Ant bullying

Check out today's column by our colleague Rosa Brooks on the executive detention order that U.S. President George W. Bush issued last week. To the several concerns voiced here, Brooks adds another:

[A] non-U.S. citizen may be secretly detained and interrogated by the CIA -- with no access to counsel and no independent monitoring -- as long as the CIA director believes the person "to be a member or part of or supporting Al Qaeda, the Taliban or associated organizations; and likely to be in possession of information that could assist in detecting, mitigating or preventing terrorist attacks [or] in locating the senior leadership of Al Qaeda, the Taliban or associated forces."

The person-believed-to-have-information could be an unwitting eavesdropper unwilling to come forward with what he's heard, or a young relative of an operative, Brooks writes. She reminds that the latter already may have occurred: as detailed on pages 19-20 of the superb NGO report discussed in this post, 1st Pakistan, and then the United States, are said have held in detention-for-interrogation the sons of Al Qaeda leader Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. In Pakistan the boys, aged 7 and 9, reportedly were "mentally tortured by having ants or other creatures put on their legs to scare them and say where their father was hiding." Their father eventually was caught and is now at Guantánamo; Brooks reports that the boys' whereabouts are unknown.