The front page of today’s Daily News proclaims: TEAR DOWN THAT PRISON, inferring a ridiculous comparison of Bush’s speech last night and Reagan’s infamous “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” speech at the Berlin Wall.
I wondered last night whether or not the US had continued to use any of the German concentration camps once they had been liberated to house German civilians? enemy combatants? insurgents prisoners of war at the end of World War II, but everything I’ve come across suggests that conditions were so horrible at most of them that they had to be burned to the ground.
Interestingly, Abu Ghraib during Saddam’s reign was [still is] often referred to as a concentration camp, where numerous Iraqis were sent and never seen again. And yet, knowing its reputation, we thought it was a good idea for us to set up camp there and use it to detain Iraqis ourselves, many of whom were dragged from their homes in the middle of the night by their supposed liberators, the US military.
Families live in fear of midnight call by US patrols
by Daniel McGrory, The Times Online, 9 July 2003
NEVER again did families in Baghdad imagine that they need fear the midnight knock at the door. But in recent weeks there have been increasing reports of Iraqi men, women and even children being dragged from their homes at night by American patrols, or snatched off the streets and taken, hooded and manacled, to prison camps around the capital.
Children as young as 11 are claimed to be among those locked up for 24 hours a day in rooms with no light, or held in overcrowded tents in temperatures approaching 50C (122F).
On the edge of Baghdad International Airport, US military commanders have built a tent city that human rights groups are comparing to the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
Remarkably, the Americans have also set up another detention camp in the grounds of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. Many thousands of Iraqis were taken there during the Saddam years and never seen again.
(more…)
