The Detainee Abuse Report

A little sick that we have to make a report about these cases, but quite a few of them have cropped up in recent days, all of them disturbing.

It amazes me that Dick Durbin has to check in on the Justice Department like a mom peering open her son's door a crack to ask if he's finished his homework. There are 17 outstanding allegations of abuse from Iraq and Afghanistan going back almost three years, and Abu Gonzales and his gang are trying to drop them, hoping that nobody's looking. Good for Durbin:

In a letter sent Monday to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, incoming Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., noted that the department began looking into the allegations of abuse two and a half years ago.

"In that time, there have not been any indictments in any of these cases," wrote Durbin, who first pressed the Justice Department for a prosecutions update in November 2005, when now-Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty was seeking Senate confirmation.

"It is my understanding that since then, the Justice Department has not commented publicly on the status of any of these cases," wrote Durbin, who sits on the Senate panel that oversees the Justice Department.

But of course, that's the way a Bush White House works - dysfunctionally. There is a reverence for officials worthy of being charged with crimes, and a contempt for detainees who have had no trial and who may have done nothing wrong.

After two years in which the military sought to manage terrorism suspects at Guantánamo with incentives for good behavior, steady improvements in their living conditions and even dialogue with prison leaders, the authorities here have clamped down decisively in recent months.

Security procedures have been tightened. Group activities have been scaled back. With the retrofitting of Camp 6 and the near-emptying of another showcase camp for compliant prisoners, military officials said about three-fourths of the detainees would eventually be held in maximum-security cells. That is a stark departure from earlier plans to hold a similar number in medium-security units.

Officials said the shift reflected the military’s analysis — after a series of hunger strikes, a riot last May and three suicides by detainees in June — that earlier efforts to ease restrictions on the detainees had gone too far.

The commander of the Guantánamo task force, Rear Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., said the tougher approach also reflected the changing nature of the prison population, and his conviction that all of those now held here are dangerous men. “They’re all terrorists; they’re all enemy combatants,” Admiral Harris said in an interview.

He added, “I don’t think there is such a thing as a medium-security terrorist.”

Of course, the military said everybody in Guantanamo previously was a terrorist; the President constantly described them as "the worst of the worst" and "people picked up off the battlefield." Not only was this proven to be untrue, the AP went back and checked on how Gitmo detainees who have been released to their home countries have been treated:

Decisions by more than a dozen countries in the Middle East, Europe and South Asia to release the former Guantanamo detainees raise questions about whether they were really as dangerous as the United States claimed, or whether some of America's staunchest allies have set terrorists and militants free [...]

But through interviews with justice and police officials, detainees and their families, and using reports from human rights groups and local media, The Associated Press was able to track 245 of those formerly held at Guantanamo. The investigation, which spanned 17 countries, found:

_Once the detainees arrived in other countries, 205 of the 245 were either freed without being charged or were cleared of charges related to their detention at Guantanamo. Forty either stand charged with crimes or continue to be detained.

_Only a tiny fraction of transferred detainees have been put on trial. The AP identified 14 trials, in which eight men were acquitted and six are awaiting verdicts. Two of the cases involving acquittals — one in Kuwait, one in Spain — initially resulted in convictions that were overturned on appeal.

_The Afghan government has freed every one of the more than 83 Afghans sent home. Lawmaker Sibghatullah Mujaddedi, the head of Afghanistan's reconciliation commission, said many were innocent and wound up at Guantanamo because of tribal or personal rivalries.

_At least 67 of 70 repatriated Pakistanis are free after spending a year in Adiala Jail. A senior Pakistani Interior Ministry official said investigators determined that most had been "sold" for bounties to U.S. forces by Afghan warlords who invented links between the men and al-Qaida. "We consider them innocent," said the official, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue.

_All 29 detainees who were repatriated to Britain, Spain, Germany, Russia, Australia, Turkey, Denmark, Bahrain and the Maldives were freed, some within hours after being sent home for "continued detention."

And of course, if they weren't terrorists before, they certainly might become ones now:

Some former detainees say they never intended to harm the United States and are bitter.

"I can't wash the three long years of pain, trouble and humiliation from my memory," said Badarzaman Badar, an Afghan who was freed in Pakistan. "It is like a cancer in my mind that makes me disturbed every time I think of those terrible days."

Here's another guy who can't wash the pain and humiliation away from his time as a detainee in Iraq. Only the difference here is, he's an American, and a whistleblower.

American guards arrived at the man’s cell periodically over the next several days, shackled his hands and feet, blindfolded him and took him to a padded room for interrogation, the detainee said. After an hour or two, he was returned to his cell, fatigued but unable to sleep.

The fluorescent lights in his cell were never turned off, he said. At most hours, heavy metal or country music blared in the corridor. He said he was rousted at random times without explanation and made to stand in his cell. Even lying down, he said, he was kept from covering his face to block out the light, noise and cold. And when he was released after 97 days he was exhausted, depressed and scared.

Detainee 200343 was among thousands of people who have been held and released by the American military in Iraq, and his account of his ordeal has provided one of the few detailed views of the Pentagon’s detention operations since the abuse scandals at Abu Ghraib. Yet in many respects his case is unusual.

The detainee was Donald Vance, a 29-year-old Navy veteran from Chicago who went to Iraq as a security contractor. He wound up as a whistle-blower, passing information to the F.B.I. about suspicious activities at the Iraqi security firm where he worked, including what he said was possible illegal weapons trading.

But when American soldiers raided the company at his urging, Mr. Vance and another American who worked there were detained as suspects by the military, which was unaware that Mr. Vance was an informer, according to officials and military documents.

We're turning other Americans against our country. And I really don't think the officials back in Washington who are authorizing this abuse give a damn if the detainees are guilty or innocent. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and nobody's going to let a little something like the rule of law stop the intimidation and humiliation racket they've got going. Because America, in their minds, is to be feared. They want it that way. It's the only way to "deal with these people," the idea goes. And if the innocent are caught up in the net, well, that'll teach the guilty that they better not "mess with Texas."

That's really what it's come down to in America. It's rotten, amoral, and backwards. And it's going to take decades to undo this kind of damage.