Torture Inc.

GOI: Being good little capitalists they've been setting up goddamn torture fanchises.

By PATRICK QUINN
Associated Press Writer

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- In the few short years since the first shackled Afghan shuffled off to Guantanamo, the U.S. military has created a global network of overseas prisons, its islands of high security keeping 14,000 detainees beyond the reach of established law.

Many say they were caught up in U.S. military sweeps, often interrogated around the clock, then released months or years later without apology, compensation or any word on why they were taken. Seventy to 90 percent of the Iraq detentions in 2003 were "mistakes," U.S. officers once told the international Red Cross.

GOI:So much for America being the "shining beacon on the hill." Seventy to 90% error rate is completely unacceptable. Everyone of those 70-90 "mistakes" are going home and telling their families about how they were treated and mistaken for insurgents. How many of those (or those in their immediate family) then DO turn to the insurgency because of their anger in being mistreated and detained without reason?

As with others, Karim's confinement may simply have strengthened support for the anti-U.S. resistance. "I will hate Americans for the rest of my life," he said.

But dozens of ex-detainees, government ministers, lawmakers, human rights activists, lawyers and scholars in Iraq, Afghanistan and the United States said the detention system often is unjust and hurts the war on terror by inflaming anti-Americanism in Iraq and elsewhere.

Human rights groups count dozens of detainee deaths for which no one has been punished or that were never explained. The secret prisons - unknown in number and location - remain available for future detainees. The new manual banning torture doesn't cover CIA interrogators. And thousands of people still languish in a limbo, deprived of one of common law's oldest rights, habeas corpus, the right to know why you are imprisoned.

"If you, God forbid, are an innocent Afghan who gets sold down the river by some warlord rival, you can end up at Bagram and you have absolutely no way of clearing your name," said John Sifton of Human Rights Watch in New York. "You can't have a lawyer present evidence, or do anything organized to get yourself out of there."

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