Saturday, September 09, 2006
"Alternative" Jails
Anya Kamanetz recently reported (again) on the detention practices of Israel, which regularly detains Palestinians for months and years without trial and without contact with their families on the orders of individual Israeli generals. They are frequently beaten, according the NGO observers.
Anya, however, seems to have a problem with criticizing Israel. She mentions in her earlier work (in 2003) that these practices are covered by the Geneva Conventions but she fails to mention that they are also covered by UN conventions like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She does mention “UN human rights laws” that only provide for “preventive detentions” in cases where the suspect is perceived to be an “immanent threat,” but nothing in those conventions could possibly be construed to allow preventive detentions that last months and years. Much like laws in the United States, these conventions allow holding someone for weeks without charges, nothing more.
She then quotes extensively from defenders of the system, including a former Israeli prison guard who maintains "I think the Israeli officials bend over backwards to be fair to prisoners. I never saw one case of abuse. The conditions are as if for a prisoner of war." She also quotes from an Israeli military official who says that they are given “extra rights.”
Good work, Anya. I’m sure if you interviewed an Iranian military official and former guard you could do a similarly good job of providing “balanced” coverage of the abuses there.
Anya is notable because her work is featured on the Huffington Post, an ostensibly left-wing media outlet. You will sometimes also find the work of Alan Dershowitz and Bill Maher on the Huffington Post and Alternet, two men that are famous for their defense of Israel.
There is a clear border on the limits of criticism allowed in these left wing sites. In all my considerable time reading the Huffington Post and Alternet I have never seen them give space to multiple defenders of the Bush Administration. I have, obviously, seen them extend that courtesy to Israel, which is a curious distinction.
In her latest post she brings up the Israeli detention practices again, concluding that, “I love Israel. I support its right to exist. And I believe that democracy in Israel is compromised by the nation's treatment of Palestinians, in its justice system and elsewhere.”
I want to say something up front. I love Anya Kamanetz. I support her right to exist. But her argument falls apart when she criticizes Israeli detentions from the point of view of it making Israel less safe. There is very little in her article explicitly stated by her about these detentions beings morally wrong, detentions that make life frightening and miserable for Palestinians who have never been convicted of a crime in any court. There is little mention of the fact that nations that use these powers (outside of Israel and the United States) are regularly excoriated by the US State Department. There is also little in either of her articles that might be construed as a blunt and honest criticism of Israel’s practices.
No, to do that we need to venture over the Amnesty International, a place where we find the characterization of Israel’s detention practices in a very different light. Amnesty International in an August 2005 report said that “Since 2000, thousands of Palestinians have been held in administrative detention in recent years, some of them for more than three years.” Commenting on the Huwara Military Base where many detainees were held, Amnesty International reported in 2003 that “for a year no lawyers were allowed to visit detainees… Cells are overcrowded and many detainees are forced to sleep on the floor as there are not enough mattresses to go round. The few mattresses and blankets which are available are dirty and bug-infested and no soap or cleaning material is provided for the detainees to wash themselves or to clean the cells, leading to the spread of skin diseases.”
There are a lot of human rights issues regarding Israel you won’t hear about in even the left-wing spectrum. For example, Amnesty International also reported in August of 2005 (among other times) that “Israeli authorities have taken no concrete measures to prevent the daily harassment and attacks against Palestinians and their property by Israeli settlers throughout the West Bank. The consistent failure of the Israeli authorities to prevent attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and to investigate such attacks and bring settlers to justice has created an atmosphere of impunity, which has ultimately encouraged further attacks.” This has been going for decades.
This is indeed relevant to the United States, as Anya Kamanetz maintains. As President Bush has recently said, the CIA has held “high value” detainees for years without charges and questioned them using “alternative” techniques. He also maintained that the CIA no longer holds people in secret prisons, which is largely unverifiable, though human rights groups like Human Rights Watch have demanded to know the location of several dozen detainees who disappeared and can’t be accounted for. His claim that the CIA no longer holds detainees is probably also disingenuous, as the US has, many times in the past, rendered detainees to foreign countries where they are held without trial or charges by the foreign government, as in the case of Salah Nasser Salim Ali, to name one of many, who was rendered to Yemen and held without charges by the Yemeni government (who confessed they had no information to prosecute him with, and were simply holding him at the request of the US government). Along with many others, Salah describes torture including regular beatings and humiliation techniques like verbal abuse and surrounding him with guards and forcing him to run around in a circle until he was exhausted, after which he was beaten.
Our prisons in Cuba, Iraq, and Afghanistan are only part of the international network of prisons the US has used over the past five years to detain suspects. This includes outsourcing the duties of prison guards and torture to proxy nations like Jordan and Yemen as well as the secret CIA prisons. As I have written recently, the US government seems very willing to outsource all sorts of military duties to foreign mercenaries from Chile to Egypt. This part of the picture is not very accurately described or emphasized in US press reports. Amnesty International estimated in April of 2005 that, worldwide, about 40 detainees were held in the controversial secret CIA prisons. They concurrently estimated that several thousand were held worldwide in the jails of foreign governments at the behest of the United States.
Thus, as I mentioned, the president touting the elimination of CIA prisons seems like much ado about nothing. Thousands of prisoners are held in Iraq at various camps, not to mention thousands more in the prisons of foreign countries and over four hundred more in Cuba. “Secret CIA prisons” is a sexy and interesting (if not frightening) concept, but there were never very many people held there. The thousands that comprise the vast majority of US detainees are not being given trials, nor have they for many years. Both Amnesty and Human Rights Watch have denounced the military tribunal system as unlawful, and the Supreme Court recently concurred in the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld Case.
I tire of the obfuscations, head fakes, and ridiculous lies “We do not practice torture” of this administration, as well as their more recent efforts to immunize themselves from prosecution by trying the rewrite the law after the fact. Human Rights Watch echoes my thoughts on these issues: “If the administration really wants to insulate personnel from spurious prosecutions, perhaps it should take a page from retiring dictators like Chile's Augusto Pinochet and work to obtain an amnesty for the administration for all criminal acts committed while in office. (Or why look all the way to Chile? Perhaps the administration should study how President Bush's father gave pardons to various Iran-Contra scandalites like Casper Weinberger.)”
# posted by BitterHarvest @ 9:40 PM 
