The whistleblowing website Wikileaks from tonight releasing more than 100 U.S. Defense Department files detailing military detention policies in camps in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay in the years after the September 11 attacks on U.S. targets - "The Detainee Policies"
In a statement, WikiLeaks criticized regulations it said had led to abuse and impunity and urged human rights activists to use the documents to research what it called policies of unaccountability. WikiLeaks says it plans to release the files in chronological order to paint a picture of the evolution of America's military detainee practices.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said: "The 'Detainee Policies' show the anatomy of the beast that is post-9/11 detention, the carving out of a dark space where law and rights do not apply, where persons can be detained without a trace at the convenience of the U.S. Department of Defense. It shows the excesses of the early days of war against an unknown 'enemy' and how these policies matured and evolved, ultimately deriving into the permanent state of exception that the United States now finds itself in, a decade later."
In January, U.N. human rights chief Navi Pillay said the United States was still flouting international law at Guantanamo Bay by arbitrarily and indefinitely detaining individuals. Almost 3,000 people were killed in 2001 when militants from Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda flew hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center towers in New York, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania. - Reuters said.
WikiLeaks said a number of documents it was releasing related to interrogation of detainees, and these showed direct physical violence was prohibited. But it added the documents showed "a formal policy of terrorizing detainees during interrogations, combined with a policy of destroying interrogation recordings, has led to abuse and impunity."
According to Forbes, WikiLeaks latest publication breaks with its two previous releases of 2012 from the private intelligence firm Stratfor and the Syrian government, both of which consisted of millions of hacked emails rather than a small collection of leaked documents. Just how WikiLeaks obtained the new documents isn't clear its anonymous submission system has been down for more than two years, with no new conduit for secure document leaks in sight.
