Creeping fascism is a threat to national security …
September 18, 2006
So even as we "debate" -- if that's what you want to call it -- the treatment of prisoners and the clarity of the Geneva Conventions, we discover that the U.S. is holding an estimated 14,000 people in its global network of detention facilities.
Captured on battlefields, pulled from beds at midnight, grabbed off streets as suspected insurgents, tens of thousands now have passed through U.S. detention, the vast majority in Iraq.
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.A report based on defense Department documents put the rate of "mistakes" at Guantanamo Bay at 55 percent, and CIA officials have said that "a significant but undetermined percentage" of those held at Baghram Airbase in Afghanistan were "innocent of anything except being in the wrong place during 'sweeps' by Afghan warlords." Let's just say for simplicity sake that a majority of those held in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Gitmo are innocent, or at the very least not hardened terrorists.
