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Law Review Article Case Western Res. J. Intl Vol 37:448
THE DANGEROUS WORLD OF INDEFINITE DETENTIONS: VIETNAM TO ABU GHRAIB
Jennifer Van Bergen† and Douglas Valentine††
I. INTRODUCTION 1
The thesis of this paper is that where you find administrative detentions,you are likely to find torture. We will show that this connection exists even where it is clear that investigations and screenings leading to such detentions are, as Alberto Gonzales put it, "not haphazard, but elaborate, and careful . . . reasoned and deliberate."
This reason is simple and can be traced to the elements of adminis-trative detention itself: the absence of human rights safeguards and normal legal guarantees such as due process, habeas corpus, fair trial, confidential legal counsel, and judicial review; vague and confusing definitions, stan-dards, and procedures; inadequate adversarial procedural oversight; exces-sive Executive Branch power stemming from prolonged emergencies; and the involvement of the Central Intelligence Agency ("CIA") or other secret, thus unaccountable, Executive Branch agencies.
Without such protections, justice does not work and human rights are jeopardized. As William F. Schultz, Executive Director of Amnesty International, put it:
This year we are witnessing not just a series of brutal but fundamentally independent human rights violations committed by disparate governments around the globe. This year we are witnessing something far more funda-mental and far more dangerous. This year we are witnessing the orches-trated destruction by the United States of the very basis, the fragile scaf-folding, upon which international human rights have been built, painstakingly, bit by bit by bit, since the end of World War II.4
The system has been intentionally broken by the Bush Administration, just as it was by the Johnson and Nixon Administrations during the Vietnam War.
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