Human Rights Law

U.S. planning big new prison in Afghanistan

In "a stark acknowledgment that the United States is likely to continue to hold prisoners overseas for years to come," the New York Times reports today that "the Pentagon is moving forward with plans to build a new, 40-acre detention complex" at the Bagram air base in Afghanistan. As Justin Peters notes at Slate, the Times' article doesn't reveal until its final paragraphs that "some detainees have been held without charge for more than five years" at the current Bagram detention facility.

US military jails 'black holes', say US lawyers for Afghan reporter

US human rights lawyers charged Sunday that US military prisons are "legal black holes" and the force is detaining journalists to "shut people up" about activities in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A vast detention camp planned for the main US base in Afghanistan will be a "second Guantanamo" where laws do not apply, they said at a press conference about an Afghan reporter in US military custody without charge for nine months.

The US military is holding Jawad Ahmad, who has worked with Canadian Television (CTV), at its detention facility at Bagram north of Kabul on allegations he is an "unlawful enemy combatant."

Ahmad is among 650 people being held at Bagram without trial, US-based International Justice Network executive director Tina Monshipour Foster told reporters.

"Many people in Afghanistan and in Iraq that have been targeted for detention are local journalists covering the conflict in their own country," said another prominent US human rights lawyer, Barbara J. Olshansky.

"When the United States detains reporters, photographers, camera operators and holds them for long period without charge for any offence and without trials and without any evidence, we know that part of the goal is to just shut people up," she said.

The intention was to "make sure that the people of those countries and the United States do not know what is going on," she alleged.

(Read the rest here)

If we can accept something so inhuman and barbaric as torture, and if furthermore we become so accepting/used of it that we can trivialize and even joke about it, then we can accept anything.

And so we have.

And we'll keep on doing it.

So let us praise our black holes of human rights, decency and justice at the altar of our false God of Security - as long as it remains "those others" who get sucked in by such inhumane travesties of "civilization", right?

Do you really feel safe now?

(Cross-posted from APOV)