[Ppnews] The disappeared: Are they dead? Are they alive?

Thu May 11 11:11:12 EDT 2006

CIA Secret Prisons Exposed
http://www.villagevoice.com/generic/show_print.php?id=73121&page=hentoff&issue=0619&printcde=MzQ0MjA3NzM5OQ==&refpage=L25ld3MvaW5kZXgucGhwP2lzc3VlPTA2MTkmcGFnZT1oZW50b2ZmJmlkPTczMTIx

The disappeared: Are they dead? Are they alive? 
Ask Congress. Ask the president.
by Nat Hentoff
May 7th, 2006 7:59 PM

[]

illustration: Matthew Leake
CIA officers soon learned one thing for 
sureprisoners sent to Bright Light and [other 
CIA secret prisons] . . . were probably never 
going to be released. "The word is that once you 
get sent to Bright Light, you never come back," 
said the CIA's Counterterrorism Center veteran. 
James Risen, State of War: The Secret History of 
the CIA and the Bush Administration

May is the month that the United States has been 
summoned to Geneva by the United Nations 
Committee Against Torture to, as Reuters reported 
on April 18, "provide information about secret 
detention facilities and specifically whether the 
United States assumed responsibility for alleged acts of torture in them."

The committee also wants a list of all these 
secret prisons. So do Ialong with every major 
human rights organization and some members of 
Congress on both sides of the aisle. However, 
Kansas Republican Pat Roberts, chairman of the 
Senate Intelligence Committee, rigidly keeps 
refusing to authorize an investigation into these 
"black sites," as they are called in CIA internal 
communications. (The United States is a faithless 
signatory to the UN Convention Against Torture 
and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment 
or Punishment and is now being called to account.)

Meanwhile, Director of National Intelligence John 
Negroponte said the prisoners in these hidden 
gulags will be there as long as "the war on 
terror continues." He added, in an April 12 Time 
interview: "I'm not sure I can tell you what the 
ultimate disposition of those detainees will 
be."As far as their families are concerned, these 
"detainees" have vanished from the face of the earth.

Time says that Negroponte's comments "appear to 
be the first open acknowledgement of the secret 
U.S. detention system" (authorized by the president soon after 9-11).

Actually, when the CIA recently fired senior 
official Mary O. McCarthyfor allegedly providing 
classified information about CIA secret prisons 
in Eastern Europe to The Washington Post's Dana 
Priestthat public accusation also officially 
revealed the existence of the "black sites." 
(McCarthy denies that she was a source for Priest.)

The cover has long ago been blown on these 
dungeons by Amnesty International, Human Rights 
Watch, Human Rights First, and the ceaseless 
researchers at NYU law school's Center for Human 
Rights and Global Justice. And in the Voice, I've 
been writing on what I can find out about them since the end of 2002.

But the CIA, the president, Alberto Gonzales, 
Condoleezza Rice, and Donald Rumsfeld have 
nothing to say about these gulags, which are 
wholly removed from American law and the 
international treaties we have signed.

Now, however, in an explosive, documented April 5 
Amnesty International report"Below the Radar: 
Secret Flights to Torture and 'Disappearance' 
"there is direct testimony, for the first time, 
from three men who have been salted away in these secret CIA prisons.

This 41-page report, currently reverberating 
throughout Europe, also includes a wide range of 
detailed information about the CIA's kidnapping 
and "renditions" of suspects to countries known 
for torturing prisoners. But most revealing are 
Amnesty International's interviews with the three 
men from Yemen who were "held in at least four 
secret US-run facilities . . . probably in 
Djibouti, Afghanistan, and somewhere in Eastern Europe."

In their last "black site," where they were 
disappeared for 13 months, Muhammad Bashmilah, 
Salah Ali Qaru, and Muhammad al-Assad were 
imprisonedthey believe it was in Eastern 
Europewhere "they were never allowed to look 
outside. . . . And for month after month, the men 
had no idea whether it was day or night . . . or 
whether their torment of spending endless days 
staring at blank walls, or being interrogated, would ever end."

Why they were finally returned to Yemen is 
unknown; but therewhere they were first arrested 
two and a half years ago before falling into CIA 
crevassesthey were charged on February 13, 2006, 
with having forged a travel document. Amnesty International emphasizes:

"None was charged with any terrorism-related 
offense; [and] the Chief of Special Prosecution 
in Yemen told Amnesty International that they 
were not suspected of any such involvement."

On the old forgery charge, the judge in Yemen 
sentenced them to time served, the trial record 
notes, "in an unknown place by the USA."

They were then released. But, AI adds, "All 
continue to suffer the dire mental and physical 
health consequences of torture and ill-treatment, 
including the prolonged periods in isolation."

As Eric Olson, acting director of government 
relations at Amnesty International USA, says, 
their long-term solitary imprisonment can, by 
international standards, "be considered cruel and 
inhuman treatment," and two "were in a facility 
where they were chained to a ring on the floor permanently."

But what of the others who have been disappeared 
in the CIA's secret prisons? In the Voice nearly 
two years ago, I quoted Jack Cloonan, a 27-year 
veteran of the FBI who, in New York, as senior 
agent on the FBI's bin Laden squad, headed the 
investigation of the master Al Qaeda strategist 
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. Cloonan had been 
directing the interrogation of Mohammed in a once 
secret CIA interrogation center at Bagram Air 
Force Base in Afghanistan (which Dana Priest exposed in The Washington Post).

Concerned at the time about the network of still 
hidden CIA interrogation centers around the 
world, Cloonan asked: "What are we going to do 
with these people when we're finished . . . with 
them? Are they going to disappear? Are they 
stateless? . . . What are we going to explain to 
people when they start asking questions about 
where they are? Are they dead? Are they alive? 
What oversight does Congress have?"

Will the elite Washington press finally ask this 
question of presidential press secretary Tony 
Snowand Senate Intelligence Committee chairman 
Pat Roberts? And especially George W. Bush at his 
next press conference? What are these American 
values, Mr. President, we stand for against the terrorists?

The Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 863-9977
www.freedomarchives.org 
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