How SHOULD we handle 'detainees?'

[MaduroUTMB]

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[washparkhorn]

Sorry for raising this from the dead, but we had some great discussions on this board. Cheers.

 

[Horn6721]

One way to not worry about the morality of what to do with "detainees" is to not have any.
I have not seen any reports or read anything that suggests our military has captured any insurgents since Obama took office. If there have been where did Obana send them?

No live people to be " detainees" problem of what to do with them solved.

 

[RomaVicta]

Nice to see your name on here again, washpark. You've been missed. Many other names on this thread have been missed, too.

 

[Uninformed]

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[Uninformed]

Matt Waxman, the U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defence for detainee affairs until the end of 2005, recalled in an interview with IPS that there had been “a lot of concern both in the Pentagon and in the field” about “over-broad detention” in Afghanistan, but also “counter-pressures” for “more aggressive detention operations”.

U.S. Ambassador Neumann told IPS that the U.S. military turned detainees over to the NDS because of “the intelligence benefit and so we didn’t have a revolving door” – a reference to the fact that many detainees who had been turned over to local authorities had been set free.

In an interview with the Ottawa Citizen published May 16, 2007, Canadian Brig. Gen. Jim Ferron, then the intelligence chief for NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) command in Afghanistan, referred to the intelligence motive for both detention and transferring detainees to NDF.

“The detainees are detained for a reason,” said Ferron. “They have information we need.”

But he complained that much of the information provided by detainees was “not truthful and is aimed at deceiving military forces”. Ferron explained that detainees went through “basic questioning” by NATO interrogators about “why they joined the insurgency” and the information was then turned over to NDS.

Ferron clearly implied that the NDS interrogators could do a better job of getting the truth out of the detainees than NATO interrogators. The “best information” was what was being gleaned by the NDS, he said, and ISAF “would like to make it more a part of our daily intelligence”.

Ferron said senior NDS officials had assured him that “detainees are treated humanely.” But only three weeks earlier, the Toronto Globe and Mail had published a series of investigative articles based on interviews with detainees turned over by the Canadians who had been tortured by NDS.

Even though they had just initiated the 96-hour rule under which detainees were turned over to NDS, British and Dutch diplomats were very concerned about the NDS reputation for torture, according to the NATO diplomat. “They knew if they turned their detainees over to the Afghans, they would be tortured,” recalled the diplomat.

Largely because of their awareness of the risk of NDS torture, the British and Dutch turned over relatively few detainees, according to the NATO diplomat.

The British and Dutch also joined with U.S. officials in trying to get the Afghan government to shift responsibility for detainees from NDS to the Afghan Ministry of Defence, the NATO diplomat recalled.

But there were two problems: under Afghan law, there was no provision for long-term legal internment, and a 1987 Afghan law gave NDS the responsibility for handling security cases through its own “security courts”.

The U.S. and its two European NATO allies wanted President Hamid Karzai to remove those legal obstacles to long-term detention by the Defence Ministry. “The idea was that Karzai would declare a state of emergency, so the government could hold people for the length of the conflict,” the diplomat said.

The plan also envisioned the renovation of the Pul-I Charkhi prison to add a new wing for security detainees, for which the Ministry of Defence would be responsible.

But Karzai refused to declare a state of emergency, according to the NATO diplomat, because he didn’t want to make concessions to the Afghan parliament to get it. Meanwhile, Defence Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak “wanted nothing to do with detainee policy”, said the NATO diplomat.

In early November 2007, a detainee turned over to the NDS by Canadian forces told Canadian diplomats in an NDS jail in Kandahar in early November 2007 that he had been beaten with an electrical cable and a rubber hose, and the Canadians found the torture instruments nearby.br>The Canadian government then halted its transfers of detainees to the NDS. And in February 2008, Amnesty International called on NATO defence ministers to suspend all transfers of detainees from ISAF to Afghan authorities, given the substantial risk of torture and ill- treatment.

Despite that appeal, however, the United States continued to transfer its detainees to NDS.

During 2009, ISAF transferred a total of 350 detainees to NDS, according to official data provided to IPS by a knowledgeable U.S. source. An even more detainees were transferred to NDS by U.S. troops operating separately from the NATO command, according to the source.



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[Horn6721]

Uniformed
Thanks for the info and links. I had no idea that is what we were doing.
amazing that the media that was all over Bush about detainees has not reported( that I have seen) anything about what Obama is doing.

All those who thought what Bush did was wrong are you in agreement with Obama turning them over to the Afghans and perhaps the Iraqui gov'ts
Does that fit into your ideas of morality rights and liberty?