Wikileaks releases detainee policies

Reading the press release at Wikileaks, I'm sure most reasonable people would consider the fact that no other news organisation on the planet has released any of these documents. It's taken Wikileaks to get this out in the open.

I suppose Obama and Mad Mitt will both be having hissy fits over it, along with all those good-old-boys who love America. This enemy of the state, deserving of the death penalty just like Osama, this terrorist, how dare he do this to us! I can hear the bloody pathetic rhetoric from here. Obama and Mad Mitt will both try to out do each other in how tough they want to be with Assange and Wikileaks. 

I mean they've not got much else to argue about do they. As far as the main problems go for American foreign policy and it's loss of soft power around the world, they both seem intent on rubbing the US's name into the dirt across the globe. Gitmo is a symbol of how fucked up the gov has made that country. I'd say "from both sides", but there's not two sides over there, just two people arguing around the fringes, both of them so far to the right as to border on extremism. 

Who'd of thought 50 years ago that the US would be jailing people without trial, not giving them a prison identity, commit systematic abuse of their human rights, inventing laws to charge them with retrospectively, without any recourse on the prisoners part? Gitmo has been doing this for years. It was only when Americans themselves were threatened with the same treatment that they cared less about it.

And so, in light of this, it has taken Wikileaks to do what all other media outlets haven't. Shine a light onto this treatment of US prisoners. Wikileaks has begun now releasing the "Detainee Polices" of Gitmo and others. The handbooks for how those prisoners were to be treated. 

The latest WikiLeaks release includes the ''foundation document'' for the Guantanamo Bay prison - the 2002 Camp Delta standard operating procedures manual.

''This document is of significant historical importance. Guantanamo Bay has become the symbol for systematised human rights abuse in the West, with good reason,'' Mr Assange said in a statement. Read more

For the world outside the US, this will be very interesting reading. For some inside the US, it will be an act of war releasing them. Oh how far the US has gone abandoning it's ideals of free speech and democracy.

Below is some of the Wikileaks Press release, and here are the documents released so far.

Starting today, Thursday, 25th October 2012, WikiLeaks begins releasing the ’Detainee Policies’: more than 100 classified or otherwise restricted files from the United States Department of Defense covering the rules and procedures for detainees in U.S. military custody. Over the next month, WikiLeaks will release in chronological order the United States’ military detention policies followed for more than a decade. The documents include the Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) of detention camps in Iraq and Cuba, interrogation manuals and Fragmentary Orders (FRAGOs) of changes to detainee policies and procedures. A number of the ’Detainee Policies’ relate to Camp Bucca in Iraq, but there are also Department of Defense-wide policies and documents relating to Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and European U.S. Army Prison facilities. 

Among the first to be released is the foundation document for Guantanamo Bay ("Camp Delta") – the 2002 Camp Delta SOP manual. The release of the ’Detainee Policies’ marks three years of Camp Delta (Guantanamo Bay) SOP manuals released by WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks has now released the main Guantanamo Bay operating manuals for 2002, 2003 and 2004. The previously unpublished 2002 manual went on to shape successive years in the Guantanamo Bay prison complex and other U.S. military prisons around the world, such as Abu Ghraib. "This document is of significant historical importance. Guantanamo Bay has become the symbol for systematised human rights abuse in the West with good reason," said WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. "But how is it that WikiLeaks has now published three years of Guantanamo Bay operating procedures, but the rest of the world’s press combined has published none?" 
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A number of what can only be described as ’policies of unaccountability’ will also be released. One such document is the 2005 document ’Policy on Assigning Detainee Internment Serial Numbers’. This document is concerned with discreetly ’disappearing’ detainees into the custody of other U.S. government agencies while keeping their names out of U.S. military central records – by systematically holding off from assigning a prisoner record number (ISN). Even references to this document are classified "SECRET//NOFORN". Detainees may be disposed of in this manner without leaving a significant paper trail. 

Another formal policy of unaccountability is a 2008 Fragmentary Order that minimises the record-keeping surrounding interrogations. Following revelations of torture tapes and pictures from Abu Ghraib and the political scandal over the destruction of Central Intelligence Agency interrogation tapes, the FRAGO eliminates "the requirement to record interrogation sessions at Theatre Internment Facilities". Although the FRAGO goes on to state that interrogations that take place at Division Internment Facilities and Brigade Internment Facilities must be recorded, it then states that these should be "purged within 30 days". This policy was subsequently reversed by the new Obama administration. 

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said: "The ’Detainee Policies’ show the anatomy of the beast that is post-9/11 detention, the carving out of a dark space where law and rights do not apply, where persons can be detained without a trace at the convenience of the U.S. Department of Defense. It shows the excesses of the early days of war against an unknown ’enemy’ and how these policies matured and evolved, ultimately deriving into the permanent state of exception that the United States now finds itself in, a decade later." more