September 18, 2006 - There are at least 14,000 detainees confined in the American Gulag in Afghanistan and Iraq as of September 18, 2006 according to an Associated Press article.  They are held without charge, without either the status of criminal defendants or prisoners of war, without access to lawyers, without the minimal right to know even the reason for their detention.  They are held with out the protection of either Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention or those rights accorded even the most vicious criminal under US law to which the Supreme Court has held them to be entitled.  They are held in defiance of Afghan and Iraqi sovereignty to which the American administration gives lip service.

http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,113859,00.html

On September 6th President Bush told us, "These are enemy combatants who are waging war on our nation. We have a right under the laws of war, and we have an obligation to the American people, to detain these enemies and stop them from rejoining the battle."  The fact is that since June 2004 at least 18,700 detainees in addition to the 14,000 presently held have been released from the Gulag when it was determined that they were not threats.  The fact is that American military officers have told the International Red Cross that up to 90 percent of the detentions were mistakes.  The fact is that after their imprisonment for months and years many of the released detainees have been willing recruits for the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan as a result of their treatment in confinement. 

Today the President is at odds with powerful members of his own party who, in contrast to him and the more hawkish members of his administration, have seen war.  No one more than John McCain knows the reality of confinement by an enemy that refused to recognize the human rights of its captives or respect the provisions of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention.  The opposition to the Presidents demand that he be given the authority to continue the defiant treatment of detainees is led, not by Democrats, but by Senators McCain, John Warner and Lindsay Graham all of whom are hardly liberal doves. 

If it was the intention of Al Qaeda to destroy American devotion to freedom and the rule of law there is no greater evidence of their success than the operation of an American Gulag that emulates the authoritarian Soviet Union operations during its heyday.  As Princeton Dean Anne-Marie Slaughter has said, “[W]e have to restore a balance between security and rights that is consistent with who we are and consistent with our security needs."

Our security needs demand that we treat detainees with the same respect that we expect our own soldiers would receive were they made captives.  Senators McCain, Warner and Graham know who we were.  The President has a vision of who he wants us to become as we operate an American Gulag.