Sippenhaft refers to the legal practice in Nazi Germany of holding relatives responsible for alleged crimes committed by individuals against the state. Thus the relatives of those involved in the conspiracy to assassinate Adolf Hitler in July 1944 were arrested and threatened with execution. Even the young children of the conspirators were arrested, renamed and sent to orphanages under the Sippenhaft Laws. While the practice is best known in Germany, it has also been a feature of other totalitarian regimes such as Stalinist Russia, Communist China during the cultural revolution and today in North Korea.
Yesterday I was horrified to learn that Sippenhaft was also been used by "Coalition Forces" in Iraq in an effort to capture prominent members of the former ruling Baathist regime. The researcher and author Tara McKelvey interviewed a number of former prisoners from the Abu Ghraib prison and documents these in her book Monstering: Inside America's Policy of Secret Interrogations and Torture in the Terror War. Among the people interviewed were the wives and daughters of men being sought by the US Military in Iraq; they were held at Abu Ghraib prison and subjected to unspeakable abuse as a tactic to encourage their husbands and fathers to turn themselves in to the Americans. You can listen to McKelvey discussing her interviews with these women here.
So, besides verschärfte Vernehmung ("enhanced interrogation techniques") the Bush administration has borrowed yet another tactic of the Nazis in waging the global "War on Terror".
UPDATE: Amnesty International has more on the detention of children of suspected terrorists:
After Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s arrest in March 2003, Yusuf and Abed Al Khalid were reportedly transferred out of Pakistan in U.S. custody. The children were allegedly being sent for questioning about their father’s activities and to be used by the United States as leverage to force their father to cooperate with the United States. A press report on March 10, 2003 confirmed that CIA interrogators had detained the children and that one official explained that:
"We are handling them with kid gloves. After all, they are only little children...but we need to know as much about their father's recent activities as possible. We have child psychologists on hand at all times and they are given the best of care."(14)
Read the complete AI Report: US Responsibility for Enforced Disappearances in the "War on Terror"
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