Godwin's Law Has Been Suspended

2001 State Dept. report on Human Rights Practices in Iraq:

The authorities routinely used arbitrary arrest and detention, prolonged detention, and incommunicado detention, and continued to deny citizens the basic right to due process...Special security courts have jurisdiction in all cases involving espionage and treason, peaceful political dissent, smuggling, currency exchange violations, and drug trafficking. According to the Special Rapporteur and other sources, military officers or civil servants with no legal training head these tribunals, which hear cases in secret. Authorities often hold defendants incommunicado and do not permit contact with lawyers...

2004 Amnesty International report on US detention policies:

Wazir Mohammad was held incommunicado. He was given no opportunity to challenge the lawfulness of his detention. He had no lawyer, no access to his family, and was not brought before any court, including the "competent tribunal" envisaged by the Geneva Conventions to determine prisoner status in time of war. He never met a delegate from the International Committee of the Red Cross either. He was then put on a plane to Guantánamo Bay. He said that he was hooded and handcuffed for the 22-hour flight. When asked about toilet facilities during the flight, he refused to elaborate, saying that he could not talk of some of the things that happened on the plane.(19) Upon arrival at Guantánamo, Wazir Mohammad said that he and his fellow detainees were taken off the plane "like cargo, not people".

The Origins of Totalitarianism:

How important to the total-domination apparatus this complete disappearance of its victims is can be seen in those instances where, for one reason or another, the regime was confronted with the memory of survivors. During the war, one SS commandant made the terrible mistake of informing a French woman of her husband's death in a German concentration camp; this slip caused a small avalanche of orders and instructions to all camp commandants, warning them that under no circumstances was information ever to be given to the outside world. The point is that, as far as the French widow was concerned, her husband had supposedly ceased to live at the moment of his arrest, or rather had ceased ever to have lived.

But we're the good guys, right?

ntodd

[Update: Wapo:

There were no rules, by her account, and little training. But the mission was clear. Spec. Sabrina Harman, a military police officer charged with abusing detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, said she was assigned to break down prisoners for interrogation.

Guess the "blowing off steam" defense isn't cutting it, so we're falling back on "just following orders", eh? Nuremberg. My Lai. Abu Ghraib. Ecclesiastes 1:9:

What has been will be again,what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.

Alas.]  ¶ 6:28 PM