There are 12,14,16,000 people being held in the black hole of american military prisons. Nobody can know exactly how many. Nor can we know their names or anything else about them. Their families will not be told where they are. The military refers to them as suspects or enemy combatants but they are neither- they have never been charged or tried or convicted of anything. 90 % of them are there because bounty hunters or angry neighbors told an american military person they were suspects. The military themselves don't know anything about these prisoners.
Now, incredibly, congress has passed legislation approving all this. It’s ok to put people away in secret prisons for life because the president or anyone he delegates says they should be put there. This has been going on since they started bombing Afghanistan. But now in this military commissions law, they’ve made it all official, and also given the president the right to pronounce you or me or the woman across the street “enemy combatants” There is no more Habeas Corpus. No right to a trial, face your accusers, hear the charges against you- nothing. The president also now will decide what torture is. The Geneva Conventions don’t mean anything because if the american president says it’s not torure, it isn’t. That’s what the law says. Welcome to the gulag..