From the NYTimes:

While an international debate rages over the future of the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the military has quietly expanded another, less-visible prison in Afghanistan, where it now holds some 500 terror suspects in more primitive conditions, indefinitely and without charges.

Some of the detainees have already been held at Bagram for as long as two or three years. And unlike those at Guantánamo, they have no access to lawyers, no right to hear the allegations against them and only rudimentary reviews of their status as “enemy combatants,” military officials said.

From the accounts of former detainees, military officials and soldiers who served there, a picture emerges of a place that is in many ways rougher and more bleak than its counterpart in Cuba. Men are held by the dozen in large wire cages, the detainees and military sources said, sleeping on the floor on foam mats and, until about a year ago, often using plastic buckets for latrines. Before recent renovations, they rarely saw daylight except for brief visits to a small exercise yard.

So this is how America liberates the world to the wonders of Democracy. Three years in near concentration camp conditions. No trial, no lawyers; you can’t even find out why you’re contained! All this for deciding to fight on the wrong side while your own country is being liberated (or is it invaded).

The Geneva Convention states:

• Prisoners of war must at all times be humanely treated.
• Prisoners of war shall be quartered under conditions as favourable as those for the forces of the Detaining Power who are billeted in the same area.

One would think that for a country so obsessed with Democracy and Liberty the Geneva Convention would be a fundamental aspect in how they wage war. Obviously not.

And now we wonder why there is a massive influx in terrorism and hatred of the West. We blame it on Islam; we blame it on Saddam; we blame it on Bin Laden. When will we realise that we ourselves are partly to blame.