By PLS
The Pentagon has a bunch of pictures of “detainees” being abused at American run “detention centers” aka prisons for “enemy combatants.” These photos are worse than the shocking, now familiar batch from Abu Graib evidently. They are so awful that the Pentagon refuses to release them under a Freedom of Information request from the ACLU.
“It’s a privacy thing,” the Pentagon explains. “We don’t want to violate the privacy of the prisoners. Above all, we don’t want to violate the Geneva Conventions on abusing the privacy of prisoners.”
Whoops! This administration continues to insist that the Geneva Conventions apply only to “prisoners of war” and not to “enemy combatants.”
Enemy combatants, according to the Rumsfeld Pentagon’s original “anything goes” approach, had no rights at all. They could languish forever without access to proper defense lawyers, without information about the charges against them, without procedural protections of any sort. They could be abused physically, mentally and emotionally at will, and their only hope of release was through ad hoc tribunals or kangaroo courts controlled entirely by their accusers—and abusers.
This no-holds-barred approach to captives labeled “enemy combatant” has been modified, slightly, only because of publicity, embarrassment and constant pressure from human rights and civil liberties advocates.
No doubt the Pentagon is worried about privacy, but not the privacy of the abused detainees. One can only assume that once these pictures hit the front pages, the Pentagon’s freedom to authorize maltreatment will be further curtailed.
Forced to choose between two evils, torture and the loss of privacy, which would you choose?
Especially if your loss of privacy was likely to mitigate the torture.