CIA Secret Prisons Exposed

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).

...

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."

tags: rendition  crime  law  cia