The Daily Background

The Washington Post, today reports that “A previously undisclosed Pentagon report concluded that the three terrorism suspects held at a brig in South Carolina were subjected to months of isolation, and it warned that their “unique” solitary confinement could be viewed as violating U.S. detention standards.”

Luckily, I have the benefit of having read a bunch of declassified documents over the last couple weeks relating to the Administration’s treatment of indvidiuals it brands “unlawful enemy combatatants,” so I might as well do a little analysis here. The Post writes:

According to a summary of the 2004 report obtained by The Washington Post, interrogators attempted to deprive one detainee, Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, a Qatari citizen and former student in Peoria, Ill., of sleep and religious comfort by taking away his Koran, warm food, mattresses and pillow as part of an interrogation plan approved by the high-level Joint Forces Command.

Under a 2002 Action Memo signed by Donald Rumsfeld, the deprivation of religious items like the Quran is permissible for individuals who are not US citizens. To quote from an unpublished item I just finished writing and hope to have published by the end of the year:

The memo also suggests that the US military can deny the right to practice one’s religion of detainees. For instance, it states, religious items (like a copy of The Holy Bible or The Quran) can be taken away from prisoners because in the view of the military, they have no legal obligation to allow detainees to practice any type of religion, and describe freedom of religion as merely an unnecessary “comfort” consideration. The memo states that “The issue or removing published religious items or materials would be relevant if these were United States citizens with a First Amendment right. Such is not the case with the detainees.” However, statements made by lawyers of American citizens being held prisoner by the Defense Department indicate that their religious items have been removed as well,¹ and this would seem to indicate that such treatment was considered unconstitutional at least by the author of this memo.

¹Referring to Mr Jose Padilla, a US citizen mentioned later in the Post article.

Also note that the use of deprivation of warm food is seen as a comfort item and the memo allows this as well. Although I’d read before that deprivation of pillows and matresses had happened to prisoners of this facility in South Carolina, I have not yet read anything adressing this in the documents I’ve been reading recently. The Post also continues, on the topic of isolation:

The attorneys told a federal judge in Florida yesterday that they have a right to learn about those interrogation methods, and they recently sought to subpoena Brig. Gen. Daryl D. Thiessen, the deputy inspector general who made the findings after inspecting the brig, and other senior military officers who worked at the prison. The attorneys said Padilla spent 1,307 days in a 9-by-7-foot cell in an isolated unit, was often chained to the ground for hours by his wrists and torso, and was kept awake at night by guards using bright lights and loud noises.

The 2002 Action Memo signed by Rumsfeld, which I will be putting online in our new document archive fairly soon (thedailybackground.com/documents), also allows the use of 30 days of solitary confinement used against troublesome prisoners. It warns “Extentions beyond the initial 30 days must be approved by the Commanding General,” which indicates that this eggregious period of time spent isolating Mr Padilla was approved at a high level. Notaably, the Post says that a memo from Rumsfeld “warned that use of isolation for more than 30 days was atypical, and that nations that consider detainees subject to prisoner-of-war protections may view this technique as “inconsistent with the requirements of Geneva [Article] III.”"

Not that this would be the first time third Geneva Convention (which specifies the conditions under which prisoners of war must be held by states) were ever violated by this Administration. But I’ll get into that in my longer piece that I have yet to get published. Hopefully it’ll be in Truthout by the end of the year. By the way, check out another new section of the website: thedailybackground.com/humanrights.

Filed under: Human Rights, Z-TDB Blog