Yo ho yo ho, a prison hulk for me

There are many things you just assume don't exist any more. Imagine your surprise if you round a corner and bump into a triceratops, or a trubechet, or a priest of Baal.

That's pretty much the feeling that I had yesterday, reading about the US government's use of warships as temporary prisons. in other words, the US government has revived the old practice of keeping people locked up in prison hulks, a contemptible practice that we thought disappeared with the Age of Sail.

To be fair, the story so far is about temporary imprisonment, not the years that prisoners spent on prison hulks in past centuries. Still, the practice makes sense. The US government need ways to move prisoners from point A (Afghanistan) to point B (Diego Garcia, near the Bay of Bengal), preferably in ways that concealed their identities, numbers, and locations.

Many elements of the story make a perverse sense. The two ships cited, the USS Peleliu and the USS Bataan, are amphibious assault ships, built to transport large numbers of people. Moving these ships into international waters may confuse the legal strictures on the treatment of these prisoners, in the same fashion that the Department of Justice argued to the Supreme Court that Guantanamo Bay was holding people who were not prisoner of war in a place that wasn't within US jurisdiction.

Rather than saying, "imagine your surprise," perhaps I should have started this post with, "If we exercised our imaginations a little bit, we wouldn't be surprised." The course of the Bush Administration's counterterrorism policies leads naturally to a ship full of prisoners, floating in the vastness of the Pacific.

Comments

[J.]

This is quite a bizzare story. I would not have thought it possible, in this day and age. Too easy to dope up the prisoners, slap them into a C5 plane, and off they go. But that is a visible means of transport - on a ship, little to no notice of what goes on there. I hope this story is followed up.

[Phil]

The USS Bataan is being used as a prison ship to keep prisoners outside of the jurisdiction of the Geneva Convention? I guess irony is alive and well. Go McCain!

[Mikey in Plano]

Clive Stafford Smith: "By its own admission, the US government is currently detaining at least 26,000 people without trial in secret prisons, and information suggests up to 80,000 have been 'through the system' since 2001. The US government must show a commitment to rights and basic humanity by immediately revealing who these people are, where they are, and what has been done to them."

[Diodotus]

What surprises me about this is that the US would go to such lengths to try to avoid further scrutiny of its detainee policy. Not consistent with the Bush Administration's history of brazen human rights abuses. Are we entering an era of a new respect to rule of law? As they say, trying to hide your atrocities is the tribute vice pays to virtue.