Monday, September 18, 2006
Sovereignty watch
AP is out today with a major article about the 14,000 prisoners being held by the U.S. in prisons all over the world. Little of it is a surprise; if anything, the most surprising thing is that AP chose to run this story. Buried in the middle of it, I found this perhaps the most interesting passage, in light of the American legal fig-leaf that the U.S. is in Afghanistan and Iraq "at the invitation" of those governments and is "just helping" those governments:
Officials of Nouri al-Maliki's 4-month-old Iraqi government say the U.S. detention system violates Iraq's national rights.
"As long as sovereignty has transferred to Iraqi hands, the Americans have no right to detain any Iraqi person," said Fadhil al-Sharaa, an aide to the prime minister. "The detention should be conducted only with the permission of the Iraqi judiciary."
At the Justice Ministry, Deputy Minister Busho Ibrahim told AP it has been "a daily request" that the detainees be brought under Iraqi authority.
