Detainee Reviews Become the Routine

[Rose Siding]

CAMP VICTORY, Iraq -- Three officers in camouflage fatigues divvied up a stack of green, pink and cream-colored folders in the courthouse on this sprawling U.S. Army base outside Baghdad. Each file contained witness statements, charging documents and handwritten appeals in Arabic from security detainees in the custody of U.S. forces.

For more than five hours one day last month, the soldiers -- a British military intelligence officer, a U.S. Army military police officer and a U.S. Marine Corps judge -- presented the details of the cases to one another, debated their merits and then voted whether to recommend that the detainees stay in custody or be set free.

A Sudanese man detained at the Iraqi border in November was recommended for release after the officers determined that he lived in Iraq and was just trying to get home. But a man caught in December with a financial ledger indicating that he might be selling weapons would have to remain at Abu Ghraib prison, one of two facilities in Iraq where U.S. forces hold people they consider security threats.

This review board is one component among several in the process that the military uses to decide whether to keep detainees in custody and how long to hold them. Military lawyers make the initial decisions about whether there is sufficient evidence to hold a suspect, and then cases are passed to the review board. U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, deputy commander of detainee operations in Iraq, has final authority over who is released. At each stage, military officials have extraordinary discretion over who stays and who goes.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56261-2004Jul16.html

3 officers? 5 hours? Last month?

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

1. You can put a pink bow on the top of a manure pile

but that doesn't change the quality of the manure pile, or the stench it creates.