Monday, September 18, 2006

Action alert: US holding 2 Iraqis in detainee limbo

I was perusing ABC News for a link to the story I posted above, and I came across this article about Bilal Hussein, an Iraqi citizen, and Assoc Press photographer whom the US military officials say is being held for "imperative reasons of security" under UN resolutions, yet for the duration of the 5 months he has been imprisoned, Hussein has never had any charges filed against him nor has been permitted a public hearing. Hussein is only one of an estimated 14000 people detained by the US military worldwide (13000 of them in Iraq) in what amounts to a legal vacuum. They are held in limbo where few are ever charged with a specific crime or given a chance before any court or tribunal to argue for their freedom. My Iraqi blog-friend NZ, oddly enough, left a comment for me at another post, urging me to post about the plight of Bilal Hussein (I hadn't published my post yet on this topic when he left the comment) so a hat tip goes to NZ as he provided info on Hussein, and also about another Iraqi trapped in legal limbo in one of our detainee prisons, Dr Fadhil Al-Bedrani (via the Brussels Tribunal Org): "The Brussells Tribunal today demands that the US govt immediately release Dr Al-Bedrani and all members of his family who were taken into US military custody Sept 12/06. Al-Bedrani is a professor of journalism and a prominent patriotic writer known for his anti-occupation stand and whose reports appear on Al-Jazeera, Reuters & the BBC. When talking about the difficulty of getting news out of Iraq and into mainstream media, he said: "we report but they censor." Little info is yet available, but some reports say that as many as 65 members of Al-Bedrani’s family were arrested with him. It is also reported that US forces killed have killed Dr Al-Bedrani’s brothers: 1 a student at the Islamic Sciences College, and another brother, also a reporter for Reuters, was shot by the US and Iraqi troops in Fallujah in Aug 05. Please circulate this widely/Contact: info@brusselstribunal.org. We urge you to contact our Senators asking them to put an end to these senseless and illegal detentions (and our Sens may be setting themselves up to being charged w/war crimes themselves if they okay BushCo's attempt to decriminalize torture) and if Bush gets his wish- which is to rewrite the Geneva Conventions, Article III in particluar - (as the Brit Att Gen Lord Goldsmith warns us) we all as Americans should face internatl condemnation, and lose any moral standing we may have managed to barely scrape up off of BushCo's shoes, b/c God only knows what will become of those 1000s who are trapped in those detainee prisons just b/c BushCo says they should be imprisoned.
Posted by Tina :: 12:54 AM :: 2 Comments:

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