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RIGHTS-US: Fate of Many "Ghost Prisoners" Still Unknown
By Eli Clifton
WASHINGTON, Feb 28 (IPS) - The U.S. government should account for all
"ghost prisoners" detained by the Central Intelligence Agency in secret
prisons around the world, urges a new report by Human Rights Watch (HRW).
The report, "Ghost Prisoner: Two Years in Secret CIA Detention," contains
detailed descriptions from a Palestinian detainee of his experience in a
secret CIA prison before his release last year.
On Sep. 6, 2006, U.S. President George W. Bush said that all CIA prisoners
have either been released or sent to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, but HRW claims
that many other prisoners were simply "disappeared" by the CIA.
"The question is: what happened to these people and where are they now?"
said Joanne Mariner, terrorism and counterterrorism director at HRW, in a
statement.
Marwan Jabour, the former CIA detainee, says that a number of these
"disappeared" individuals are still in CIA prisons and that he personally
saw one of these men, Algerian terrorism suspect Yassir al-Jazeeri, in
July 2006 in CIA custody.
The location of the missing detainees is unknown but one possibility is
that they have been moved from CIA "black sites", U.S. prisons rumoured to
be present in Thailand, Afghanistan, Jordan, Pakistan, Morocco, Czech
Republic, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Armenia, Georgia, Latvia, and
Bulgaria, to foreign prisons where they remain under CIA control, and may
face torture at the hands of U.S. or local interrogators.
In May 2004, Marwan Jabour was arrested by Pakistani authorities and held
for more than a month at a "black site" in Islamabad staffed by both U.S.
and Pakistani personnel, during which time he was badly tortured.
In June, he was taken to a secret prison, believed to have been in
Afghanistan, where the personnel were nearly all U.S. nationals.
Upon arrival at the secret prison, he says he was left completely naked
for a month and a half, during which time he was questioned by female
interrogators and filmed.
He was chained to the wall of his cell so he could not stand up, placed in
stress positions so that he had difficulty breathing and told that if he
did not cooperate he would be put in a suffocating "dog box".
Jabour says he worried incessantly about his wife and three young
daughters but was not allowed to send a letter to reassure them he was
alive during his more than two years spent in a windowless cell.
"It was a grave," Jabour told HRW, "I felt like my life was over."
The report not only calls attention to the trauma experienced by the
detainees but also addresses the hardships and confusion faced by the
families of detainees whose husbands, fathers and sons have been
"disappeared".
HRW offers recommendations for how the U.S. and foreign governments should
confront the human rights failures posed by the CIA rendition of terrorism
suspects.
It urges the U.S. to repudiate the use of secret detention and coercive
interrogation as counterterrorism tactics and permanently discontinue the
CIA's detention and interrogation programme, and to disclose the
identities, fate and whereabouts of all detainees previously held at the
facilities operated or controlled by the CIA since 2001.
Other governments should refuse to assist or cooperate in any way with CIA
detention, interrogation and rendition operations, and disclose any
information that they have about such operations, HRW says.
The release of the report was accompanied by a letter to President Bush,
expressing the group's concern over the use of secret prisons to hold
people suspected of involvement in terrorism.
"By holding such people in unacknowledged, incommunicado detention, the
United States violated fundamental human rights norms, in particular, the
prohibition on enforced disappearance," the letter states.
Although 14 CIA detained terrorism suspects were transferred to Guantanmo
Bay, after Bush acknowledged the transfer and said there were no more
secret CIA prisoners, Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte,
publicly acknowledged there were three dozen people in detention in April
2006, three months before Bush's announcement.
HRW does not believe satisfactory information has been released about
every person detained since 2001 in CIA prisons, states the letter.
The message to Bush concludes with a list of 16 people believed to have
once been held at CIA prisons and whose current whereabouts are unknown
and a separate list of 22 people who were possibly once held in CIA
prisons and whose current whereabouts are unknown.
Earlier this month, the European Parliament released a report accusing
Britain, Germany, Italy and other European nations of tolerating CIA
flights transporting terrorism suspects to secret prisons, a practice
known as "extraordinary rendition", in an apparent breach of EU human
rights standards.
(END/2007)
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