[Peace-discuss] The American disappeared

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Beyond the outright murder of Iraqis, the principal crime for
which Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, et al. should be in jail,
this seems to me the greatest crime committed by this
administration.  They have violated the Bill of Rights,
designed to prevent the central government from behaving as
they have.  What are we doing to stop it?  --CGE]

   Liberty Beat
   CIA Secret Prisons Exposed
   The disappeared: Are they dead? Are they alive? 
   Ask Congress. Ask the president.
   by Nat Hentoff
   May 7th, 2006 7:59 PM
	
    "CIA officers soon learned one thing for sure -- prisoners
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 I -- along 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.
McCarthy -- for allegedly providing classified information
about CIA secret prisons in Eastern Europe to The Washington
Post's Dana Priest -- that 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 imprisoned -- they believe it was in Eastern
Europe -- where "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 there
-- where they were first arrested two and a half years ago
before falling into CIA crevasses -- they 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 Snow -- and 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?

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