U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has admitted that he "ghosted" a detainee, meaning that he made the decision to hold a prisoner without keeping any records of the fact.
While prisoners of war can be theoretically stripped of their rights by calling them other names (like "unlawful combatants"), they are probably most effectively stripped of all rights by keeping their imprisonment secret. That is what Rumsfeld says he did.
My comments, submitted as a reply, below:
The Administration tries to defend these types of practices by scaring us with terrorism, and saying that the practices are practiced on those who deserve no rights. But if there are no rights, no procedures to defend those rights, and no legal recourse for "certain people" that certain other people can choose, without any review by anyone else who is relatively impartial, then anyone can disappear, anyone can become a "ghost", anyone can be tortured. Allowing some of these loopholes, not necessarily "ghosting" per se (but close), under the Patriot Act was a huge, bipartisan mistake, which many Dems defend by saying "we thought that we could trust the Administration". Of course you can't, but even if you could, a United States that starts removing its Constitutional bridles from the government must eventually begin itself turning into another USSR or a northern version of one of the "banana" dictatorships that, showing warning flashes of our dark side, we helped create. As it happens, it feels like the transition is happening sooner than later. But perhaps We the People allowed this pattern to develop, by standing by when it seemed to be happening mostly to other people in other lands. And now our chickenhawks have come home to roost.
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