By Roger Cohen, International Herald Tribune
I spent some time in Argentina in the aftermath of the 1976-83 dictatorship. Enough to become familiar with countless picture frames holding images of impossibly lovely young women, taken from their homes for “brief questioning,” never to be seen again. Enough to know the unquenchable parental tears these disappearances provoked.
It was not too early then, in rooms filled with the animal sobbing of the bereaved, to feel rage at the junta’s crimes. But it was too early to know the full extent of them: the 30,000 disappeared, the torture at the Navy School of Mechanics in Buenos Aires, the corpse-dumping flights out to sea.
…Â President George W. Bush acknowledged last year that some individuals deemed particularly dangerous had been moved “to an environment where they can be held secretly.” In effect, categorized as enemy combatants, they have been “disappeared.”
This practice is unconscionable. It does not matter that the purpose of the disappearance is not murder, as it was in Argentina.
(Original Article)