Quite obviously higher-ups knew about these abuses and we must not allow the military upper-echelon to scapegoat a few low-level soldiers. This was obviously a concentrated act of purposeful humiliation, otherwise why wasn't it stopped when reports first surfaced months ago? This is simply a methodical attempt at instituting "control" at the bodily level, ritualized humiliation of a subaltern community has long been the modus operandi of colonizing forces. This is Empire in all of its bloody, cruel glory.
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Red Cross Sought Action on Prisoner Abuse
Associated Press Report
Posted at Yahoo
The international Red Cross said Thursday that it had repeatedly asked U.S. authorities to take action over alleged prisoner abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison before recent revelations about the way detainees were treated.
"We were aware of what was going on, and based on our findings we have repeatedly requested the U.S. authorities to take corrective action," said Nada Doumani, spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross, speaking from Amman, Jordan.
The ICRC, which visits prisoners held by coalition authorities in Iraq, had previously declined to comment publicly on conditions at the prison.
"We've been visiting Abu Ghraib prison since already from last year," Doumani told The Associated Press. "We are of course aware of the situation since we talk with the detainees privately.
"We get testimony from them. We visit all the premises in this place. We crosscheck information we receive from different detainees. Definitely we were aware of what was going on in Abu Ghraib.
Doumani said the visits have been taking place every five or six weeks since last year. The most recent visit was March 20, she said.
The scandal over treatment of prisoners began when CBS television broadcast pictures of smiling American guards with Iraqi prisoners in humiliating positions. That unleashed a huge international outcry.
The ICRC is designated by the Geneva Conventions on warfare to visit prisoners of war and other people detained by an occupying power. It traditionally discusses its observations only with the detaining authority, but has been under pressure to say whether it had specifically warned the United States about prisoner abuse before the photographs came to light.
Doumani didn't say specifically when it gave its first warnings, but that it was over a period of months
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Guantanamo Bay Detainees, Supreme Court, Into the Shadows and the Cunning of History
"Supreme Court Hears Detainees' Appeals"
By ANNE GEARAN, Associated Press Writer
Posted at Yahoo
WASHINGTON - In the first major challenge to arise from the war, the Supreme Court hears appeals Tuesday involving the Guantanamo Bay prisoners, whom the United States calls "enemy combatants." More than 600 men from 44 countries pass their days in small cells at a U.S. Navy (news - web sites) prison camp in Cuba, far from the scene of a high-stakes court case that will help draw the boundaries for the war on terrorism.
The case asks a basic question about that legal system: Can these foreign-born prisoners, held outside U.S. borders, use U.S. courts to try win their freedom? In addition to that jurisdictional issue, the court next week takes up two related cases about the rights of American citizens labeled enemy combatants and held under similar restrictions.
The most important theme in all the cases is the power of the president to conduct a new kind of war as he sees fit. In the Guantanamo case, the Bush administration's top Supreme Court lawyer argued in court filings that allowing the prisoners to go to court would "place the federal courts in the unprecedented position of micromanaging the executive's handling of captured enemy combatants from a distant zone."
The prisoners at Guantanamo were mostly picked up in the fighting that toppled the Taliban government in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the months following the Sept. 11 attacks. The Bush administration asserts the right to hold and interrogate the men as long as necessary, without formal charges or the guarantee of a trial or access to a lawyer. The administration also asserts the men are not traditional prisoners of war, who would have guaranteed rights under the Geneva Convention.
The lawsuit before the high court was brought by lawyers who had not met their clients. Since then, a few Guantanamo detainees have been granted access to attorneys. The lawyers say the men are in a nightmarish legal limbo. Furthermore, they say their clients had nothing to do with Sept. 11 and have never harmed Americans.
"They maintain today, as they have throughout this litigation, that they are innocent of wrongdoing, and the United States has never presented evidence to the contrary," lawyers for British and Australian citizens argued in a court filing. Organizations and individuals as varied as British members of Parliament, retired military officers and former American diplomats support the prisoners.
"History teaches that we tend to sacrifice civil liberties too quickly based on claims of military necessity and national security, only to discover later that those claims were overstated from the start," a friend-of-the-court filing from former Japanese-American internee Fred Korematsu said.
It was Korematsu's challenge to the World War II internment camps for Japanese-Americans that led the Supreme Court to uphold that wartime detention in 1944.
Arrayed on the other side are former U.S. attorneys general, other former military officers and Medal of Honor winners, and conservative legal scholars and lawyers, including failed Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, a former federal appeals court judge. "If the court, for the first time in history, interposes the federal judiciary between our armed forces and enemy belligerents held abroad, the court will effect a dangerous and unprecedented revolution in the separation of powers and undermine the ability of the U.S. military to protect our citizens from attack," the Bork group wrote in a friend-of-the-court filing.
The cases are Rasul v. Bush, 03-334, and al-Odah v. United States, 03-343.
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Supreme Court
Case Briefs
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Into the Shadows
By Tom Engelhardt
Mother Jones
During the Cold War, there was much talk about plunging into the "war in the shadows." This was the intelligence war (as well as the various secret wars that accompanied it in the Third World) where We were prepared to meet a communist Them on their own terms. This was also the world John le Carré once so brilliantly caught in novels like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in which our intelligence agents and theirs, though at war, came to have so much more in common with each other than with either of the aboveground societies they represented.
Now, we've once again plunged into that deadening, dark world to meet another Them on terms They will supposedly understand. Though not our only, or even the most important threat facing us -- as Luke Mitchell recently made clear in A Run on Terror, a fine piece in Harper's Magazine -- terror is, of course, all too real. Ask the inhabitants of Madrid or Istanbul. Ask us New Yorkers. But its enemy is the light, not the shadows. Its perpetrators of horrors should be brought to trial in the bright light of day according to legal systems we have pride in. They should be brought to account publicly for acts of horror in a place where they can be seen, not tortured privately until they fess up truth, or lies, for a chosen few.
Guantanamo, the prison camps of Iraq, the holding areas of Bagram Air Base and Diego Garcia, the grim torture cells of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Thailand and other compliant lands -- to make these the destination of choice for American justice is already to acknowledge Osama Bin Laden's triumph. Such a world mocks what should mean most to us. It indicates what, in a crunch, we value most. It threatens to become the starting point for a new (classified) constitution, a new no-calls legal system.
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I think that The Cunning of History by Richard Rubenstein supplies some historical understanding of what happens when we start labeling people as legally non-existent and unworthy of basic human rights (what the Bush adminstration wants for anyone they charge with terrorism--including American citizens):
{Thivai summary—pages 12-21 examine the judicial process that led to the development of the death camps and mass extermination. Important in this legalistic development was the designation of “apatrides or stateless persons” (12) at the end of WW1. These were people who had been denied any official standing in the nation and thus could be prosecuted or jailed at any time for no reason at all. Also the process of denaturalization or denationalization was increasingly used during and after the 1920s to deal with unwanted minority groups within the European states. This was an effective stripping of any rights whatsoever. Concentration camps first appeared across Europe to deal with apatrides (or refugees).}
The concentration camps for the apatrides served much the same purpose as did the original Nazi camps in 1933 and 1934. In the popular mind, the first Nazi camps conjure up images of wild sadism by brutal brown-shirted storm troopers. The images are, of course, well deserved, but they tend to hinder precise understanding of the development of the camps as a legal and political institution. (Rubenstein, 15)
Initially, the concentration camps were established to accommodate detainees who had been placed under “protective custody” (Schützhaft) by the Nazi regime. Those arrested were whom the regime wished to detain although there were no clear legal justification for so doing. Almost all of the original detainees were German communists, not Jews. Had the Nazis’ political prisoners been brought before a German court in the first year or two of Hitler’ regime, the judiciary would have been compelled to dismiss the case. This was not because the German judiciary was anti-Nazi, but because it was bureaucratic in structure. In the early stages of the Nazi regime, there was no formula in law to cover all the political prisoners the Nazis wanted to arrest. This problem was solved by holding them under “protective custody” and setting up camps outside of the regular prison system to receive them. Incidentally, the American government did something very similar when it interned Japanese-American citizens during World War II. They had committed no crime. No court would have convicted them. Prison was not the place to detain them. Happily, as bad as were the American concentration camps, they were infinitely better than the German counterparts. (15-16)
One of the least helpful ways of understanding the Holocaust is to regard the destruction process as the work of a small group of irresponsible criminals who were atypical of normal statesmen and who somehow gained control of the German people, forcing them by terror and the deliberate stimulation of religious and ethnic hatred to pursue a barbaric and retrograde policy that was thoroughly at odds with the great traditions of Western civilization.
On the contrary, we are more likely to understand the Holocaust if we regard it as the expression of some of the most profound tendencies of Western civilization in the twentieth century. (Rubenstein, 21)
In order to understand more fully the connection between bureaucracy and mass death, it will be necessary to return to the apatrides. They were the first modern Europeans who had become politically and legally superfluous and for whom the most “rational” way of dealing with them was ultimately murder. A majority of the apatrides had lost their political status by a process of bureaucratic definition, denationalization. (Rubenstein, 31)
Men without political rights are superfluous men. They have lost all right to life and human dignity. Political rights are neither God-given, autonomous nor self-validating. The Germans understood that no person has any rights unless they are guaranteed by an organized community with the power to defend such rights. They were perfectly consistent in demanding that the deportees be made stateless before being transported to the camps. They also understood that by exterminating stateless men and women, they violated no law because such people were covered by no law. Even those who were committed by religious faith to belief in natural law, such as the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic church, did not see fit to challenge the Nazi actions publicly at the time. (Rubenstein, 33)
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More Reports:
Lawyer: "Guantanamo is a Lawless Enclave
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