a shock http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/Co...ageid=968332188492&col=968793972154&t=TS_Home UN suspects secret U.S. terrorist prisons 'Undeclared holding areas' could include navy ships in international waters, torture expert says ASSOCIATED PRESS VIENNA — UN human rights experts have started an investigation into U.S. detention facilities for terrorist suspects amid allegations that there are secret prisons, one of the project leaders said today. Manfred Nowak, the UN's special expert on torture, said some undeclared holding areas could include U.S. navy ships in international waters. He said there were "serious" allegations to that effect from Amnesty International and other non-governmental human rights groups. "I have heard these rumours and we have to follow them up," he told The Associated Press, urging Washington to co-operate with the investigation. Officials at the U.S. mission to the United Nations in Vienna refused to comment. Asked about the investigation, U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said: "I think that Mr. Nowak himself said that these allegations are based on rumours. And I have no information that would substantiate those rumours." Nowak, a Vienna law professor, is one of several independent human rights experts appointed by the 53-country UN Human Rights Commission, the United Nations' top rights watchdog. Nowak, who also reports to the UN General Assembly, has great autonomy in deciding what to investigate and did not need to seek outside approval in launching the inquiry into U.S. detention practices and locations. The United States has criticized the commission because its members include countries with poor human rights records. But the experts operate independently and sometimes reproach their own countries for violations. Jose Diaz, spokesman for Louise Arbour, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and a former Supreme Court of Canada justice, said Nowak had "great authority in investigating suspected abuses." "Our long-standing position is that we encourage countries to co-operate with the special rapporteurs of the commission," said Diaz. "Their dialogue with the U.S. should continue so that they (the investigators) can be allowed to carry out their work." Nowak said he and three fellow experts decided last week to launch the inquiry without waiting for assurances of U.S. co-operation after holding off for more than three years in hopes Washington would give members access to Guantanamo Bay and other facilities holding suspected terrorists. Nowak expressed disappointment at a lack of U.S. response. Still, he said, he was assured after recent high-level meetings with U.S. officials that the request to visit Guantanamo Bay was "being given highest consideration at the top level of the State Department (and) the Pentagon." He said that the four-member team also would like to visit Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and other U.S.-run sites known to hold terrorist suspects. The team also wants to trace allegations of clandestine prisons — including reports of detainees being held on U.S. navy ships in extraterritorial waters in the Indian Ocean and elsewhere. Nowak said team members had begun interviewing former suspects held and subsequently released by U.S. authorities in efforts to establish conditions in the prisons and their exact locations.
I motion to exclude this post from consideration for the daily "liberal outrage of the day", due to the fact that it was already discussed yesterday in this thread: http://bbs.clutchfans.net/showthread.php?t=98265&page=2
isn't it sad that we have to be listed as human rights violators? This is america! We should be an example to the rest of the world not a bully.
why do you hate America? dontcha know that reporting the truth is unamerican! dontcha know that blogs kill Americans, not Iraqi Insurrgents? Here are you government issued pom-poms, now get to work!
All this time the secret prison camps are on ships in the ocean? Man, I thought that the new Denver airport was suppposed to be our secret prison.
Now the liberals want to make sure terrorists are free from harm/punishment/panties on their heads in international waters! Simply hilarious.
another interesting article ..... Island paradise or torture chamber? CIA under fire for secret detentions Indian Ocean atoll alleged abuse site http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/Co...ageid=968332188492&col=968793972154&t=TS_Home LYNDA HURST FEATURE WRITER From satellite pictures, Diego Garcia looks like paradise. The small, secluded atoll in the Indian Ocean, with its coral beaches, turquoise waters and vast lagoon in the centre, is 1,600 kilometres from land in any direction. A perfect hideaway. But no one is allowed to set foot on it. The little-known British possession, leased to the United States in 1970, was a major military staging post in the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. It continues to be, in effect, a floating aircraft carrier, housing 1,700 personnel who call it Camp Justice. But intelligence analysts say Diego Garcia's geographic isolation is now being exploited for other, darker purposes. They claim it is one in a network of secret detention centres being operated by the Central Intelligence Agency to interrogate high-value terrorist suspects beyond the reach of American or international law. These prisoners are known as "ghost detainees" or the "new disappeared," and they're being subjected to treatment that makes the abuses at the military-run Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad and Guantanamo Bay camp in Cuba look small-time, say intelligence analysts. Last year, Federal Bureau of Investigation director Robert Mueller said CIA interrogation techniques "violate all American anti-torture laws," and instructed FBI agents to step outside of the room when the CIA steps in. Analysts say there are at least a score of unacknowledged facilities around the world. Among them, several in Afghanistan (one known as "the pit") and Iraq, in Pakistan, Jordan, in a restricted unit at Guantanamo, and one, they suspect, on Diego Garcia, where two navy prison ships ferry prisoners in and out. This week, the United Nations said it will investigate a number of allegations from reliable sources that the U.S. is detaining terrorist suspects in undeclared holding facilities, including on board ships believed to be in the Indian Ocean. "Diego Garcia is an obvious place for a secret facility," says American defence analyst John Pike. "They want somewhere that's difficult to escape from, difficult to attack, not visible to prying eyes and where a lot of other activity is going on. Diego Garcia is ideal." The British government has flatly denied detainees are being held covertly on the island. When asked last year, U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state Lawrence DiRita didn't deny it outright, saying only, "I don't know. I simply don't know." What is known about CIA activities is that, since 2001, the agency has been transferring or "rendering" suspects to third countries for aggressive interrogation. Syrian-born Canadian Maher Arar was snatched in New York and dispatched to Syria, where he says he was tortured. Last month, an Italian judge ordered the arrest of 13 CIA agents and operatives on charges they seized an Egyptian cleric on a Milan street two years ago and flew him to Egypt for interrogation. The rendition policy was initiated in 1998 by the Clinton White House after the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed by terrorists. The intent, says intelligence specialist Wesley Wark, was to bring Al Qaeda and Taliban suspects to the U.S. for prosecution. "It was legalized kidnapping," he says, "and they did grab a few and bring them back. But after 9/11, the policy got changed to `extraordinary rendition' and suspects began being shipped, not to the U.S. and into the legal system, but elsewhere. And it started to be used for a whole assortment of people." Since 2001, according to The New York Times, between 100 and 150 individuals have been rendered to Egypt, Morocco, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, all countries with records of practising torture. But rendering means giving up control to the other country, says Pike, which in turn means only low-value suspects are transferred. "The CIA keeps the high-level ones to themselves," he says. "And they work them over." It's known that in August of 2002, the CIA approved the adoption of "enhanced" interrogation measures and stress and duress techniques. They're believed to include "water-boarding" — in which a prisoner's head is forced under water until the point of drowning — denial of pain medication and mock burial. A month later, Cofer Black, then CIA director of operations and now head of counterterrorism at the U.S. State Department, told the congressional intelligence committee he couldn't elaborate on what was "highly classified" information: "All you need to know is, there was a before 9/11, and there was an after 9/11. After 9/11, the gloves came off." Despite the contention of many specialists that torture doesn't yield valuable evidence, Pike says the agency firmly believes in "hostile interrogation." "It would be nice," he says, "to think that torture was inhumane, illegal and ineffective, but the dilemma is, it is effective. The CIA knows that from past experience." Because the agency operates outside the law, doing what the government doesn't want to be publicly associated with, "it isn't bound by international treaties," says Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org. The White House has said it doesn't consider that the "unlawful combatants" in the war on terror (now referred to as "security detainees") are covered by the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war, which prohibits "violence to life and person, cruel treatment and torture." But critics point out the convention also states "no one in enemy hands can fall outside the law." Moreover, they say the U.S. is also bound by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which it ratified a decade ago. The covenant prohibits incommunicado detention, requires that detention centres be officially recognized, that identities be registered, that families be told of the detention and that the times and places of all interrogations and names of those present be documented. None of these provisions is being met with the ghost prisoners, says David Danzig, spokesman for Human Rights First, a legal advocacy group that has produced two reports on U.S. treatment of suspects, both those in the military system and the unacknowledged phantom system. Danzig says the International Red Cross has a list of 36 individuals, almost exclusively high-value detainees, that the U.S. admits it is holding but will not say where. "But our conversations with government officials, former detainees and others suggest it's safe to say hundreds, probably thousands, is more accurate for the number of people being held in secret." Among them, it's claimed, are three top Al Qaeda lieutenants: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (who Pike believes is being held on Diego Garcia), Ramzi Binalshibh and Abu Zubaida. The Southeast Asian terrorist Nurjaman Riduan Isamuddin, known as Hambali, is also one of the disappeared, according to Danzig's organization and another advocacy groups. They have little doubt the secrecy surrounding their detention makes the use of torture "not only likely, but inevitable." In a blistering report, Beyond the Wire, released in March, Human Rights First outlined the suspected scope of the global network of covert detention facilities. "The U.S. government is holding prisoners in a secret system of offshore prisons beyond the reach of adequate supervision, accountability or law," it stated, referring to the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison as "just the tip of the iceberg." Since the Abu Ghraib revelations last year, there have been three major Pentagon reports on the treatment of detainees in military prisons and a new manual on interrogation techniques was introduced in April. Human Rights First wants a full-scale investigation into the covert CIA detention network and use of rendering, and for months has been calling for an independent bipartisan inquiry akin to the 9/11 commission. But a veil of silence continues to shroud the ghost detainees, says Danzig, head of the organization's End Torture campaign. "Both the (Bush) administration and the CIA are stonewalling and blocking efforts to get a credible investigation," he says. "The Pentagon reports are enough, they say. Though there is evidence of a lot of wrongdoing, the CIA detention centres are a giant black hole." But Danzig says "the landscape is starting to change." Calls for a commission are starting to grow in congressional circles, with a major Republican, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, joining in last week. The U.S. needs "to prove to the world that we are a rule-of-law nation," he said. Even conservative Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly, normally a staunch defender of Bush administration policies, says an independent commission should be set up to investigate U.S. detainee policy "across the board." "The president must take the offensive on this, or else the country's image will continue to suffer and the jihadists and their enablers will win another victory." It's alarming, if not surprising, that so little is known about secret detention sites, says lawyer Noah Novogrodsky, director of the University of Toronto International Human Rights Program. But that they exist he has no doubt. When a regime is threatened by something it can't identify, by an unknown enemy, it counters by throwing in everything, including the kitchen sink, he says. "It would be hard to systematically torture in known detention centres, but you can't track a secret world. The secret locales are one part of the whole picture, the dark underbelly, and they're absolutely outside of the law."
Calls for a commission are starting to grow in congressional circles, with a major Republican, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, joining in last week. The U.S. needs "to prove to the world that we are a rule-of-law nation," he said. Someone must have forgot to tell W.
Confirmed -- Europe's CIA Inquiry: Poland, Romania hosted secret prisons By Spencer Ackerman - June 8, 2007, 10:32 AM Today the Council of Europe makes it official: Poland and Romania hosted secret detention facilities on behalf of the CIA. In a just-released inquiry approved by the Council, investigator Dick Marty of Switzerland confirms Dana Priest's Pulitzer Prize-winning report for the Washington Post that unnamed Eastern European countries allowed the CIA to hold suspected al-Qaeda detainees on their territory, without access to legal protections or the International Committee of the Red Cross. For the first time, the Council on Europe's report names some of the detainees in the secret facilities: they include 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and former al-Qaeda military committee chief Abu Zubaydah. Both, Marty writes, "were questioned using 'enhanced interrogation techniques,'" making his report the first documentation by any public official to state definitively that such techniques have in fact been employed. In 2005, ABC News reported that such techniques include waterboarding, in which a detainee is forced to believe he is drowning. Previous inquests by the European Parliament, most recently in February, stopped short of reporting definitively that the prisons existed, thanks mainly to lack of cooperation by U.S. and European intelligence officials, allowing the U.S., Poland and other suspected countries to maintain deniability over the prisons. In April, CIA Director Michael Hayden chastised the Parliament for what he called its "unbounded criticism" of CIA detentions, renditions and interrogations, which he and the CIA have consistently defended as both legal and necessary to combat al-Qaeda. You can read Marty's report here at the TPM Document Collection. We'll bring you updates on its most significant revelations. http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/003390.php The report http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/docs/cia-secret-prisons/
lol..i like that...outrage of the day. i think this is all its ridiculous. I know, i know what people will say, but give it a rest. i think its great how people will *****, moan and complain about something so ambiguous, unknown and could be considered a 'gray area' that may be going on with the US and make it out to be some huge outrage.
I'm surprised people can take this news (not that it should be a surprise to anyone) without being outraged. This is pretty damn crooked. How can it not bother people?
seems like all those stories are guesses, speculation and rumors...why be outraged? i dont get the ridicule...because its secret? b/c they MAY be misuse of power?