Rights Groups Report on Ghost Prisoners
By William Fisher
t r u t h o u t | Report
Tuesday 12 June 2007
Six prominent human rights groups are charging that US authorities are
secretly holding 39 terror suspects. One of the groups, the New
York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, has filed a lawsuit in US
federal court demanding the disclosure of information concerning
disappeared detainees, including ghost detainees and unregistered prisoners.
"What we're asking is where are these 39 people now, and what's happened
to them since they 'disappeared'?" said Joanne Mariner of Human Rights
Watch, one of the organizations in the coalition.
The new report, titled "Off the Record: U.S. Responsibility for Enforced
Disappearances in the 'War on Terror'" - reveals the names of "the
disappeared" - some for the first time. The organizations said their
information was based on interviews with former prisoners and officials
in the US, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen.
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) declined to comment specifically
about the report, but a spokesman said, "We act in strict accord with
American law, and ... our counterterror initiatives - which are subject
to careful review and oversight - have been very effective in disrupting
plots and saving lives."
The spokesman added, "The United States does not conduct or condone
torture."
The report acknowledged that information on the missing detainees was
incomplete in some cases.
For example, some detainees had been added to the list after Marwan
Jabour, an Islamic militant who claims to have spent two years in CIA
custody, recalled being shown photos of them during interrogations, the
report said. It added that others were identified only by their first or
last names, such as "al-Rubaia," who was added to the list after a
fellow inmate reported seeing the name scribbled onto the wall of his cell.
But coalition spokespersons said information on at least 21 of the
detainees had been confirmed by two or more independent sources.
President Bush acknowledged the existence of secret detention centers in
September 2006, after The Washington Post revealed their existence. But
the president said that the prisons were then empty, adding that 14
terrorism suspects the CIA had been holding, including the alleged
mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the US, had been transferred
to military custody at Guantanamo Bay for trials.
The Post's article, whose authors were awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 2007,
did not identify the locations of the secret prisons, but it has been
widely reported that the so-called "black sites" were in former
USSR-client countries in Eastern Europe.
But a spokesperson for the human rights coalition said she wasn't
convinced the sites were ever emptied, and claimed a program of secret
detentions was ongoing.
She said, "We wanted (the detainees') names in the public eye because
of
the impression that this is over, this is finished, and they're not
doing this anymore. That's clearly not the case."
Detainees on the list include Hassan Ghul and Ali Abd al-Rahman
al-Faqasi al-Ghamdi, both of whom were named in the 9/11 Commission
report as al-Qaida operatives.
Another is Mustafa Setmarian Nasar, a jihadist ideologue who has been
named as one of the FBI's "Most Wanted Terrorists." US officials have
confirmed that Nasar was seized in the southwestern Pakistani city of
Quetta in November 2005, and the activists' report said that he was
taken into US custody after his arrest, citing unnamed Pakistani
officials. His current location is unknown.
Also missing is Mohammed Omar Abdel-Rahman, the son of Omar
Abdel-Rahman, the "Blind Sheik" behind the first plot against the
World
Trade Center in New York, the report said.
Most of the 35 other detainees mentioned in the report have been
previously identified, with the exception of four Libyans, who are
alleged to be members of the al-Qaida-linked Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.
The report says they were handed to US authorities and have not been
heard from since.
It also highlights aspects of the CIA detention program that it claims
the US government has actively tried to conceal, such as the locations
where prisoners may have been held, the mistreatment they endured, the
countries to which they may have been transferred for proxy detention,
and the detention and abuse of spouses and children to gain information.
The other groups involved in preparing the report are the Center for
Constitutional Rights in New York; Amnesty, the Center for Human Rights
and Global Justice at New York University's School of Law, and Human
Rights Watch - all based in the US - and Reprieve and Cageprisoners,
both based in the UK.
The issue of "ghost prisoners" has been a consistent source of criticism
of the Bush administration's detention policies and practices by the
human rights and legal communities since the terrorist attacks on the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001.
The administration denied it was holding "ghost prisoners," but during
a
2004 press briefing, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld disclosed
for the first time that, in response to a personal request from then-CIA
Director George Tenet, he had instructed the US military to hold a
prisoner at Iraq's infamous Abu Ghraib prison without recording his name.
This practice is banned by the terms of the Geneva Conventions and was
fiercely criticized at the time by the International Committee of the
Red Cross, which is supposed to have identification of and access to all
detainees.
The CCR lawsuit, filed after the government refused to comply with
several Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, seeks documents that
provide information about government authorization of secret detention
and extraordinary rendition policies and practices, the involvement of
private contractors and non-governmental actors, the location of the
prisons and identity of the prisoners, the types of interrogation
methods used at the sites, and injuries suffered by detainees.
In a related development, the Italian government opened the trial of 33
suspected US and Italian intelligence agents for allegedly kidnapping an
Egyptian cleric.
Twenty-five suspected CIA operatives, a US military officer, Italy's
former spy chief, Nicolo Pollari, and six other Italians are accused of
kidnapping Osama Mustafa Hassan Nasr in 2003. The case is the first over
a practice called extraordinary rendition, in which the US sends
suspected terrorists to other countries without trial.
The US government says it will not extradite the Americans allegedly
involved to stand trial in Italy.
Defense lawyers have asked the Milan judge hearing the case to delay
proceedings pending a ruling from Italy's constitutional court. Judge
Oscar Magi said he will rule on June 18, the trial's next meeting date,
whether to proceed with the case or wait for the high court to determine
if documents and testimony used as evidence are covered by state secrecy
rules.
The defendants are accused by prosecutors of involvement in the
abduction of Nasr, also known as Abu Omar. The cleric was flown to Egypt
and tortured during questioning, prosecutors say.
Meanwhile, The Bush administration's attempts to invent a new legal
system for holding and trying terrorism suspects suffered another
setback when war-crimes charges against two al-Qaeda suspects held at
the Guantanamo Bay prison were dismissed by two different military judges.
The judges ruled that the administration had not legally established
that the accused were "unlawful enemy combatants" and thus subject
to
trial by Guantanamo's military commissions. More than five years after
President Bush rejected the Geneva Conventions and the US court-martial
system for handling al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners, the first trial of a
detainee once again has been put off indefinitely.
The judges' decisions opened the way for Congress to revisit the
Military Commission Act, hurriedly passed in 2006 after the Supreme
Court ruled that the administration had no authority to hold prisoners
in the absence of a basis in law.
The administration's latest difficulty stems from the fact that the two
men it was trying to put on trial, Salim Ahmed Hamdan and Omar Khadr,
had been judged by Guantanamo's parallel system of Combatant Status
Review Tribunals to be "enemy combatants" only, without the designation
"unlawful."
Capt. Keith J. Allred, one of the military judges, ruled that Hamdan had
never received "an individualized determination" that he was an unlawful
combatant, as required under Geneva. Without that, detainees are
entitled to be treated as prisoners of war. The judge also found that
the standard for "enemy combatant" used by the status tribunals was
broader than that for "unlawful combatant" as established by Congress
for purposes of the military commissions.
Congress is currently considering two new pieces of legislation to
mitigate the legal quagmire at Guantanamo. One, already voted out
favorably by the Senate Judiciary Committee under the bipartisan
sponsorship of Arlen Specter (R-Pennsylvania) and Patrick Leahy,
(D-Vermont), would restore the right of habeas corpus to Guantanamo
prisoners, allowing them to appeal their detentions to US federal courts.
The other, which has been attached to the Senate's version of the annual
defense authorization bill by Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Michigan), would
reform the tribunal process at Guantanamo by requiring that detainees be
represented by lawyers and have access to the evidence against them. The
measure would also curtail the use of evidence obtained by coercion and
require that the tribunals be headed by judges.
Appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press" program Sunday, former Secretary
of
State Colin Powell said he thought Guantanamo should be closed
immediately and its remaining approximately 380 prisoners be detained
and tried either through the courts martial process or through regular
civilian courts.
President Bush has also said he would like to see Guantanamo closed, but
has thus far taken no action to do so.
William Fisher has managed economic development programs in the Middle East and in many other parts of the world for the US State Department and USAID for the past thirty years. He began his work life as a journalist for newspapers and for The Associated Press in Florida. Go to The World According to Bill Fisher for more.
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