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| Presidents Hamid Karzai and Barack Obama at the White House. (photo: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images) |
09 March 12
ow primitive the Afghans are! A New York Times account of faltering negotiations over a possible “strategic partnership”
agreement to leave U.S. troops on bases in that country for years to
come highlights just how far the Afghans have to go to become, like
their U.S. mentor, a mature democracy. Take the dispute over prisons.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has been insisting that the U.S. turn over
its prison facility at Bagram Air Base to his government. (The recently burned Korans
came from that prison's library.) The Obama administration initially
refused and now has suggested a six-month timetable for such a turnover,
an option Karzai has, in turn, rejected. No one, by the way, seems yet to be negotiating about a second $36-million prison at Bagram that, TomDispatch recently reported, the U.S. is now in the process of building.
The Times' Alissa Rubin suggests, however, that a major stumbling block remains to any such turnover. She writes:
“The challenges to a transfer are enormous, presenting serious security
risks both for the Afghan government and American troops. Many of the
estimated 3,200 people being detained [in Bagram's prison] cannot be
tried under Afghan law because the evidence does not meet the legal
standards required to be admitted in Afghan courts. Therefore, those
people, including some suspected insurgents believed likely to return to
the fight if released, would probably have to be released because
Afghanistan has no law that allows for indefinite detention for national
security reasons.”
Honestly, what kind of a backward country doesn't have a provision for the indefinite detention,
on suspicion alone, of prisoners without charges or hope of trial? As a
mature democracy, we now stand proudly for global indefinite detention,
not to speak of the democratic right to send robot assassins
to take out those suspected of evil deeds anywhere on Earth. As in any
mature democracy, the White House has now taken on many of the traits
of a legal system -- filling, that is, the roles of prosecutor, judge,
jury, and executioner. READ MORE
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