Since the American invasion of Iraq, more than 5 million Iraqis have been driven from their homes by violence and terror. One of these Iraqis is Ahlam Ahmed. This is her story.
Guantánamo may be moving to Standish, Michigan.
View Standish in a larger map
The Associated Press reports: Obama administration officials are touring a maximum-security prison 145 miles northwest of Detroit today. The Standish Maxium Correctional Facility is being considered as a potential destination for terror suspects currently held in Guantánamo Bay.
Despite “not in my backyard” resistance, Obama still plans to close Gitmo by early 2010.
The Standish facility is currently on the chopping block because of Michigan state budget cuts, despite the fact that it is Arenac County’s largest employer in a region with a crippling 17.3 percent unemployment rate. States like Pennsylvania and California are already in talks with Michigan officials about paying to ship some of their inmates in Standish.
Michigan’s governor, Jennifer Granholm, said she’d rather accept those prisoners from other states than Gitmo detainees, and the local pressure to save the prison is mounting.
White House officials are also eyeing the military penitentiary at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas as an alternative location for Gitmo detainees.
Chicago is home to the second largest Iraqi population in the United States (the first is in Dearborn, Michigan). But the absence of the Iraqi community is being felt by Chicago resettlement agencies, like the Heartland Alliance’s Refugee and Immigrant Services. With the resettlement of Iraqis increasing almost 15 fold, representatives of these agencies say this void was not something they expected.
Click to listen.
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Highlights:
Some of the U.S. Congressmen who vowed “not in my backyard” during debates regarding where to send Guantánamo detainees after the facility is shuttered are in for an unpleasant surprise. According to the Associated Press, the Obama administration is “looking at creating a courtroom-within-a-prison complex in the U.S. to house suspected terrorists” in America’s heartland.
A state prison in Michigan and the 134-year-old military penitentiary in Kansas are both on the short list of locations for the site. If chosen, the facility would hold the 229 suspected terrorists from Guantánamo prison. Read more…
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Obama administration is looking to overhaul the way America interrogates terror suspects.
The new plan would call for a small team of professionals, from both spy services and law-enforcement agencies, to be used for “high-value” detainees. Under this new system the CIA would get the boot, no longer running the show like the last eight years. However, the Journal’s source did not specify who might be in charge of this new program.
One of the team’s first tasks would be to form a new set of interrogation methods drawing from scientific and academic studies, a notable break from the brutality permitted by the Bush administration. These new non-coercive procedures may differ from the 19 permitted in the Army Field Manual (lawmakers’ and human rights groups’ golden standard of interrogation) to include providing rewards for information and playing on a detainee’s anxiety or other emotions.
The interrogation unit would include people assigned to research, master and conduct non-coercive interrogations. The team would most likely be drawn agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, CIA and Pentagon.
If adopted, the new interrogation team would signify an attempt by the Obama administration to wipe the slate clean of the counterterrorism issues that have plagued the CIA and Justice Department since a U.S. network of secret prisons was exposed in 2005.
But don’t get your hopes up just yet. There could still be some similarities to the approach of the Bush administration. For starters, the team’s efforts will still focus more on gathering intelligence than on assembling evidence for use in a criminal trial. (Because all of those studies saying interrogation leads to unreliable evidence are wrong. Oh, and all of those people who were acquitted by a military tribunal because of insufficient evidence… well, that was just bad luck. Keep on doing what you’re doing!)
For the full story: U.S. Weighs Special Team of Terrorism Interrogators
Tuesday a representative of the Obama administration said that the U.S. could continue to detain non-U.S. citizens in facilities like Gitmo, even if they have been acquitted of terrorism charges by an American military commission.
The Defense Department’s chief lawyer, Jeh Johnson, told the Senate Armed Forces Committee that releasing a detainee who has been tried and found not guilty was a policy decision that officials would have to make based on their estimates of whether or not the accused posed a future threat.
But why should there be a different standard for Americans than non-U.S. citizens? Hundreds of criminals who were probably guilty as sin have been acquitted only to return to society and harm others. If a military commission cannot find enough evidence to convict an individual of terrorism charges, why should the American government be allowed continue to hold these people when any other justice system could not?
And it is safe to say that the Obama administration (or any other administration for that matter) would not stand by while another country implemented an equivalent policy. Just weeks ago, injustices toward former Northwestern University student Roxanna Saberi topped the U.S. diplomatic agenda because she was being unfairly detained. And she was found guilty in a court of law. Admittedly, the court system of Iran does not have the same tradition of justice that its American counterpart has. But Iran found Saberi to be a threat, just as the American government finds these Gitmo detainees to be threats.
If we are just going to hold these people anyway, maybe the American government should lose the pretenses of justice and skip the trial all together. Either way, the standard of the American justice system is not being upheld.
Full Wall Street Journal article: Detainees, even if acquitted, might not go free