Salon.com | "Abuse"? How about torture

Salon.com | "Abuse"? How about torture: "Bush has created what is in effect a gulag. It stretches from Afghanistan to Iraq, from Guant?namo to secret CIA prisons around the world. There are perhaps 10,000 people being held in Iraq, 1,000 in Afghanistan, almost 700 in Guant?namo -- no one knows the exact numbers. The law as it applies to them is whatever the executive deems necessary. The administration has argued before the Supreme Court in the case of Jose Padilla, the so-called al-Qaida dirty bomber, that anyone who is considered a threat to national security, even a U.S. citizen, can disappear forever, never be charged with any crime, and never receive any legal representation.
There has been nothing like this system since the adoption of the Geneva Conventions after World War II and the fall of the Soviet Union. The U.S. military embraced the conventions because applying them to prisoners of war protects American soldiers. But the Bush administration, in an internal fight, trumped the military's argument by designating those at Guant?namo 'enemy combatants.' Rumsfeld extended this system -- 'a legal black hole,' according to Human Rights Watch -- to Afghanistan and then Iraq, openly rejecting the conventions. "