Offshore "secret" detention facilities

A human rights group claims that the U.S. is operating a number of secret detention facilities around the world:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States is holding terrorism suspects in more than two dozen detention centers worldwide and about half of these operate in total secrecy, said a human rights report released on Thursday.

Human Rights First, formerly known as the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, said in a report that secrecy surrounding these facilities made "inappropriate detention and abuse not only likely but inevitable."

"The abuses at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib cannot be addressed in isolation," said Deborah Pearlstein, director of the group's U.S. Law and Security program, referring to the U.S. Naval base prison in Cuba and Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq where abuses are being investigated.

"This is all about secrecy, accountability and the law," Pearlstein told a news conference.

This is hardly surprising, since we keep hearing about how high level Al Qaeda fighters such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh are being held in undisclosed locations overseas. I'll just note here that one common argument for extending court jurisdiction to Guantanamo Bay -- namely, that we effectively own the base, and therefore it's de facto U.S. territory -- would lead to more prisoners being detained at such secret overseas facilities. Therefore, I think that dodging the continued vitality of Johnson v. Eisentrager, which holds that nonresident enemy aliens have no right of access to our courts, only forestalls the deeper issue.

Comments

[Brian]

If we leave prisoners detained at places where terrorists can attempt to free them, all in the name of domestic law, it risks the lives of our people, to which I am not prepared to needlessly accept. This is war, and unpleasant things need to be done. The people in Guantanamo are not the innocent Japanese of WWII, they are thugs who are lucky they weren't just killed on the battlefield.

The options today are imprison them or kill them. If the Court rules that the Guantanamo detainees have access to U.S. courts, then the imprison them option becomes limited. Our generals can't be shuttled back and forth to testify at every habeas hearing.