Dear Log,
«The Afghan government privately shares Nadery's fears. One minister, who asked not to be named, said, "Washington holds Afghanistan up to the world as a nascent democracy and yet the US military has deliberately kept us down, using our country to host a prison system that seems to be administered arbitrarily, indiscriminately and without accountability."I wonder what those US-run torture camps do with all the corpses. Boy, it's a good thing none of them are white people!
[...]
The floating population of "ghost detainees", according to US and UK military officials, now exceeds 10,000.
[...]
On September 26 2002, Maher Arar, a 34-year-old Canadian computer scientist, was arrested at New York's JFK airport as a result of a paper-thin evidential chain. Syrian-born Arar told us, "I was pulled aside by US immigration at 2pm. I told them I had a connecting flight to Montreal where I had a job interview." However, Arar was "rendered" in a private jet, via Washington, Portland and Rome, landing in Amman, Jordan, where he was held at what a Jordanian source described as a US-run interrogation centre. From there, he was handed over to Syria, the country he had left as a 17-year-old boy. He says he spent the next 12 months being tortured and in solitary confinement, unaware that someone he barely knew had named him as a terrorist.
[...]
Arar, who was eventually released in October 2003 after a Syrian court threw out a coerced confession in which he said he had been trained by al-Qaida, told us, "I am not a terrorist. I don't know anyone who is. But the tolerant Muslim community I come from here in Canada has become vitriolic and demoralised."»--"'One huge US jail'"
Freedom is on the march, Texas/Pinochet witchhunt style. But it's okay, because there have been elections in Iraq. You know, like Haiti has.
