insights from the digital future
Allbritton, who files regularly for Time and the S.F. Chronicle, is a freelance journalist who has won my admiration with his solid, independent reporting from the Middle East over the past few years.
He is posting updates on his current dispatches from Beirut on his blog, Back to Iraq.
In the first civil case challenging U.S. detention policies in Iraq, an Iranian-American filmmaker who was imprisoned in Abu Ghraib and other facilities for 55 days without charge sued Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other high-ranking military officials.
Cyrus Kar, 45, of Los Feliz, alleges that his detention violated his civil rights, the law of nations and the Geneva Convention.
source: L.A. Times.
Now how about some justice? Amnesty has this report on detention under the American occupation in Iraq, in which at least four Americans in addition to Kar have been also held without charge.
Following up on my post a couple months ago, in which I dwelled upon the six month sentence given to Sgt. Michael Smith for his involvement in torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib with dogs, videotaping peanut-buttered testicles and more.
At the time, a Pentagon spokesman declared, ?What you?re seeing is what the department has committed itself to ? a very broad and a very deep review of its detention operations across the board.?
Today, the second Abu Ghraib dog handler was “sentenced” — and I use that term in its lightest and most fragmented form — to a few months of hard labor and a reduction in rank — no suspension or pay loss whatsoever.
Sgt. Santos A. Cardona was convicted of dereliction of duty, but was acquitted of more serious charges “including unlawfully having his dog bite an inmate and conspiring with another dog handler to frighten prisoners into soiling themselves.”
“We will construct high-tech fences in urban corridors, and build new patrol roads and barriers in rural areas. We will employ motion sensors infrared cameras and unmanned aerial vehicles…
“catch and release….” [link]
“…[W]e have enough Guard forces to win the war on terror, to respond to natural disasters and to help secure our border.“