Brush Up Your Solzhenitsyn (Elaine Cassel)

[struggle4progress]

On Sunday, Jan 2, Dana Priest, writing in the Washington Post, described the plans of the Pentagon and the Justice Department to imprison indefinitely, perhaps for life, persons it wants “removed” from society. Having committed no crime, but believed to be associated with “terrorism” –however that is defined at any given moment in time—the people will live in prison camps modeled on American prisons.

At this moment, the CIA admits that it has imprisoned hundreds of people in foreign prisons. Amnesty International puts that number at well over 1000. At least one American citizen has been thus imprisoned in Saudi Arabia at the demand of federal prosecutors—Ahmed Abu Ali. Charged with no crime, implicated in no wrongdoing.

But back to the Priest story. The administration apparently has some trouble trusting its lawless incarceration to its friends. Even the most inhumane of governments don’t want to be America's prison warden. Recall that Syria sent back to Canada the Canadian citizen the CIA had kidnapped at New York’s Kennedy Airport and sent to Syria for “questioning” (go ahead and read “torture” into that term). The Syrian guards got tired of trying to beat information out of man who had no ties to anything.

To avoid restlessness among its surrogate thugs, Priest writes that the US is contracting with private companies (no doubt subsidiaries of Halliburton, which continues to build prisons in Guantanamo and Iraq) to build new prisons on American soil. Sources say the government is writing the rules (as they can do until somebody stops them), and it is specifically written that these prisoners won’t be charged with any crime and will never set foot in a courtroom. <snip>

http://babelogue.citypages.com:8080/ecassel/

[neweurope]

1. In another time and place they used to be called concentration camps.

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