July 21, 2007
Buried deep in this WaPo story today was the news that, oh by the way, "the number of detainees held by the U.S. military in Iraq has increased to almost 22,000, from 15,400 six months ago."
Think about it. These are nearly all men of bread-winning age, most likely with an average of around five dependents. That makes more than 100,000 people who are directly affected by this mass-detention situation.
In the circumstances faced by the US military (and everyone else) in today's Iraq, the US military doesn't even claim to have "probable cause" for the detention of each one of these men; and it certainly doesn't have the capacity to hold individualized hearings to investigate the nature of any allegations that may have been made against them.
Actually, the vast majority of these detainees are probably not being held because they are judged through any rational process to be personally guilty of having committed a crime. No, they are most likely being held "preventively", that is, because of a generalized fear that they might commit some action against the US occupation forces in Iraq, someday. (Sort of on a par with the reasoning Bush used to invade their country in the first place-- doing this "preventively", rather than to respond to or even "pre-empt" any evidently threatening Iraqi attack against the US.)
Now, as that WaPo article makes clear, there has arisen another strong incentive to increase the number of detainees, as well: The bulk of the article is about the informal "amnesty" process that many US units are now using toward Iraqi tribal sheikhs, whereby men loyal to these sheikhs who are in detention are released into the sheikhs' control in return for the sheikhs agreeing to work as allies with the occupation force.
So under this model, if a local US officer wants to win the support of a local sheikh, he has every incentive to capture a few of the sheikhs' supporters as hostages-- an action, I should note that,
Oh, and here we are, in news from Ramallah, that,
Family and friends joyously hugged 255 Palestinians freed by Israel on Friday, hoisting them on shoulders for a boisterous heroes' welcome meant to give President Mahmoud Abbas [= local tribal leader with whom a deal has been done] a political boost in his power struggle with Hamas.
Of course I share the joy of those families. But that's not the point. The point is that these two occupying powers-- the US and Israel-- have no darn business at all engaging in the antecedent broad campaigns of hostage-taking, undertaken for purely manipulative political ends rather than through any form of due-process, regulated, criminal justice procedure.
That AP report from Ramallah spells out that "thousands more Palestinians remained in Israeli jails". 22,000 Iraqis meanwhile languish in US prisons in Iraq-- and many further thousands of (mostly Sunni) political hostages languish in terrible conditions in prisons run by the Iraqi 'government', as well.
The NYT today carried a stomach-turning series of photos taken inside one of these Iraqi government jails. You have to know that, since the people in charge of this jail let the photographer in, it was evidently among the "most humane" of the prisons they run. (We can probably hardly even imagine the life-threatening squalor and the torture chambers inside some of their other prisons...) But even the scenes in these photos reminded me of the intense overcrowding I glimpsed during the short visit I made to the Central Prison in Kigali, Rwanda, in June 2002.
Yes, post-genocide Rwanda is just another of the many US-supported regimes around the world that have used massive campaigns of "preventive" detentions-- i.e., political hostage-taking-- as a way of intimidating and coercing whole populations judged too critical of the central government.
If you want to get a bit of historical context on this whole phenomenon of how colonial regimes use mass detentions in an attempt to subjugate whole populations, you should read this article that I published not too long ago, on the ghastly mass incarceration campaigns that Britain used against the Kikuyu of northern Kenya in the 1950s.... Or better still, study the award-winning historical study of the topic by Caroline Elkins that I was reviewing there.
In my own much smaller researches into the effects of the Rwandan government's more recent mass-detention campaigns against their country's majority Hutu population I was able to confirm her findings that such campaigns have devastating and long-lasting effects not only on the detainees themselves but also on their families and on the broader fabric of society that is rent asunder by the detentions...
In today's Iraq, the US government has a lot to answer for. The effects of the ongoing mass-detention campaign should not be forgotten.
Meanwhile, the tide of history is certainly running against the ability of the Bushites to "win" this contest in Iraq. (Whatever "winning" would mean.) So all these detentions, all these campaigns the US military is engaging in to arm this faction or that faction inside Iraq-- they will lead to nothing... Nothing, that is, except to deepen the scars of violence that the US occupation has carved deep into the very being of Iraqi society.
