“But we Don’t Have Concentration Camps in our Country”

[Time for change]

The quote from the title of this post is what I often hear some people say in response to those who argue about how dangerous the Bush administration is. Listening to C-SPAN yesterday morning got me thinking about this some more. The host referred to our detainees at Guantanamo Bay as “terrorists” and later referred to them as “detainees, as critics of our detention program call them”.

Since the great majority of our detainees have never been tried in a court of law, referring to them as “terrorists” in a widely broadcast radio program does a great disservice to our detainees, as well as to the listening audience. That kind of talk by so-called journalists explains why some irate listeners call in with enormously ignorant comments, such as one I heard yesterday morning, complaining that these people shouldn’t have so many “special rights”. By special rights I guess the caller meant the right to a fair trial. Well, don’t worry guy, they don’t have that right, and it’s doubtful that they ever will as long as your man is president.

A recent Wall Street Journal editorial was even more egregious, since you would expect someone writing for a major newspaper to have a little more sense – or common decency:

The real goal of Guantanamo’s critics is to have these killers treated like common criminals in American courts. That would make it impossible to deny them the full array of U.S. legal protection. In many cases, prosecutors would lack enough evidence to convict them under normal trial rules… The result of bringing Gitmo detainees into U.S. criminal courts would inevitably be their widespread release – which means leaving them free to kill Americans again.

Heaven forbid!! Giving criminals a fair trial could result in their being released! That would be …. un-American.


What is the difference between concentration camps and what we do with our detainees?

Here’s what Wikipedia says about concentration camps:

The term concentration camp lost some of its original meaning after Nazi concentration camps were discovered, and has ever since been understood to refer to a place of mistreatment, starvation, forced labor, and murder. The expression since then has only been used in this extremely pejorative sense; no government or organization has used it to describe its own facilities, using instead terms such as internment camp, resettlement camp, detention facility, etc, regardless of the actual circumstances of the camp, which can vary a great deal.

So how does this differ from what we do with our detainees at Guantanamo Bay, in Iraq, in our secret prisons around the world, and what happens to those whom we outsource into the hands of various murderous regimes via our “extraordinary rendition” program?

Murder? An analysis of 44 autopsies reported by the ACLU, of men who died in our detention facilities, found 21 of them to be homicides. Mistreatment? There have been numerous human rights reports that have made it quite clear that severe mistreatment is the rule rather than the exception. Starvation? There’s probably not much of that. We try very hard to keep our detainees alive, so that we can torture … I mean interrogate them on a regular basis. Forced Labor? I haven’t heard reports of that. So that’s two out of four.

Why not regard our system of detainees from our “War on Terror” simply as a part of our prison system? Well, prisoners are generally charged with a crime, they have access to counsel and get to see the charges against them, so that they can defend themselves; there detention is usually not indefinite, unless they have been found guilty of some heinous crime; there is a record of their detention, their family is notified, and they get to see their family once in a while; and they are generally not subjected to torture, whereas George Bush specifically signed a “signing statement” nullifying a Congressional law that prohibited torture of our detainees.

How many of these detainees has George Bush’s “War on Terror” claimed? It is hard to tell precisely because so much of the program is secret. But according to investigative reporter Stephen Grey, in his book, “Ghost Plane – The True Story of the CIA Torture Program”, an estimated 11,000 men (and boys) have been illegally detained, without charges, for months or years, and without recourse to the human rights mandated by international law in the Geneva Conventions, in George Bush’s “War on Terror”.

But at least these things don’t happen on U.S. soil.


Recent developments and propaganda

Between July 2004 and March 2005, the Department of Defense conducted “Combatant Status Review Tribunals” (CSRT) for 558 detainees of the U.S. government at Guantanamo Bay and determined that 520 of them continued to warrant “enemy combatant” status.

Consequently, eight of the detainees deemed to be “enemy combatants” petitioned the U.S. Federal Appeals Court in Washington, D.C., for a review of the CSRT decision. On July 20, 2007, the Federal Appeals Court, in a decision written by Chief Judge Douglass Ginsburg, ruled that the U.S. government must release information “bearing on the issue of whether the detainee meets the criteria to be designated as an enemy combatant.”

Five days later, July 25th, the Combating Terrorism Center (CTS) released a report (which they had written at the request of the Secretary of Defense) claiming that 73% of the 516 detainees whose records they reviewed were a “demonstrated threat” as an enemy combatant. It is not clear when they were asked to conduct their “investigation”, but it should be clear to anyone who read their report that their investigation could have been conducted and their report written easily within five days.

As might be expected, the CTS report was a big propaganda coup for the Bush administration in its efforts to get the American people to accept its concentration camps … I mean detention facilities as nothing out of the ordinary. It was that report that spurred the Wall Street Journal editorial and the C-SPAN segment that I quoted above, and newspaper articles such as this one, titled “New U.S. study calls Guantanamo captives dangerous.”

Apparently the DOD requested the Combating Terrorism Center to do their investigation in order to combat the negative publicity, and perhaps especially in response to the recent appeals court decision that demanded more information from the Bush administration – thus implying that George Bush and his administration do not have the legal right to unilaterally determine who can be imprisoned, in the absence of a fair trial (Or more specifically, the court asserted our Fifth Amendment rights to due process and our Sixth Amendment “right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state…”)

After all, if 73% of them are “demonstrated threats” and another 22% of them are “potential threats”, then various conservative individuals and groups, as indicated by the Wall Street Journal article, would jump to the obvious conclusion that for the sake of our national security we can’t afford to give these terrorists a fair trial.

But let’s take a close look at the CTS report.


Orwellian report claims 73% of Guantanamo detainees are a “demonstrated threat”

One might think that if a government commissions a research group in the hope that it will find evidence to validate the government’s own decisions, that the government would allow that research group access to more evidence than the government itself used in a court case where its evidence was deemed insufficient. But one would be wrong if one thought that in this case. The Combating Terrorism Center was given access only to the exact same evidence that the federal appeals court found insufficient to prosecute the detainees.

To conduct their “research” the CTC simply reviewed government reports on the detainees. The primary finding of their report was that 73% of detainees were classified as “demonstrated threat as an enemy combatant” and an additional 22% (for a total of 95%) were classified as “potential threats”. Their definition of a “demonstrated threat as an enemy combatant” was “a detainee who “participated, prepared to participate, or intended to participate in direct hostilities against the U.S. and its Coalition allies.” In other words, it included anyone who defended their country against the U.S. invasion of their country.

The largest category of “demonstrated threat” was the “hostilities” category, which included those who “definitively supported or waged hostile activities against the US/Coalition allies.” This label was put on 56% of the total 516 detainees whose records were reviewed in the study. By “definitive”, the CTC meant that there was “an explicit statement made without qualification about the data field in the publicly available CSRT (i.e., the Combatant Status Review Tribunals) unclassified summary”.

What evidence did the unclassified summaries contain that allowed the CTC to classify these people as “definitive threats as enemy combatants”? There was only one type of evidence noted in the documents: Fifty-six (56) individuals admitted to fighting the U.S. or coalition forces. However, there was no notation as to how many of those “admissions” were obtained under torture. As for the rest of those detainees who were relegated to the “hostilities” category, no evidence was provided. Individuals were found to have manned the front lines; or they were found to have directly participated in, or supported the planning or plotting of a combat operation. The other findings that led to the categorization of a detainee as a “demonstrated threat” were no more solid than that.

The CTC, to their credit, did admit in their report that “The summary of details for any given CSRT unclassified summary is neither comprehensive nor all that specific. This is due, in large part, to the fact that much of the information used to determine an individual’s status remains classified.” However, they not only failed to note how much of the information was obtained under torture, they didn’t even mention torture as a means of obtaining information. And just as bad, they failed to note that much of the information contained in the reports was obtained from bounty hunters who delivered captives into U.S. custody for large sums of cash. The report does however contain an analysis of the source of capture of the detainees, in which less than 5% are noted to have been captured by the U.S. government and more than half do not have the capture source stated in their records.


The U.S. detainee program in perspective

Thus in response to a myriad of criticisms of human rights abuses and the indefinite imprisonment of thousands of innocent men (and boys), the Bush administration commissioned a study to set the record straight; the researchers were solely limited to government documents to conduct their research; they classified detainees as “definitive threats” based on confessions obtained under torture or information supported by no (publicly available) evidence whatsoever, much of which was obtained from bounty hunters; they concluded that 73% of our detainees are “definitive threats as enemy combatants”; and from that the Bush administration got a big propaganda boost, as rags like the Wall Street Journal editorial page whine about the possibility that some of the “terrorists” at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere might go free if we allow them to have the right to a fair trial – a right that American citizens take for granted.

Let us also not forget that the term “enemy combatant” has no legal standing under international law whatsoever. It is simply a term that George W. Bush uses to avoid having to treat his prisoners humanely, as required under the Geneva Conventions, in his self-proclaimed “War on Terror”.

What if fair trials were given to our prisoners and a handful of “guilty” ones were released for lack of evidence? Let’s say that “guilty” meant that they had fought to defend their homeland against U.S. invasion. Worse yet, let’s suppose we actually had to let go a handful of real terrorists, for lack of evidence against them. That would probably swell the ranks of anti-American terrorists by what – a tenth of a percent maybe? In the meantime, our widespread infamous violations of international law are swelling the ranks of terrorists by huge numbers. Does anyone with an ounce of common sense believe we’ll ever solve the problem of anti-American terrorism by capturing terrorists and throwing them in dungeons to be tortured? The Bush approach is like trying to put out a fire by throwing kerosene on it.

I’ll end this post now with an excerpt from Stephen Grey’s book about the CIA torture program, where he compares our detainee system to the Soviet Union’s Gulag system under Stalin, and which I discuss in this post:

How much more than surreal, more apart from normal existence, was the network of prisons run after 9/11 by the United States and its allies? How much easier too was the denial and the double-think when those who disappeared into the modern gulag were, being mainly swarthy skinned Arabs with a different culture, so different from most of us in the West? How much more reassuring were the words from our politicians that all was well?

Our country has now put about 11,000 men and boys into this network. And yet most Americans like to think and claim that we don’t have concentration camps.