EMAIL SIGN UP!
Most Popular This Week
- Corporate Win: Supreme Court Says Monsanto Has 'Control Over Product of Life'
- Patent Filing Claims Solar Energy ‘Breakthrough’
- Disaster Capitalism Strikes as Hedge Funds Circle Near-Bankrupt Municipalities Like Vultures
- In 'March Toward Disaster,' World Hits 400 PPM Milestone
- Ignoring Bee Crisis, EPA Greenlights New 'Highly Toxic' Pesticide
Popular content
Today's Top News
US Accused Over '39 Ghost Detainees'
Human rights groups have asked the US to reveal the whereabouts of 39 people who have allegedly been held in secret CIA-run prisons.
A report compiled by six human rights groups listed the names of people who remain unaccounted for after having passed through US custody.
The groups urged the US to stop using secret prisons for terror suspects.
The US last year admitted the existence of such prisons in its "war on terror" but said they were no longer in use.
President George W Bush said last September that all secret prison sites were "empty".
The groups says they compiled their report, entitled Off the Record, from government and media sources and from interviews with former prisoners.
"It's time for the US government to come clean," said Clive Stafford Smith, Legal Director of Reprieve, one of the groups involved in the appeal.
"These 39 people have been missing for years, and the evidence shows they were in US custody at some point. Where are they and what has been done to them?"
Rendition flights
A spokesman for the CIA told the BBC News website that the CIA acts "in strict accordance with American law".
"Our counter-terror initiatives - which are subject to careful review and oversight - have been very effective in disrupting plots and saving lives," said CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano.
The US administration has faced criticism from legal experts and human rights activists over its policy on detentions of terrorism suspects.
The human rights groups say that people have been arrested in countries including Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Sudan and Somalia and flown in "extraordinary renditions" to secret US prisons.
A report approved by a European Parliament committee earlier this year said more than 1,000 covert CIA flights had crossed European airspace or stopped at European airports in the four years after the 9/11 attacks.
Last month, a US civil liberties group sued a subsidiary of Boeing for allegedly helping the CIA fly suspects to secret overseas detention centres where it says they were subjected to torture and abuse.
Three of the organisations - Amnesty International, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the International Human Rights Clinic of New York University School of Law - have filed a lawsuit under the US Freedom of Information Act for information on the missing people.
'Tough' interrogation
Human Rights Watch and Cageprisoners are the other two organisations seeking information on the 39 "ghost detainees".
The groups fears the missing people may have been moved to countries where they might be at risk of torture.
They say children as young as seven are among those detained.
"The duty of governments to protect people from acts of terrorism is not in question," said Claudio Cordone of Amnesty International.
"But seizing men, women and even children, and placing people in secret locations deprived of the most basic safeguards for any detainees most definitely is."
In September 2006, Mr Bush said 14 detainees had been held at secret CIA prisons that used interrogation methods that were "tough" but "lawful and necessary".
He said the prisoners had since been transferred to the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the CIA was not holding any more terror suspects.
© BBC MMVII
Comments
Note: Disqus 2012 is best viewed on an up to date browser. Click here for information. Instructions for how to sign up to comment can be viewed here. Our Comment Policy can be viewed here. Please follow the guidelines. Note to Readers: Spam Filter May Capture Legitimate Comments...
13 Comments so far
Show AllA spokesman for the CIA told the BBC News website that the CIA acts "in strict accordance with American law".
Does he mean American law with or without the Presidential signing statements and the Gonzales interpretations?
"Our counter-terror initiatives - which are subject to careful review and oversight - have been very effective in disrupting plots and saving lives," said CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano.
When they disrupt terror plots in the UK, they publicize the arrests, give information on the terror plot, and put these people on trials open to the public. The US take my word for it version of stopping plots sounds an awful lot like the color coded threat alerts or the old joke, there's a rabbit under my hat but when you lift it he's not there.
Anyway with Bush encouraging Putin and half a dozen other countries to move along on the road to democracy it sounds like a real short road yet to be traveled to be on par with the US version under Bush.
They are probably buried with the bodies from The Great Afgan Shipping Container Massacre
you really are a bag of information canuckchuck, you moonlighting as neo-con puppet poster or just that uneducated
"Disappearing" people is one of the cruelest crimes a state can commit -- leaving loved ones to search endlessly for bodies they never find.
I suspect that some of these prisoners are still alive somewhere and still being tortured, and others are probably dead, their bodies hidden or destroyed.
Pangea, I think Cannuckchuck was referring to a massacre carried out by U.S. soldiers against Afghan prisoners that was documented by an Irish filmmaker.
Sean:
The massacre was conducted by the Northern Alliance, if I recall correctly. US forces may have been complicit but the shots were fired by the NA. And I think the film maker was John Pilger. Coincidentally, he appeared on DemNow today.
Of course your point (that Cannackchuck is not expressing a neocon point) is on the mark.
It is a very good possibility that these detainees have been tortured into insanity if not death.
If the cia releases insane people into an unsuspecting population that will build additional ill will in the world.
Of course dead people or live witnesses will not be a smart PR move either.
Bu$h the inferior is as stupid as he is immoral.
As a group, it is the collective stupidity of the American people who put President Shit-for-brains in position. Just who is going to change that situation? Whilst ignorance has a cure, stupidity goes all the way to the bone. Personally I think the number of people within our borders who actually think is pretty damn low. Many more are capable of it but choose TV instead, it is after all, easier.
My former physician in Baltimore is the sister and aunt of some of the missing including children. Their mother and grandmother, in Pakistan, is beside herself with grief.
Myboysherman,
thanks for the correction.
I should track down a copy of the documentary and see it . .
"Our counter-terror initiatives - which are subject to careful review and oversight - have been very effective in disrupting plots and saving lives," said CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano....
Well, in the words of Mandy Rice-Davis, he would, wouldn't he?
The only problem is they refuse. on grounds of "security", to provide verifiable proof...
I did a comparison between the reports from Amnesty, how it wass reported by BBC and then how it was reported in the US on my blog.
I find it very strange that the language used in the US media was so much lighter and watered down compare to the actual report and how the BBC reported on it.
You can find my analysis at:
http://www.abdolian.com/thoughts/?p=580
/Farhad
There is a little voice in my head. I mutters, as long as I spend my time reading blogs on atrocities committed by us (you and me and the people we allow to rule us), and otherwise do nothing, expecting someone else to do it, the Current Occupant and his buddies will not be brought to accountability and justice, nor will the missing be found and granted habeas corpus.
There is a little voice in my head. It mutters, As long as you spend your time reading blogs on atrocities committed by us (you and me and the people we allow to rule us), and otherwise do nothing, expecting someone else to do it, the Current Occupant and his buddies will not be brought to accountability and justice, nor will the missing be found and granted habeas corpus.