The new Detainee Review Board (DRB) procedures for the approximately 600 detainees currently held in Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan, are an improvement over the existing review regime, which has resulted in prolonged and unjust detention and has been a growing source of frustration and decreased Afghan support for U.S. presence in Afghanistan. But these reforms do not address the core of U.S. detention problems that persist in Afghanistan -- problems that undercut America's counterinsurgency goals there.
Back in May, the Pentagon told the press that 1 in 7 Guantanamo detainees "returned to terrorism or militant activity." The New York Times ran with this lead, without even requesting a definition of "returned to terrorism or militant activity." Weeks later, the New York Times had to run a correction, essentially blaming the whole confusion on not receiving documents from the Pentagon. This was, of course, a ridiculous excuse. The Pentagon responded to my request for documentation in a matter of hours, with a pdf that described, entirely, how they define whether or not someone is suspected of returning to the battle field:
More and more former interrogators and counterinsurgency experts are using Dick Cheney's recent ubiquity to expose his iniquity regarding the torture and abuse of detainees. Earlier this week, I wrote about Major Matthew Alexander, the former Senior Interrogator who conducted over 300 interrogations in Iraq and supervised 1,000 more. Alexander relied upon conventional means of interrogation, and his efforts led to the capture and killing of al-Qaeda leader Abu Mousab al-Zarqawi. Yet Alexander also witnessed the perilous consequences of Cheney's torture policy.
In an exclusive interview with Brave New Foundation, Alexander said, "At the prison where I conducted interrogations, we heard day in and day out foreign fighters who had been captured state that the number one reason they had come to fight in Iraq was because of torture and abuse, what had happened at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib."
Today, MoveOn.org and VoteVets.org joined the growing movement to amplify the testimonies of former interrogators and reveal the repercussions of treating prisoners inhumanely. Their joint campaign features a video with Jay Bagwell, an Afghanistan veteran and counterintelligence agent, who reaffirmed Alexander's assessment of Cheney's torture policy. According to Bagwell, "Torture puts our troops in danger, torture makes our troops less safe, torture creates terrorists. It's used so widely as a propaganda tool now in Afghanistan. All too often, detainees have pamphlets on them, depicting what happened at Guantanamo."
It's no shock that those long-opposed to All Things Immigrant are using the Swine Flu outbreak—which has mostly affected Mexicans at this point—to ratchet anti-immigrant rhetoric up to an irresponsible level. It's disappointing though, especially because the last few weeks saw more rational dialogue emerging in media coverage. This week's Wire examines the voices talking about immigration both in the media and on the ground, from those recycling age-old "eliminationist" rhetoric to those who put their own bodies on the line to fight for inclusive justice.
The dialogue on immigration has, historically, been contentious and cyclical. There are times when hysteria peaks, and rational thought struggles to enter the national dialogue. There are also moments of truth. This week, independent media debunked many myths about the undocumented and made the case for the positive impact of immigrants in the US, including the positive effect of legalizing the undocumented on the economy and how citizens are holding elected representatives accountable for votes against pro-immigrant measures.
This week, two comprehensive reports on the health of immigrant detainees were released by Human Rights Watch and the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center. As Public News Service reports, "Immigrants are, literally, dying for decent care."
In political circles, we sometimes use the phrase "police state," to describe losses of civil liberties or the encroachment of penal processes into our lives. But how does such a thing manifest in our every day experience? Some would point to the all-too-casual use of electric shock devices by legal authorities.
