Releasing detainee names to the ICRC - a step in the right direction

from the nyt...

In a reversal of Pentagon policy, the military for the first time is notifying the International Committee of the Red Cross of the identities of militants who were being held in secret at a camp in Iraq and another in Afghanistan run by United States Special Operations forces, according to three military officials.

The change begins to lift the veil from the American government’s most secretive remaining overseas prisons by allowing the Red Cross to track the custody of dozens of the most dangerous suspected terrorists and foreign fighters plucked off the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan.

[...]

Under the new policy, the military must notify the Red Cross of the detainees’ names and identification numbers within two weeks of capture, a notification that before happened only after a detainee was transferred to a long-term prison. The option to seek custody extensions has been eliminated, a senior Pentagon official said.

marcy still sees some problems but hopes this means we're getting out of the "disappearance" business...

It sounds like ICRC gets the names and ID numbers of detainees, but not yet the access to talk to them. If so, then there is still not an outside monitor on detainee conditions.

[...]

But if we could be sure we were getting out of the disappearances business that would be small progress.

a step forward is still a step forward and can perhaps lead to making sure the following horror is a thing of the past...

A Central Intelligence Agency inspector general’s report set to be released Monday provides new details about abuses that took place inside the agency’s secret prisons, including details of how C.I.A. officers carried out mock executions and threatened at least one prisoner with a gun and a power drill.

[...]

It is a violation of the federal torture statute to threaten a detainee with imminent death.

i'm relatively sure, despite many recent revelations, we're only seeing the tip of a very large iceberg...

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Oh, crap...! Here we go again...! The U.S. holds another German citizen in Bagram without any solid evidence...

oferchrissake... don't we EVER learn (see khalid al masri and murat kurnaz)...? if i was a german high government official, i would be VERY PISSED...!

here's the lead-in...


A German soldier on patrol
near Bagram in Afghanistan

For the past three months, the United States military has detained a German citizen in Afghanistan on suspicion of terrorism. German security experts are convinced that the man, who has a history of psychological problems, is innocent.

[...]

An employee of the [ICRC] visited Gholam Ghaus Z., a German citizen, at the US air base in Bagram near Kabul, where he has been held under inhumane conditions since early January. The Americans believe that the 41-year-old man is a terrorist.

[...]

Germany's domestic intelligence agency, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, has carefully investigated the man, who is from Afghanistan but holds a German passport and lives in the western German city of Wuppertal. They have also investigated the unmarried man's family members and acquaintances, but have not found any evidence of extremist activities or dubious contacts with Islamists.

now, here's the REAL low-down...

Gholam Z. claims that he traveled to the Afghan capital Kabul to visit members of his widely scattered family in early January. While he was there, he heard that Western-quality goods could be obtained in a supermarket on the grounds of a US military base in Kabul, and that he, as a German citizen, could go shopping there without any problems.

Gholam Z. borrowed a relative's car to go on what a security expert has called his "fatal shopping trip," during which he planned to buy a razor, among other items. According to his version of events, he drove up to the military base on Jan. 4, showed the guard his German passport in its red cover and was then allowed to pass through several security checkpoints without incident.

But then US soldiers must have suddenly noticed Gholam Z., and he was detained. To the soldiers, it looked like a terrorist had managed to enter the well-guarded camp by posing as part of a group of visitors. It was the sort of suspicion that would automatically put guards on edge, as the number of suicide attacks in Afghanistan had increased substantially during the year 2007.

The Americans searched Gholam Z.'s clothing and found cash in various currencies, with a total value of about €1,000 ($1,580), as well as telephone cards from several countries. For the US military, these items were strong evidence that they were dealing with an Islamist terrorist who was part of an international network.

Gholam Z. was also carrying a brochure for London's Tower Bridge, fueling suspicions that the landmark could be the target of an attack.

US military interrogators spent hours trying to extract information from the presumed terrorist. They refused to believe his attempts at an explanation. He had not planned an attack on Tower Bridge, he told them, but had merely visited relatives in London and gone on a sightseeing trip that included the landmark. But the man's story seemed confused to the interrogators.

The US military interrogators also considered the suspect's justification for the foreign currency he was carrying to be implausible. He told them that he had stopped in Iran on the way to Afghanistan, where he had sold a large number of used mobile phones from Germany.

The soldiers locked him up and continued to interrogate him, but without yielding any results. They also refused to allow the German to contact a lawyer.

[...]

But totally clean apparently isn't clean enough for the US military in Afghanistan, which is under permanent threat of attack. The Americans dealt with the man from Wuppertal in the same way they had proceeded in other cases where innocent people had come under suspicion -- they kept Gholam Z. locked up.

lock 'em up and throw away the key and who cares about evidence, lawyers, speedy trials, or any other vestige of due process... it's the AMERICAN WAY...!

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The Gitmo INSIDE Gitmo

hour after hour, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, we keep learning more and more and more shit about our secret, criminal government...

Somewhere amid the cactus-studded hills on this sprawling Navy base, separate from the cells where hundreds of men suspected of links to al-Qaida and the Taliban have been locked up for years, is a place even more closely guarded—a jailhouse so protected that its very location is top secret.

For the first time, the top commander of detention operations at Guantanamo has confirmed the existence of the mysterious Camp 7. In an interview with The Associated Press, Rear Adm. Mark Buzby also provided a few details about the maximum-security lockup.

Guantanamo commanders said Camp 7 is for key alleged al-Qaida members, who must be kept apart from other prisoners to prevent them from retaliating against long-term detainees who have talked to interrogators. They also want the location kept secret for fear of terrorist attack.

Many operations have been classified since the detention center opened in January 2002 in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. More than four years passed before the military released even the names of detainees held on this 45-square- mile base in southeast Cuba—and it did so only after the AP filed a Freedom of Information Act request.

Detainees have been held in Camp Echo and Camps 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6. Journalists cleared by the military have been allowed to tour some of these lockups, where 260 men are held, but aren't allowed to speak to detainees. Some lawmakers and other VIPs have passed through, and the International Red Cross has access, on the condition that no details about its visits with detainees be made public.

But Camp 7, where 15 "high-value detainees" are held, is so secret that its very existence was not publicly known until it was mentioned in December by attorneys for Majid Khan, a former Baltimore resident who allegedly plotted to bomb gas stations in the United States. Previously, many observers believed the 15 were being held in Camps 5 or 6, which are maximum-security facilities.

"Under the gag order ... we are prohibited from saying anything more about their camp," lawyer Gitanjali Gutierrez, who met with Khan in October, said Tuesday. Most of the lawyers' notes and memos have been stamped "top secret" by the government.

basically, the thought seems to be that, if nobody knows, you can do anything you goddam well please...

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Bagram in Afghanistan - we can't seem to get rid of these hell holes

un-friggingly-believable... our plan was to close down bagram and send all the detainees over to the new afghani-run facility, so whatever ugliness and torture got meted out from that point forward wouldn't be OUR fault... goodness me, no... guess that ain't workin' out too well...

The American detention center, established at the Bagram military base as a temporary screening site after the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, is now teeming with some 630 prisoners — more than twice the 275 being held at Guantánamo.

The administration has spent nearly three years and more than $30 million on a plan to transfer Afghan prisoners held by the United States to a refurbished high-security detention center run by the Afghan military outside Kabul.

But almost a year after the Afghan detention center opened, American officials say it can accommodate only about half the prisoners they once planned to put there. As a result, the makeshift American site at Bagram will probably continue to operate with hundreds of detainees for the foreseeable future, the officials said.

Meanwhile, the treatment of some prisoners on the Bagram base has prompted a strong complaint to the Pentagon from the International Committee of the Red Cross, the only outside group allowed in the detention center.

In a confidential memorandum last summer, the Red Cross said dozens of prisoners had been held incommunicado for weeks or even months in a previously undisclosed warren of isolation cells at Bagram, two American officials said. The Red Cross said the prisoners were kept from its inspectors and sometimes subjected to cruel treatment in violation of the Geneva Conventions, one of the officials said.

why are we continuing to flush our reputation as a country down the toilet...? we've made ourselves look so bad to the rest of the world, it's going to take a generation to pull it back even to where it was in 2000...

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