[Dialogue] Emailing: Ghost ShipsAmerica's 'floating prisons' are not only illegal, but evidence of the limitless scale of US detention policy - CommonDreams.org.htm

Tue Jun 10 14:25:31 EDT 2008

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Published on Monday, June 9, 2008 by The Guardian/UK
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jun/05/terrorism.humanrights>

Ghost Ships
America’s ‘floating prisons’ are not only illegal, but evidence of the
limitless scale of US detention policy

by Shayana Kadidal

This week the Guardian broke the news that an upcoming report from Reprieve
<http://www.reprieve.org.uk/>  — our counterparts across the pond in the
Guantánamo litigation — documents the use of as many as 17 American warships
as floating prisons
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/02/usa.humanrights>  to hold
detainees in the “war on terror”. The report apparently documents not only
descriptions of detentions at sea from released Guantánamo detainees, most
of whom presumably were held in the early days of the “war on terror”, but
also more recent detentions on US warships, particularly in the Horn of
Africa, a current hot spot for disappearances carried out by the US military
and intelligence agencies. The report also claims that in the last two years
there have been several hundred renditions
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/jun/07/usa.politics>  — another
practice thought to have ceased after President Bush declared an end to it
in 2006.

>From a purely legal standpoint, the fact the US may have been holding a
large number of prisoners on its own military vessels is surprising news,
because even before 9/11 there were legal precedents for federal courts
exercising jurisdiction over detentions on warships. The so-called “American
Taliban”, John Walker Lindh
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/jul/16/worlddispatch.usa> , was held
on an amphibious warship (the USS Peleliu) between his capture in
Afghanistan and his transfer to the US to face trial. But because Lindh was
a US citizen, it was clear from the start that he would have the right of
access to federal courts in habeas corpus, and for this reason — and for his
public relations value — the government determined early on to try him
through the criminal process.

In contrast, if foreign nationals were held on US ships, the government
would have every reason to scrupulously hide that fact from the world in
order to facilitate their continued indefinite detention without trial or
any form of oversight from the courts. Administration officials might have
shown off to the press the fact that detainees were held at Guantánamo
because they believed federal courts would never be able to hold them
accountable for anything done at Guantánamo, no matter how blatantly
illegal. But hiding the fact that large numbers of foreign nationals were
held on warships may have been essential to hide those cases from the
scrutiny of the federal courts.

The report also evidences continued Bush administration disrespect for
international law. Even on the (usually-dubious) assumption that these
secret detainees may be held as prisoners of war, Article 22 of the Third
Geneva Convention <http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/91.htm>  states that
“Prisoners of war may be interned only in premises located on land.” These
provisions were included in the 1949 Conventions in response to the
appalling mistreatment of American prisoners of war by the Japanese, who
shipped thousands of American prisoners to labour camps in the Philippines,
Thailand, Korea and elsewhere under decks in vermin-infested ships. (Indeed,
many of these prisoners were killed when allied armed forces torpedoed the
unmarked prison ships where they were held.)

The Reprieve report quotes a detainee who describes the treatment meted out
on the prison ships as worse than Guantánamo. Again, that’s unsurprising,
given the secrecy that surrounds these detentions. One interesting question
the report may shed light on, though, is whether the abusive practices at
sea lasted past the Abu Ghraib scandal and the supposed end to medieval
coercive interrogation techniques by the US military in 2004, which followed
in its wake.

I suppose a final lesson is that there is no limit to the number of
potential Guantánamos for the US to exploit. The US government currently
holds some 270 prisoners in Guantánamo, over 600 at Bagram in Afghanistan
and about 27,000 in Iraq. And much has been written about the possibility
that detainees were held in other insular enclaves like Diego Garcia
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/02/ciarendition.unitednations> .
But the prospect of floating prisons — and of widespread renditions from
those ships to unknown places within Morocco, Egpyt, Jordan or elsewhere —
casts a special blanket of darkness over these practices. Some of what we
know about previous renditions of innocent men - Maher Arar, Khaled el Masri
— comes from flight records cobbled together by planespotters watching their
local airports. Even that bare thread will not be present for men
transferred from below decks on American warships to the secret prisons run
by torture regimes in totalitarian states. If this is the detention mode
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jun/03/theincrediblehulks> l
of the future, it may well be one that produces no history, no disclosure of
abuses and no record of mistakes.

Shayana Kadidal is head of the Guantánamo litigation project at the Center
for  <http://ccrjustice.org/> Constitutional Rights in New York, which
brought the case of the detainees to the US supreme court in 2004 and again
in 2007.

© Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

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15 Comments so far 

1.	

	Thomas More June 9th, 2008 2:31 pm 

	This is a simple question to answer. 

	This is a policy that should be stopped immediately. Period. It
needs no discussion.

2.	

	greatbear215 June 9th, 2008 3:16 pm 

	There’s a limit to everything-and America’s patience wears thin with
this White House.

3.	

	aljoschu June 9th, 2008 5:45 pm 

	Dear Americans,
I have posted this statement before as a comment on the same topic:
It is horrifying to see that the lessons learned by mankind as a consequence
of Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich - which only lasted 12 years - have
obviously been lost entirely 60 years after WW II.
Floating American KZs (Konzentrationslager) mark the point of utter moral
squalidness after a never-ending sequence of shock and awe to the world
public: the raid of Iraq, Abu Ghoraib, the tortured hooded men, Guantánamo,
squatting men in red jumper suits, horrid and humiliating stories about the
teatment of “insurgents”, the kidnappings, etc.
Images that have now been chiseled into our collective memory since 2001.
My generation was raised in the firm belief that nothing, nobody would ever
compare to Hitler and what he had done to the world. Hitler was to be
unique, the ultimate singularity, forever - to belief this was almost like
feeling safe in this world.
However, this belief has been shattered entirely by two terms of Bush,
Cheney and Rice.
To witness the atrocities of the so-called “war against terrorism” happening
in a censored (”embedded”) environment, however, publicly retrievable by
media and the internet - and thus inextinguishable from public memory - has
shattered the belief in Hitler’s singularity, at last.
If Bush, Cheney and Rice can lie any lie, can commit any crime, anywhere at
anytime under the eyes of the public, elected by a people who claim to be
free - and who are not oppressed or personally threatened by liquidation -
even elected twice by the American people who claim to be free
 then Hitler
cannot be held as a singularity any longer.
This means: the Third Reich can happen anywhere, anytime - no matter under
what regime or form of government. And there is no limit to barbarity
whatsoever to happen right in the midst of us all. With all of us as
ignorants, spectators, or “Willige Helfer” (willing helpers).
May God or Allah help us.
Best wishes again from Germany.

4.	

	vintage42 June 9th, 2008 6:22 pm 

	Some high value prisoners were no doubt helicoptered to those two
amphibious assault ships for interrogation and rendition to other countries.
But that is much different from a multi-billion dollar warship being used as
a “floating prison” or “prison hulk”. That is inaccurate and misleading. We
have built plenty of prisons in Iraq for the masses we have detained. No
need to put them on our warships.

5.	

	curmudgeon99 June 9th, 2008 6:50 pm 

	@aljoschu:

	Thank you. My father always maintained how little separated us from
the Nazis. He alomost went to the Lincoln Brigade.

	As he and I got older, he kept saying time and again - ‘Just
remember what I have said when the fascists take over.’

	He passed in 1989.

6.	

	Thomas More June 9th, 2008 7:24 pm 

	greatbear215 June 9th, 2008 3:16 pm
There’s a limit to everything-and America’s patience wears thin with this
White House.

	Its worn out!

	An analogy between this administration and the Nazi’s is to absurd
to contemplate.

7.	

	jamadison4 June 9th, 2008 9:15 pm 

	.
FASCISM is on the rise again.

	Unfortunately, most people perfer to think it only happened in the
past, or somewhere else, or to other nations.

	FASCIST evil is corrupting our own country. This Bush-Cheney
Administration is a reprise of Germany in the mid-thirities.

	.

8.	

	canuckchuck June 9th, 2008 9:24 pm 

	The beauty of using US ships to house those illegally detained, is a
simple length of chain around the waist and a quick dip in the ocean removes
all evidence that they ever existed.

9.	

	Mike Corbeil June 9th, 2008 9:47 pm 

	” aljoschu June 9th, 2008 5:45 pm

	Dear Americans,
I have posted this statement before as a comment on the same topic:
It is horrifying to see that the lessons learned by mankind as a consequence
of Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich - which only lasted 12 years - have
obviously been lost entirely 60 years after WW II. 
”

	The overall statement bears some truth, but to be fully true would
require considering that some people claim that Hitler had been inspired by
or based on U.S. history, a LOT of it, and whether that’s true or not is
something I don’t know; but it’s definitely fitting. People have a regular
habit of forgetting U.S. history and, instead, think of the USA far
differently from what it has LONG been and never stopped being. And as for
WWII, Howard Zinn and others have written about the major war crimes of the
U.S. and the U.K. during that war; in Germany, and maybe other European
countries. Instead of targeting the Nazi forces of soldiers, cities,
residential, civilian areas were heavily bombed, f.e.

	The U.S. didn’t stop its major crimes of war 
 ever since, and had
committed many before that war.

	Canada hasn’t stopped its crimes of genocide and imperialist
predation against the First Nations Peoples of this country, and the msm
“news” media and the churches here are very complicit in these crimes.
Neither has Australia. They also continue in South American countries, and
it’s around 500 years of colonialist, imperialist, 
 genocide in much of all
of the Americas, including Haiti, where the U.S., Canada and France
maintain, ongoingly,their criminal act-of-war coup d’etat against Haitians
and their govt, and President Aristide; and backed by the UN, and so on.

	As for the present in Canada, I often recommend the following two
resources, while more Canadian online resources can also be found with
simple Web searches.

	www.hiddenFromHistory.org 

	www.MohawkNationNews.com

	It should not need to be repeated, but many people continually speak
of the U.S. as if most of its real history is not real.

	Even the Nazis’ false-flag Reichstag fire was possibly thought of
based on U.S. history; f.e., when the U.S. navy sank or struck one of its
own ships to pretend to Americans back in the U.S. that it was the
Philippines that did this and that it therefore justified war on that
country, during the 1890s.

	What I read about Hitler having been inspired about from U.S.
history is with respect to the genocide of the Jews; having been purportedly
inspired from the long history of extreme U.S. genocide of Native Americans,
massacring potentially nearly 100 million and having concentration camp
confined many living Native Americans, an earlier apartheid system than the
one ended not long ago in South Africa. 

	A form of apartheid is applied against many Canadian First Nations
Peoples today and there’s no end in sight. And the genocide is very real
today.

	This sort of awareness is one reason why I knew the war on Iraq and
of today was going to be of Hellish kind; extremely hellish crime. But we
also had hard facts prior to the launch of the war and telling those of us
who refused to ignore these known facts, while some were fully obvious and
actually known worldwide, could NEVER be justifiable and that Bush, Cheney,
Rumsfeld, Powell, and so on, were LYING, flagrantly lying, and flagrantly
distorting any snippets of truth that they said to a perverted extent that
they were more LIES.

	A lot of people preferred to remain ignorant and to irresponsibly
not do any respectable amount of research before giving support for the
criminal war. Many who knew of the critical facts and the obvious enough
lies of the Bush 
 cabal chose to criminally disregard these facts and
obvious lies, making it criminal support of a criminal war.

	Awful, atrocious, horrific, 
!

	When people speak of the Nazi crimes of WWII, most speak only of the
genocide of the Jews, and it is important, but it’s far from being a just
view, for it’s an injustice towards the far greater number of all other
victims of that war. Even with just the concentration camps of Nazi Germany,
not only Jews were incarcerated there. France and perhaps other European
countries invaded by the Nazi forces were turned into situations like huge
concentration camps; only having a slightly different appearance. Etc.

	In Canada, First Nations Peoples are still be expropriated and
denied many human rights, etc.; extremely criminal of the govt and the
ruling elites here!

	So while WWII was very bad, it’s a small blip if we don’t deny a LOT
of history. We can’t legitimately, ethically commit such denials; and when
we do, we partake in additional injustices, too.

	As for these “ghost ships”, there was an article recently posted
here on this and some people posted of far older examples; of U.S., U.K.,
and (I believe) Japan.

10.	

	Sherman101 June 9th, 2008 10:00 pm 

	How about considering our revolution. Captured Continental soldiers
were left to rot on British prison ships. Are we the “new British” of the
world and will we end the same way as the British Empire?

11.	

	Turce June 9th, 2008 11:04 pm 

	Closing GITMO now ships that’s why Mullen is so
<http://cbs4.com/national/mullen.close.gitmo.2.629047.html>  smiley faced
when the # 10,000 echoes in his empty skull

12.	

	hereontheres June 10th, 2008 1:03 am 

	Dennis Kucinich has put the Articles of Impeachment on the table.
Hopefully our spineless congress will follow through with their
constitutional duty.
Roll back the congressional power usurped by this administration before any
president takes office.
How can we expect a new president to give up inherited power?
IMPEACH NOW!!!

13.	

	ColdWarBaby47 <http://coldwarproductions.blogspot.com/>  June 10th,
2008 1:37 am 

	All this rendition and prison ships and whatnot is good practice for
the labor camps soon to be populated by working class Americans. The
psychopaths are just warming up.
Major United Nations Sanctions against America NOW! The rest of the world
needs to unite against America as it did against Hitler’s Germany.

14.	

	FightTheMachine June 10th, 2008 10:37 am 

	Now the generals, Myers, sanchez, miller, abazaid, hartmen and many
others in the mil w/ stars and bars, and peacock like uniforms need to be
neutered by having their toys taken away, budget slashed, and charged w/ war
crimes
of course they’ll be presumed innocent

15.	

	Shiva June 10th, 2008 12:01 pm 

	If YOU pay taxes you are supporting this whole thing and are just as
guilty

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