Despite what George said, US Prison diaspora grows - now 13,000 without charge

George Bush's peformance last week in explaining how there were secret prisons run by the US abroad and that a handful (14) of their detainees were now in Guantanmo bay may well have confused some people about the size of the US prison diaspora.

AP report that there are currently some 14,000 prisoners held without stated reason , trial or even the knowledge of their families and friends.

When the US recently closed Abu Ghraib prison and handed it over to the Iraqi authorities it was empty, as the 3000 prisoners there were moved to a US$ 60 MN. state of the art prison at Camp Cropper near Baghdad Airport. The US Army oversees about 13,000 prisoners in Iraq at Cropper, Camp Bucca in the southern desert, and Fort Suse in the Kurdish north.

Neither prisoners of war nor criminal defendants, they are just "security detainees" held "for imperative reasons of security," said U.S. Army Lt. Col. Keir-Kevin Curry. Every U.S. detainee in Iraq "is detained because he poses a security threat to the government of Iraq, the people of Iraq or coalition forces,"

As of Sept. 9, the Central Criminal Court of Iraq had put a total of 1,445 on trial (including Saddam an dhis chums) , convicting 1,252. In the last week of August, for example, 38 were sentenced on charges ranging from illegal weapons possession to murder, for the shooting of a U.S. Marine.Almost 18,700 have been released since June 2004, without charge, or explanation.

AP report that by September 9, fewer than 1,500 of the Iraq prisoners have been tried by the Central Criminal Court of Iraq. At Guantanamo Bay despite the heralded departures 455 prisoners remain of 770 sent there. So far only ten of these prisoners have been charged with crimes by the much criticised military tribunals.

Detainee mistreatment by US forces and the CIA in Iraq alone has led to more than 800 investigations and investigations on the actions of over 250 US military staff and there have to date been 89 courts martial.

In 14 of 34 cases, someone has been punished for the killings of detainees; the harshest sentence was 5 months. Of 98 detainee deaths , the cause has only been determined in half the cases - including 3 suicides made known at Guantanamo Bay in June.

The situation in Afghanistan is unclear , about 500 detainees are believed to be held mostly Afghans, but also apparently Arabs, Pakistanis and Central Asians.

The United States have said they will cede control of its Afghan detainees by early next year, 5 years after invading Afghanistan to eliminate al-Qaida's base and bring down the Taliban government. Meanwhile, the prisoners of Bagram (27 miles N. of Kabul) exist in a legal vacuum like that elsewhere in the U.S. detention network.

"There's been a silence about Bagram, and much less political discussion about it," said Richard Bennett, chief U.N. human rights officer in Afghanistan.

Freed detainees tell how in cages of 16 inmates they are forbidden to speak to each other. They wear the same orange jumpsuits and shaven heads as the terrorist suspects at Guantanamo, but lack even the scant legal rights granted inmates at that Cuba base. In some cases, they have been held without charge for three to four years, rights workers say.

The Guradian on Friday February 18, 2005 reported details of documents the ACLU had obtained about detainee abuse at Bagram and also affidavits from prisoners who went on the Guantanamo Bay.

Hussain Adbulkadr Youssouf Mustafa, a Palestinian living in Jordan, told the lawyer, Clive Stafford-Smith, that he was sodomised by US soldiers during his detention at Bagram air force base in 2002.

He claims to have been blindfolded, tightly handcuffed, gagged and had his ears plugged, forced to bend down over a table by two soldiers, with a third soldier pressing his face down on the table, and to have had his trousers pulled down.

"They forcibly rammed a stick up my rectum," he reports. "It was excruciatingly painful ... Only when the pain became overwhelming did I think I would ever scream. But I could not stop screaming when this happened."

In a second affidavit, the Jordanian citizen, Wesam Abdulrahman Ahmed Al Deemawi, detained from March 15 2002 to March 31 2004, says that during a 40-day period of detention at Bagram he was threatened with dogs, stripped and photographed "in shameful and obscene positions" and placed in a cage with a hook and a hanging rope. He says he was hung from this hook, blindfolded, for two days although he was occasionally given hour-long "breaks".

As Cofer Black, the former director of the CIA's counter-terrorist branch, (see picture at top) said in evidence to a US Congressional intelligence committee September 26, 2002: "All you need to know: there was a before 9/11, and there was an after 9/11... After 9/11 the gloves come off."

It was of course the same guy who speaking on August 15th 2001 to the Department of Defense’s annual Convention of Counterterrorism, “We are going to be struck soon, many Americans are going to die, and it could be in the US.”