Hello again. I know it's been a long time, but suffice it to say that a lot has happened over the past two months, and I'm currently overseas. Now that things are starting to settle down, here's some more stuff to ponder. These next few posts will deal with detention--not the kind we were sent to in elementary school, but the U.S.'s holding of terror suspects in various facilities. In light of President Bush's veto on Saturday of a bill that would have barred the CIA from using coercive interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding, on detainees, it seems even more pressing for us to evaluate our treatment of detainees. In these upcoming posts, we will compare practices and policies being used by the U.S. in this war with those used by others in the past. Hopefully, such a comparison will help us avoid perpetuating the types of human rights abuses that were common in the colonial era and are sadly still in practice today.
Immediately following the attack on the World Trade Center in New York, on September 11, 2001, the United States government quickly moved to keep the country from further harm by detaining a large number of Muslim men. By November of 2001, over 1000 Muslim men had been apprehended and detained in the United States without having charges pressed against them1, and the total number of individuals detained in the FBI operation called PENTTBOM rose to about 1,200 individuals. “They were caught in their bedrooms while they slept, pulled from the restaurant kitchens where they worked, stopped at the border, even federal offices where they had gone to seek help.”2 Hundreds of those arrested were not terrorists but were nevertheless taken into custody on immigration charges, and some of the men remained in custody for up to five years without criminal charges3 such as in the case of Ali Partovi.4 Furthermore, the basic constitutional right to habeas corpus review was denied to or suspended for several of the detainees. To make matters worse, the government refused to release much information to the public about who the detainees were or how many were still in custody. As we now know and will discuss below, other suspected Al Qaeda “members or supporters”5 who were captured in Iraq and Afghanistan, were taken to the infamous Guantanamo Bay detention center, where allegations have been made that abuse occurred.
After a 2003 report from the Justice Department discovered that immigration laws had been misused to detain terrorist suspects following the September 11th, 2001 attacks, the Department of Homeland Security established guidelines in 2004 to ensure the protection of the rights of those in detention. According to Dean Boyd, spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, “We learned from the past.”6 However, it seems that we had already had a chance to learn from the past because unreasonable reactions to fear similar to the PENTTBOM operation have occurred before in our own history. Everyone knows the story of the aftermath of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor when many Japanese-Americans were held in internment camps out of fear that they might be supporting the Japanese enemies. Their rights as citizens and human beings were abridged, and the internment has since been denounced. We had supposedly learned from that mistake, so why was a similar ‘mistake’ made again?
Nevertheless, the worst stories of the detention of terrorist suspects were yet to come. As of September 2006, 14,000 detainees were being kept by the U.S. military in prisons abroad, meaning they were outside of U.S. jurisdiction, and many suspects have been captured, intensely interrogated, and held for months or years before being released without any kind of remuneration, explanation, or apology.7 Some of the first major scandals of the “War against Terror” which caught the world’s attention were the abuses at the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay prison facilities, and yet again, such incidents were not new at all. Countless episodes in history were replayed in these scandals, and the discourse which surrounded the scandals bears very close resemblance to discourse that accompanied the injustices of British colonial history . When reading newspapers or listening to newscasts over the past 4 years, I feel almost as if the words are being copied straight out of an 1865, 1919, or 1959 British newspaper, and you will see soon see why.
To be continued
1 According to a New York Times article from October 2002
2 Associated Press, “1 Man Still Locked Up From 9/11 Sweeps,” published on MSNBC.com October 14, 2006 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15264274/page/2/
3 Associated Press, “ High court bars Gitmo prisoners’ appeal” April 2, 2007 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17911662/
4 Associated Press, “1 Man Still Locked Up From 9/11 Sweeps,” published on MSNBC.com October 14, 2006 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15264274/page/2/
5 Dedman, Bill, “Battle Over Tactics Raged at Gitmo” October 23, 2006. © 2007 MSNBC Interactive
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15361458/.
6 Associated Press, “1 Man Still Locked Up From 9/11 Sweeps,” published on MSNBC.com October 14, 2006 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15264274/page/2/
7 Associated Press wire reports, “Discussion and Debate Over Secret Prisons Continues.” Published in The Harvard Crimson.The Real World News in Brief September 18, 2006.
