Although a great deal is now known about the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Bagram, and Abu Ghraib, little has been asked – and less revealed – about the years of solitary military detention and interrogation without trial at naval brigs in Virginia and South Carolina endured by two U.S. citizens and a legal resident – Yaser Hamdi, Jose Padilla and Ali al-Marri.
Documents obtained by the Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic at Yale Law School and the American Civil Liberties Union from the United States Fleet Forces Command pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act suggest that there may not have been much difference between detention inside and outside the U.S. because: (1) the brigs were ordered to follow the standard operating procedures developed for Guantanamo Bay; and (2) interrogations at the brigs, like interrogations on Guantanamo, were conducted by the CIA and a component of the Defense Intelligence Agency known by the acronym “DHS,” around the same time that the same agencies were conducting interrogations at Guantánamo.
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