Report: CIA holds terror suspects in secret prisons

basso,

let me make it simple for you:


Leaking the identity of a CIA agent working in the WMD field as political retribution against her husband- BAD

Reporting on secret prisons run by the CIA where torture may be taking place-GOOD

 

but both classified, no?

 

whatever works

 

why does the cia hate america?

 

The Osama Bin Laden defense. I don't care if I kill 3000 civilians on 9/11. Whatever works and hits America where it hurts. I don't care if my cronies behead little children. Whatever works and gets the most shock effect. Suicide bombings? Hey, it keeps the Israelis on their toes 24/7.

This mentality is what is wrong with America today.

 

brilliant. even the russians are criticizing us. i didn't think the US would sink this low in the post cold war era. thanks bush.

U.S. Faces Scrutiny Over Secret Prisons
Officials in Eastern Europe Deny Role

By Craig Whitlock
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, November 4, 2005; A20

THE HAGUE, Nov. 3 The International Committee of the Red Cross, the European Union and human rights groups said Thursday they would press the U.S. and European governments for information about the reported existence of secret prisons in Eastern Europe, where the CIA has detained top al Qaeda captives.

Government officials across that region issued denials Thursday that their countries hosted the prisons, which some European officials contend would violate local human rights laws. But the revelation, reported by The Washington Post on Wednesday, captured headlines across the continent and led human-rights organizations to call for official investigations.

The Post reported that the CIA had been interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda prisoners at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe. The classified site is part of a global network of covert prisons the CIA established after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks with locations in eight countries, including Afghanistan, Thailand and several East European democracies.

In Brussels, a spokesman for the European Union, Friso Roscam Abbing, said that the E.U. would query its 25 member states to find out more about the prisons. Their existence, he said, could violate the European Convention on Human Rights and the international Convention Against Torture, treaties that all E.U. nations are bound to follow.

"We have to find out what is exactly happening," Roscam Abbing told reporters. "We have all heard about this."

Later Thursday, senior E.U. officials appeared to put a damper on any kind of official inquiry. Justice commissioner Franco Frattini said in a statement that the E.U. had no information on the Post report and it was therefore "not appropriate" for him to comment. Noting that the 25 E.U. countries are bound by human rights and anti-torture conventions, he said he would "encourage member states to look into this matter."

It is illegal for the U.S. government to hold prisoners in such isolation in secret prisons in the United States, which is why the CIA placed them overseas, according to several former and current intelligence officials and other U.S. officials. American legal experts and intelligence officials said that the CIA's internment practices would be considered illegal under the laws of several host countries.

The Post has not identified the East European countries involved in the secret program at the request of senior U.S. officials who argued that the disclosure could disrupt counterterrorism efforts. But the report has prompted a concerted effort by European news organizations and other groups to try to pinpoint the locations.

Human Rights Watch, a New York-based advocacy group, said it had obtained flight logs showing that a CIA-chartered aircraft had used airstrips in Poland and Romania in 2003, around the same time that the United States was transporting top al Qaeda prisoners from Afghanistan to other locations, including the U.S. naval prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The Romanian Defense Ministry issued a statement saying it "was not aware that such a detention center existed" at the air base identified by Human Rights Watch. Prime Minister Calin Popescu Tariceanu was more direct: "We do not have CIA bases in Romania," he said on state television.

In Poland, undergoing a change in government after recent elections, current and former officials denied that the country was involved in the prison system.

In Russia, a number of news organizations reported on the Post story on their Web sites. Some headlines compared the CIA prisons to the Soviet gulag, the infamous network of prison camps. "Secret network of jails -- heritage of Gulag?" read the headline on the news site www.regions.ru. The headline on www.utro.ru read: "The Washington Post: CIA has created a new GULAG." Russian officials denied there were CIA prisons in their country.

In Geneva, the Red Cross said Thursday it has repeated a request to the U.S. government to allow the humanitarian organization to visit terrorism suspects held in isolation at secret locations. The Red Cross is allowed to visit prisoners held by the United States in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay but has previously expressed concern that U.S. officials were keeping some detainees hidden from its monitors.

"We are concerned at the fate of an unknown number of people captured as part of the so-called global war on terror and held at undisclosed places of detention," Antonella Notari, chief ICRC spokeswoman, told the Reuters news service.

Europe's leading human-rights organization, the Council of Europe, said it would open an investigation into the East European prisons.

The U.N. Human Rights Committee and the U.N. special rapporteur on torture said they have already been pressing the U.S. government to disclose the existence of any secret detention centers and would renew their efforts in response to the reports of the CIA prisons.

Correspondent Peter Finn in Moscow contributed to this report.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/03/AR2005110300422_pf.html

 

Prisoner Accounts Suggest Detention At Secret Facilities
Rights Group Draws Link to the CIA

By Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 7, 2005; A11

Three Yemeni nationals who were arrested in late 2003 say they were transferred to U.S. custody and kept isolated in at least four secret detention facilities that Amnesty International officials believe could be part of a covert CIA prison system.

The three detainees have not said they were physically abused while in U.S. custody, but they describe being whisked away in airplanes to unknown locations where they were interrogated by Americans in civilian clothes, according to an Amnesty International report. At one prison, the detainees were guarded by people in all-black "ninja" suits, who communicated using hand gestures.

During their separate incarcerations, the detainees were never visited by the International Committee of the Red Cross, never had access to lawyers, were unable to correspond with their families and had no contact with the outside world, the report said. Their families believed they were dead or were told that they had gone to Iraq to fight the United States.

The accounts, taken in independent interviews by Amnesty International researchers over the past few months, appear to be consistent with reports of a network of secret CIA detention facilities, according to the report. The detainees could not determine where they were because they were hooded during the flights, but because of the travel time they assumed they were in Europe or the Middle East, according to Amnesty International.

"We've tried working out where they might have been, but it's so subjective," said Anne FitzGerald, senior adviser on research policy for Amnesty International, who interviewed the detainees in two Yemeni prisons. "It's clear they were in facilities that were designed to hold many people, not just them. But they really didn't know where they were."

The CIA declined to comment Friday.

In a telephone interview from London last week, FitzGerald said she believes the detainees' stories are credible because they were each detained separately and were unable to communicate with one another before the United States turned them over to the Yemeni government in May. One of the detainees has never met the other two and is now kept in a separate facility, yet his story is consistent, she said.

Muhammad Assad was arrested in his home of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on Dec. 26, 2003, for alleged passport problems. A Yemeni native, Assad had lived in Tanzania for 20 years.

After his arrest and initial questioning, Assad was taken to a waiting airplane, and his family was told that he was deported to Yemen, according to Amnesty International. Yemeni authorities denied that Assad had entered the country, and Tanzania later informed Assad's father that he had been turned over to U.S. officials.

Assad believes he was arrested because of his connections to a charity that was "blacklisted" after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks for allegedly funding terrorism. The al Haramain Islamic Foundation, a Saudi Arabian charity, had rented space in a building Assad owned. It is the only topic Assad was questioned about in his 15 months of incarceration.

He was first taken on a small airplane that flew for about two to three hours, and was interrogated for two weeks by Arabic-speaking people, according to the report. He was then flown elsewhere, a flight that he believes lasted about 11 hours, with a one-hour stop-over. When he arrived, his surroundings were much colder, and he was interrogated by white men who spoke what he believed to be American English.

"There was nothing haphazard or makeshift about the detention regime, it was carefully designed to induce maximum disorientation, dependence and stress in the detainees," according to the 20-page report. "The men were subjected to extreme sensory deprivation; for over a year they did not know what country they were in, whether it was night or day, whether it was raining or sunny. They spoke to no one but their interrogators, through translators, and no one spoke to them."

Salah Ali and Muhammad Bashmilah, who were living in Indonesia, were arrested in August and October 2003, respectively; Ali in Jakarta and Bashmilah in Amman, Jordan. They were taken to a Jordanian prison and tortured -- badly beaten and chained in uncomfortable positions -- by Jordanian authorities before being transferred to U.S. custody, according to Amnesty International. Both men had traveled to Afghanistan in 2000 to learn about jihad, but neither man fought against the United States, according to FitzGerald.

Ali said he was stripped and beaten with sticks by a ring of masked soldiers. "They tried to force me to walk like an animal, on my hands and feet, and I refused," Ali told Amnesty, "so they stretched me out on the floor and walked on me and put their shoes in my mouth."

Ali and Bashmilah recount similar stories after their transfer to U.S. custody in a place Amnesty International believes could have been Eastern Europe. They were put into a windowless, underground facility, each was isolated in a tiny cell, and their jailers and interrogators spoke English with American accents. In April 2004, they were moved to a new facility with "no pictures or ornaments on the walls, no floor coverings, no windows, no natural light," according to the report. It was here that the guards dressed in all black.

FitzGerald said that the two Indonesian detainees were barely interrogated after their first few weeks, perhaps an acknowledgment that they did not know much. All three were released to Yemeni authorities in May. Ali and Bashmilah are in the central prison in Aden, and Assad is at a security prison at Al Ghaydah. Their families now know they are alive, FitzGerald said.

"The cases of the three 'disappeared' Yemenis documented in this report . . . suggest that the network of clandestine interrogation centres is not reserved solely for high-value detainees, but may be larger, more comprehensive and better organized than previously suspected," the report says.

Such "incommunicado" detentions are against international standards but are consistent with recent reports of how the CIA operated its detention network.

Manfred Nowak, the U.N. rapporteur on torture, said in an interview last week that secret facilities are a particularly important issue because there is no outside oversight and no ability to know which detainees are in custody or where they are held. He condemned the practice.

"Incommunicado detention forms inhumane treatment in and of itself," Nowak said.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/06/AR2005110601049.html

 

Scottie boy has an impossible job.

 

Frist, Hastert Call for Leak Probe

But today, in an off-camera meeting with reporters, Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS) revealed that the leak likely came from a Senator or Senate staffer who attended a GOP-only meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney last week, where the detention centers were discussed. link

Any bets that Frist recants his call for a leak probe?

Nixon: I am not a crook.

Clinton: I did NOT have sex with that woman.

Bush: We do not torture.

 

It must suck to have his job.

 

he's doing a heck of a job

 

One could almost feel sorry for old Scott, poor man. I wonder how long it will be before he throws in the towel? The guy is keeping the Pepto-Bismal company in business by himself.

Good to see the press beginning to grow a sack. Helen already has a pair, lol.



Keep D&D Civil.

 

is ari fleischer not the happiest man on earth right now?