Amphibious warfare vessels are fabulously useful ships; just about everyone, from South Korea to South Africa to Turkey to New Zealand, is buying one. They typically have a couple of helicopters and some landing craft, and they give a country the capability to establish a presence in disaster relief or humanitarian intervention operations. A new report in the Guardian suggests that the United States may have found a new use for these ships:
The United States is operating “floating prisons” to house those arrested in its war on terror, according to human rights lawyers, who claim there has been an attempt to conceal the numbers and whereabouts of detainees. Details of ships where detainees have been held and sites allegedly being used in countries across the world have been compiled as the debate over detention without trial intensifies on both sides of the Atlantic. The US government was yesterday urged to list the names and whereabouts of all those detained.
According to research carried out by Reprieve, the US may have used as many as 17 ships as “floating prisons” since 2001. Detainees are interrogated aboard the vessels and then rendered to other, often undisclosed, locations, it is claimed.
The last sentence of the last paragraph raises some concern; is the problem that ships are being used to transport prisoners, or is it that the ships are being used as prisons? This is quite a distinction, as the first is a fairly common-sense way of handling prisoner transportation (whatever problems there may be in terms of eventual destination would remain if the prisoners were delivered by some other means), while the second does represent a new and troubling claim. Galrahn, unimpressed, notes:
During ongoing operations, the expectations a ship should stop and sail thousands of miles to offload prisoners is very unrealistic. If Americans don't like the process of holding detained individuals on ships for extended periods of time in remote places like the coast of east Africa, Americans need to support the investment of several billion dollars for the MV-22, because it is the only asset in the world that would meet the conditional requirements for transferring a detainee off ship. On the use of Diego Garcia as a transferring facility, what alternatives are there really? Is Reprieve and those offering outrage suggesting the prisoners remain detained on the ship for the duration of the ships 6 month deployment? The alternative in this scenario is rendition, exactly what is being accused of the United States.
The point is that amphibious vessels supporting operations off Somalia, Iraq, or Afghanistan may well be used for temporary detention of various suspects, but this hardly amounts to the description “prison ships”; the logistics of maintaining an offshore deployments limits the extent to which detainees can be moved around. As such, calling our “prison ships” doesn't really add anything to the discussion of rendition, secret detention facilities, and so forth.
--Robert Farley
