convention did not apply to these people that they were creating a grey area about prisoner treatment. I bet I was not the only person to get the message.
I was not surprised at all to hear about the abuses at Abu Ghraib. The decision to use that place as a prison when they knew the symbolism of it just reeks.
Hmmmm - David Hicks' father (and Australian lawyer) were interviewed on radio yesterday morning.
Hicks says his son looked well, but had commented that his thinking was not right after a number of years in solitary confinement.
David had expressed concern about abuse of prisoners in Guantanamo.
He said he was beaten for two lots of ten hours in interrogations in Afghanistan - and had suffered a number of other "not good" things (as expressed by the father, who did not want to go into details - but sounded very distressed) during his detention.
The Australian lawyer expressed dismay at the lack of legal knowledge in the American military court personnel prosecuting Hicks - gave an example of one of the soldier prosecutors confessing that he was unaware of what was in the Geneva convention.
Lawyer said detainees clearly have no hope of a proper trial.
American authorities allowed physical contact between Hcks and his family - which it had been feared they would not - and, it seems, allowed pretty private communication for Hicks and his family.
Court Martial Expected
FORT BRAGG, North Carolina (CNN) -- Pfc. Lynndie England was celebrating her 21st birthday when she helped commit some of the worst acts of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, military prosecutors said Tuesday.
The prosecution asked that England be ordered to face a full court-martial.
England faces 19 proposed counts of abuse and sexual misconduct that could lead to as many as 38 years in prison.
England's hearing is the only one taking place in the United States. She was brought back from Baghdad because she is pregnant by Graner. Her baby is due in mid-October.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/LAW/08/31/england.prisoner.abuse/index.html
