Our Awful Situation

Archive for the ‘Prison’ Category

We’re stuck with “enemy combatants”

Posted by patriot on May 21st, 2008

Ah, that pesky problem of illegally detaining a bunch of people, and then figuring out what to do with them when we’re done…

The United States is “stuck” with its war-on-terror detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba because it cannot figure out what to do with prisoners who cannot be charged or set loose, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Tuesday.

Gates told lawmakers that he still believes that the prison should be closed, but has not found a way to do it.

“Senator, I think the brutally frank answer is we’re stuck. And we’re stuck in several ways,” he told California Senator Dianne Feinstein.

He said the United States was prepared to send 60 or 70 prisoners home but either cannot persuade their countries to take them, or can’t trust them not to free them.

New Mega-Prison in Afghanistan

Posted by patriot on May 17th, 2008

Those enemy combatants aren’t coming home anytime soon…

The Pentagon is moving forward with plans to build a new, 40-acre detention complex on the main American military base in Afghanistan, officials said, in a stark acknowledgment that the United States is likely to continue to hold prisoners overseas for years to come.
…
Until now, the Bush administration had signaled that it intended to scale back American involvement in detention operations in Afghanistan. It had planned to transfer a large majority of the prisoners to Afghan custody, in an American-financed, high-security prison outside Kabul to be guarded by Afghan soldiers.

But American officials now concede that the new Afghan-run prison cannot absorb all the Afghans now detained by the United States, much less the waves of new prisoners from the escalating fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Packed prisons in the USA

Posted by patriot on April 23rd, 2008

Ah, the land of the free, home of the convicted:

The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.

Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.

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