Whatever the treatment of prisoners in US prisons, prisoners have been before a court, found guilty of a crime, then sent to prison for punishment. Well at least prior to the Patriot Act. Once in prison they continue to have limited access to legal assistance and in principle can appeal their sentence. There are no intelligence interrogators who await them and few or no government officials are interested in what prisoners have to say or know. What prisoners have done is already known and presumably demonstrated in a court.
Abu Ghraib, Camp Vigilant, Camp Bucca and other internment facilities in Iraq are not prisons. There are only guards and interrogators. There are no judges, no lawyers, and no prosecutors beyond the walls, or in fact anywhere. This confinement system is operated completely outside the US military's own system of justice. This is not a criminal justice system.
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I got into an interesting series of conversations at work last week on this topic.
Following your lead, I presented my co-workers with the idea that Abu Ghraib and the rest of the Pentagon's gulag system are not prisons at all in the commonly understood American sense of the word (a prison being, officially at least, a place for those who've been fairly tried and sentenced within a legal system of some sort) but concentration facilities.
Most of the folks I spoke with resisted this idea at first -- their cultural instruction as Americans having trained them to think only the guilty are in prison or otherwise detained. But, when I stated and re-stated your points -- where are the judges? where are the lawyers? what are the charges? where is the due process? there are only inmates and guards -- some began to change their minds, experiencing an 'a-ha' moment of new understanding. This only made them feel even more disturbed by the whole thing since mistreatement of 'bad guys' is, to many people, one thing whereas mistreatment of a guy who was walking down the wrong street at the wrong time -- perhaps when a Humvee was blasted by an RPG7 round and soldiers hastily rounded up all the nearby males -- is considered to be a whole other universe of bad.
Robert Fisk (yes, the excitable un-Cockburn) has made the point that it's all part of a continuum of behavior -- cluster and thermobaric bombs dropped on neighborhoods to 'flush out terrorists' killing scores of civilians is of a piece with creating an extra-judicial system of detention. In both cases you demonstrate your contempt for Arab lives (since, so far, it's Arabs who've faced the full brunt).
The question is, now that this gulag program is underway, taking a more solid form with each passing day and is part of the 'War on Terror' playbook (shared by many liberals and conservatives alike), what will it take to undo it?
.d.