The best strategy in fighting terrorism, some say, is to "disrupt" the groups and cells planning future missions. One way of doing that, already practiced by the United States, is to farm out torture assignments to countries such as Egypt, Jordan, or Saudi Arabia, where they have no compunctions about extracting information from sources with violence or by threatening their family members. [...] The 700 detainees aren't being tortured here, but they aren't being treated very nice. They have been held over a month without charges, many in solitary confinement in 8-by-10-foot cells. Some report being deprived of toothbrushes, showers, and warm clothing. They have limited contact with attorneys and none with their families. The material witness statute allows them to be held only "a reasonable amount of time," and it's clear that many of these detentions are not reasonable. It's approaching Nosenko treatment, and in a few weeks it really will "shock the conscience."
You know, it's probably terribly naive of me, but it never once occurred to me that we did deliberately "farmed out" people for torture. You wonder what that request looks like: "Oh, Egypt, here are a couple of accused terrorists that are Egyptian nationals. We can't get any information out of them, but we're pretty sure they're terrorists so we've decided to deport them anyway, so you can have them back ... Oh, and if you can get some information from them, we'd appreciate hearing about it. We wouldn't even mind if they wind up a little dinged-up or damaged. (Wink wink, know what I mean? Know what I mean? But we never said that, of course.)"
“We are known for humanitarian treatment, so basically we are stuck. ... Usually there is some incentive, some angle to play, what you can do for them. But it could get to that spot where we could go to pressure . . . where we won’t have a choice, and we are probably getting there.”
It will be interesting to see -- several years hence, no doubt -- what the Court does, in fact, have to say about "getting there".
Regarding the people who are merely "detained", it will also be interesting to see what the Court says about indefinite detention that reaches "torture" status. (Technically, it should come sooner, since, as the author notes, habeas corpus has not formally been suspended at the current time. I expect that oversight to be remedied fairly soon. In any event, when such cases do come up, expect the Administration to ask for continuances, to drag its feet, to do anything possible to delay the case.) The precedent set by the Japanese-American internment cases may no longer control, given the results of various cases since then. After all, it's rather difficult for Congress to pass a law stating that Japanese Americans should be recompensed for their unlawful detentions without setting the implicit precedent that detentions based on little more evidence than their ethnicity are illegal.
Copyright © 2001, Iain Jackson, after-words.org
[Archives: 2001 and after]
Archives before February 5, 2001
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12/19/2001: vive la france
12/19/2001: princess, redux
12/19/2001: yemen and rumsfeld
12/18/2001: you're NOT in the army now
12/18/2001: interesting donation
12/18/2001: shame on winn dixie, indeed
12/18/2001: saudi princess
12/17/2001: new resolve
12/17/2001: a victim of the attack ... yeah, right
12/17/2001: polluters ho!