Iraq Outrage of the Day: Americans in Secret Custody

Another unbelievable tale of the Iraq fiasco is revealed in this recent New York Times article. It provides an overview of what it's like in one of our secret maximum security military prisons in Iraq. The account is provided by an American who was a whistleblower to the FBI after discovering problems within the Iraqi security company where he worked. He and another American were wrongly seized by U.S. authorities and imprisoned for 97 awful days in Baghdad. His story offers yet another upsetting view into the chaotic, confusing labyrinth of allegiances, secrets and illegalities that defines what's going on in Iraq three plus years into our "cakewalk."

Read it and consider carefully the horrors being performed in our names, ostensibly to nurture freedom and democracy, allegedly to protect our citizens, supposedly to show the world what America is all about. How much worse will it get if BushCo gets away with escalating our blind and completely ineffective militarism instead of working to excise the fast-growing tumor of an aggressive cancer that's almost all of our own making?

Excerpt from article:

The story told through those records and interviews illuminates the haphazard system of detention and prosecution that has evolved in Iraq, where detainees are often held for long periods without charges or legal representation, and where the authorities struggle to sort through the endless stream of detainees to identify those who pose real threats.

“Even Saddam Hussein had more legal counsel than I ever had,” said Mr. Vance, who said he planned to sue the former defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, on grounds that his constitutional rights had been violated. “While we were detained, we wrote a letter to the camp commandant stating that the same democratic ideals we are trying to instill in the fledgling democratic country of Iraq, from simple due process to the Magna Carta, we are absolutely, positively refusing to follow ourselves.”