Rights Groups Dismiss Bush’s Rules for Secret Prisons
SAN FRANCISCO - Human rights organizations are reacting coldly to President George W. Bush’s executive order forbidding the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from torturing, humiliating, or abusing detainees in its once-secret interrogation program.
“It’s incredibly vague to the point of being useless as a way to stop torture,” said Shayana Kadidal, an attorney at the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, who represents detainees held at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Bush’s five page executive order issued Friday bars CIA agents from acts of violence serious enough to be comparable to murder, torture, mutilation, and cruel or inhumane treatment.
It also bars willful or outrageous acts that any reasonable person would deem “to be beyond the bounds of human decency, such as sexual or sexually indecent acts undertaken for the purpose of humiliation, forcing the individual to perform sexual acts or to pose sexually, [and] threatening the individual with sexual mutilation.”
But the order does not explicitly forbid sleep deprivation or mock drowning (often called waterboarding), leaving Kadidal to believe it was written “intentionally to give leeway” to agents and “provide them with a legal defense if charged with torture.”
“We’re not pleased with it at all,” added John Sifton, senior researcher at New York-based Human Rights Watch, which believes the CIA program should be scrapped.
“The bigger issue is that this order continues to formalize a detention system that is outside the rule of law,” he told OneWorld.
Detainees held by the CIA, he noted, “have no access to a lawyer, no family visits, and no oversight by the International Committee of the Red Cross. They’re held indefinitely. It’s an enforced disappearance of a person: a person is thrown into a black hole and no one knows where they are.”
It’s not known how many people have been arrested by the CIA and secretly detained at so-called “black sites” around the world.
After published newspaper reports appeared on the program last September, Bush confirmed its existence but would not disclose how many individuals were secretly detained.
Human rights organizations have been able to document some of the cases, however.
Last month, six major human rights groups — Amnesty International, Cageprisoners, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at NYU School of Law, Human Rights Watch, and Reprieve — published a report called “Off the Record” identifying 39 individuals believed to have been held at some point by the United States in secret sites.
All but one remain missing.
Among those in the report is Ali Abdul-Hamid al-Fakhiri, a Libyan national who allegedly ran a training camp in Afghanistan from 1995 to 2000. After being apprehended by Pakistani authorities in November 2001, al-Fakhiri was turned over to the CIA in January 2002.
According to Human Rights Watch, the U.S. government moved al-Fakhiri from a U.S. base in Afghanistan to the U.S.S. Bataan to Egypt and then back to a secret U.S. detention facility in Afghanistan in 2003. Al-Fakhiri was reportedly transferred out of Afghanistan in late 2003 to a secret U.S. detention facility and then transferred to Libya in late 2005 or early 2006. On December 5, 2005, ABC News reported that he had been held in a secret U.S. detention facility in Poland.
“Al-Fakhiri is now reportedly held in isolation in Tripoli,” the six-group report reads, “and is said to be suffering from tuberculosis and to be in very poor health. At least one U.S. official has acknowledged U.S. involvement in elements of al-Fakhiri’s treatment, including questioning al-Fakhiri and transferring al-Fakhiri to a third country for interrogation.
“On July 19, 2006 his name was included in the ‘Terrorists No Longer a Threat’ List,” the report continues. “No other information about al-Fakhiri’s fate has been released by the U.S. government, and his whereabouts remain officially unexplained.”
Human Rights Watch’s Sifton believes the complex system of secret prisons abroad is unnecessary.
“We have a federal criminal code that dealt with the KKK and the Italian mafia,” he said. “The federal courts are also more than able to deal with any of these alleged terrorists just like we indicted the people who carried out the 1998 Embassy bombings or the 1993 World Trade Center bombings.”
Copyright © 2007 OneWorld.net.
“Human Rights Watch’s Sifton believes the complex system of secret prisons abroad is unnecessary.”
UNNECESSARY!?! What the hell does THAT mean? How about a criminal affront to international law and the Geneva Conventions!!!!!
How do we get the international community to bring charges against ALL of the criminals in this administration and have them tried in the Hague for war crimes? The citizens of the US can’t even get impeachment of these thugs “on the table”. Our federal criminal code will do NOTHING to stop this administration!
PLEASE!! What can we do to get the international community to help us throw off this dictatorship?
It is easy to see that that criminal is a terrorist and is guilty. His eyes are covered so that way we don’t see his venom and hate. The easy way to tell that he is a guilty terrorist is that he is in an orange jumpsuit! We all know that all people in those orange jumpsuits are guilty. He probably killed thousands! Stop supporting these vile terrorists!
“It’s incredibly vague to the point of being useless as a way to stop torture” - geez, are these clowns naive enough to think what Bush was doing was banning torture? He’s prepping for the time when he’s not president when someone may get up the gumption to bring him to trial. I can hear it now: “How can you say we tortured when I explicitly banned in executive order XYZ?”
Torture is a crime, and if it is done by a regime then it is war crime. Why is our elected Congress not doing its duty?
Ms. Pelosy:
Why is impeachment off the table?
This man has no shame. His hypocrisy is so enormous that they should coin a new word for it. How shameless of him to talk about the terrorists when he is the embodiment of the number one terrorist the world has ever seen. He makes Hitler and Attila look like innocent angels. By all accounts he must be immoral, insensitive, maniacal, sadistic, and deranged. Get rid of him.
My former physician’s sister and her young children are among those who disappeared into the Bush/Cheney gulag kidnapped from the US. There is no answer to the Saddiqi family’s pleas. We may never know how many prisoners “accidentally” died while in custody. We may never know if the children were saved or not. There is much material from Abu Ghraib that has not been released. There is supposed to be a video of young Iraqi boys being sexually attacked and screaming before their mothers to get the mothers to give information. The evil of an administration that we never even elected (That’s right, folks! See election.solarbus.org for solid, intelligent articles, analyses, etc.) is profound and condemns us all.
How can the President/Vice President and others of this administration in any way claim that they are for democracy when from the very beginning we could see the INHUMANITY of their ideas on display in these prisons — !!!!
You can’t be for both torture and human rights –
Waterboard Bush and Cheney and see how long it takes before they confess to being members of Al-Quaeda. I’d give those draft dodging wimps less than 30 seconds. Torture is useless if you are actually seeking the truth but it’s great if you just get off on seeing people suffer.