14,000 Held In Overseas U.S. Prisons

(AP)  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 often interrogated around the clock, then released months or years later without apology, compensation or any word on why they were taken.

Defenders of the system say it is 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 and lawmakers, human rights activists, lawyers and scholars in Iraq, Afghanistan and the United States interviewed by The Associated Press said the detention system often is unjust and hurts the fight against terrorism by inflaming anti-Americanism in Iraq and elsewhere.

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 George W. Bush said the CIA's secret outposts in the prison network had been emptied.

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 does not 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 prison, Afghanistan) and you have absolutely no way of clearing your name," said John Sifton of Human Rights Watch in New York.

The U.S. government has contended it can hold detainees until the "war on terror" ends — as it determines. "When we get up to 'forever,' I think it will be tested" in court, said retired admiral John D. Hutson, former top lawyer for the U.S. Navy.

In Iraq, the Army oversees about 13,000 prisoners at Camp Cropper near Baghdad airport, 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," said command spokesman Curry, using language from an annex to a U.N. Security Council resolution authorizing the U.S. presence here.

Others say there is no need to hold these thousands outside of the rules for prisoners of war established by the Geneva Conventions.

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[fredegrar]

By 'indefinitely', I meant 'however long suits us'. That's not necessarily the same as 'forever'. I retract my numeric calculations anyway - when I first read this story there was a quote about 70 - 90 percent of these people being innocent. That paragraph is no longer in the article, so CBS must've been unable to sustantiate it. I'm shocked - unsubstantiated info making it into a CBS news story??

[ronniehm]

Well are we keeping them indefinitely or are we letting them out? It seems to me that if we're letting anyone out, we're doing more than we did during WWII. And if you think we're just picking up people at random, you'd have to think our soldiers are just a bunch of complete idiots, because they're the ones choosing the prisoners, not Bush. And if you think the majority of the people we're fighting aren't terrorists, you must think that lot more American soldiers have died than Iraqi civilians, and that's not true. They're terrorists, with all the "loaded" things that go with that word, like targeting civilians. And I still find it hard to believe that 20% of any cuture but muslims would become terrorists or insurgents. It didn't happen during WWII, and even if it did, we'd still be right.

[fredegrar]

Hi, Ronnie. I did use the phrase, "when they get out." I'm just assuming that eventually people who did nothing except get picked up in a raid will eventually be freed. As far as my 20% is concerned, strictly just a guess - I'm betting it's a conservative number, but I could be way off in either direction. Last I checked, thousands of Americans haven't been falsely incarcerated in their own country by a foreign power in quite a while. I also didn't say they'd all become 'terrorists' - that's a pretty loaded word. I'm sure any of these people who do decide to turn to violence will think of it more as 'resisting the foreign occupier' than terrorism. Some might be goaded into using terrorist tactics (targetting civilians) and some may go a more traditional shoot-soldiers-with-guns route (but most, I hope, will go home and try to get their lives back). I'm not willing to say muslims are more prone to becoming terrorists than anyone else, but throwing people in jail for no good reason and keeping them indefinitely, without any sort of explanation, at the very least doesn't strike me as a good way to 'de-radicalize' folks.

[ronniehm]

Just out of curiousity, fredegrar, how would your 1800 "new problems" harm us if they're already locked up? And, where did you get your 20% figure? From what I can recall, 0% of Americans held hostage by the other side ever became terrorists, and I'm sure they were pretty angry. Do you think muslims are more likely to become terrorists?

[ronniehm]

No doubt people joined the Nazi party during WWII as well.

[fredegrar]

"How many of these people are guilty of terrorism?" I think the article quotes some anonymous source as saying 70 - 90 percent of these people had nothing to do with terrorism or the insugency. So, even using the 70% number, that would be around 9,000 innocent people. If just 20% of these people become so angry at their incarceration that they decided to BECOME terrorists or insugents when they get out... that's 1,800 new 'enemies of the US'. Of course, that would imply that we're locking up more terrorists than we're creating (5,000 properly jailed/1800 new problems - through the 'false incarceration' method, anyway). On the other hand, using less conservative numbers would turn that calculation around pretty quick.

[ronniehm]

"By this logic extended we would therefore genocide Germans during WWII, etc. because "they are doing it too"."

Actually, by this logic, we would have done exactly what we did during WWII, and we certainly did not genocide Germans. By your logic, we would have lost WWII.

[trid2bnrml]

It would be "justice", in my opinion, if Bush and company were able to get the bill through congress that says, among other things, that they can try people without allowing them to see the evidence against them, and then BUSH and COMPANY stood before that very same court, prosecuted for war crimes and crimes against humanity under the same laws they pushed so hard to enact!

Then, when that's all over and the Administration criminals are off to prison, congress needs to repeal those unjust laws and write legislation forbidding anything remotely like that in the future.

Then send each of Bush and company a copy of it in their respective prison cells...

Justice Has Been Served.

[sharncedar]

"So the United States is detaining 14,000 people. The insurgents in Iraq have MURDERED,not detained,far more than 14,000 poeple."

You seem to be saying it is OK therefore to detain these other people. A common argument of the Fox News types is that we can do these new kinds of behaviors such as torture and denying habeous corpus because "they" are doing it too. By this logic extended we would therefore genocide Germans during WWII, etc. because "they are doing it too". Or order hits on mob figures and kill them without trial, or break into burglars houses and steal their stuff, or abuse child abusers in some gross manner. It is a bizarre logic that says that one is allowed to do anything one's deranged enemies might do. Bizarre reprisal logic like this is common in people who are venting or upset; certainly we don't expect it from national leaders who have responsibilities to law and order.

[ronniehm]

"CBS, the 14,000 thank you." -- janem4

Usama sends his regards as well.