Torture Widespread In U.S. "Black Site" Prisons, Says AI

by Tito Drago

(IPS) MADRID -- The U.S. government prohibits torture on its own soil, but operates secret prisons in various parts of the world where human rights are regularly violated, maintained political analyst Roberto Montoya and rights activist Miguel Angel Calderon in interviews with IPS.

In response to a U.S. Department of Defense directive made public Tuesday, which specifically prohibits acts of physical and mental torture and states that "all captured or detained personnel shall be treated humanely," Calderon called for "clear signs that they will comply with the Geneva Conventions (on treatment of prisoners of war) and stop the use of torture."

Calderon, communications director for the Spanish chapter of human rights watchdog Amnesty International, stressed that "all detainees should be tried in accordance with national and international laws or else be released."

Moreover, he said, "the Red Cross should be allowed access to all detention centers, which means that those which are still secret must no longer be so."

On Monday, Amnesty International released a report providing detailed information on three Yemeni nationals who were illegally held in secret detention centers or "black sites" run by the United States.

Muhammad al-Assad, Salah Ali and Muhammad Bashmilah were arrested in Yemen in 2003 and handed over to U.S. custody, at which point they "disappeared" for a year and a half until resurfacing in Yemeni custody this past May.

Through interviews with the three men after they were released, Amnesty International uncovered evidence that during the interim, they had been held in complete isolation in a series of U.S.-run secret detention centers.

While there have been widespread reports recently that the United States is holding two to three dozen "high-value" detainees at secret CIA-run facilities outside the country, the cases of the three "disappeared" Yemenis documented in the new Amnesty International report "suggest that the network of clandestine interrogation centers is not reserved solely for high-value detainees, but may be larger, more comprehensive and better organized than previously suspected," the report maintains.

For his part, Montoya said it was "strange" that the new Department of Defense directives were issued "at the same time that Washington is trying to boycott an amendment introduced by Senator (John) McCain that opposes the government's stance that there should be exceptions made for special intelligence operations abroad."

McCain, a senator from the ruling Republican Party -- as well as a Vietnam veteran who was himself tortured as a prisoner of war -- is the author of an amendment attached to a revised military spending bill that would ban the use of "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" against anyone in U.S. government custody.

The White House unsuccessfully lobbied McCain to exempt the CIA from the measure, and has threatened to veto the bill if it includes the amendment.

Montoya called the new Pentagon directives hypocritical, and recalled that while President Bush declared that the United States respects all "relevant" national and international laws, internal documents from the Pentagon itself subsequently demonstrated that defense authorities knew about the abuse of prisoners in places like Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

The journalist and international relations specialist has just published a new book, "La inmunidad imperial" (Imperial Immunity), which documents illegal activities of U.S. military and intelligence personnel in other countries.

Montoya, who is currently the international news desk director at the Madrid daily El Mundo, is originally from Argentina, where he was imprisoned and tortured during the 1966-1973 military dictatorship.

He went into exile in Paris in 1976, when the Argentine army staged another coup and installed a de facto military regime that ruled until 1983. Montoya later moved to Spain, and began to write for El Mundo in 1992.

His book documents the existence of reports written "in his own hand" by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, which "give the green light" for the use of torture. Consequently, noted Montoya, human rights abuses are not "exceptions," but rather have been perpetrated on higher orders in Iraq, Afghanistan and the U.S. military base in Guantanamo, Cuba.

Some of the CIA's illegal activities are carried out by private companies used as "fronts," Montoya added, or by former agents no longer officially connected to the agency. There is also evidence of the use of civilian aircraft to transport illegal detainees, he said.

Montoya pointed out that the U.S. military has undergone growing privatization, and noted that during the administration of George Bush (1989-1993), the current president's father, then-defense secretary Dick Cheney requested a study of the potential benefits to be gained by the armed forces by contracting out services.

Today, with Cheney as vice president, the U.S. military is backed up by more than 20,000 mercenaries in Iraq and Afghanistan alone, he said.

Montoya's book provides detailed accounts of concrete cases like the illegal detention in 2003 of Egyptian Islamic cleric Abu Omar in Milan, Italy. He was kidnapped in broad daylight by 13 men who were eventually identified through a cell phone records check authorized by a court order.

Investigations revealed that all of Abu Omar's abductors were CIA agents who took him to Egypt on a plane that took off from the air base in Aviano, Italy.

He eventually turned up in custody in Egypt, where he told his family that he had been tortured both in Aviano and the Egyptian jail where he was being held.

Despite the fact that all 13 CIA agents were identified, the U.S. government refused to hand them over to stand trial in Italy.

Another case documented in the new book is that of a Lebanese-born German citizen who was arrested in Macedonia near the Serbian border and taken first to Afghanistan and then to Iraq, where he was tortured and released three months later.

The victim in this case declared that the plane on which he was transported made a stopover in Palma de Mallorca, the capital of the Balearic Islands located off Spain's Mediterranean coast.

This information helped Montoya locate and publish a photograph of the three civilian planes used by the CIA, whose license numbers were registered at the airports in both Palma de Mallorca and the Canary Islands, another Spanish territory, off the northwest coast of Africa.

"I knew from conversations with airline pilots that a lot of them have the hobby of taking pictures of planes and posting them on a Web site," explained Montoya.

He then began to comb through the pictures on the Internet until he found the three planes that corresponded to the license numbers in question, and published the photographs in his book.

In addition, he investigated the private companies that collaborate with the CIA and found a number in the United Kingdom, as well as South Africa, in addition to those from the United States.

"I also discovered that racial discrimination extends to this sector as well, where blacks and indigenous people get paid less than white Anglo-Americans," he noted.

Imperial Immunity contains accounts of numerous abductions perpetrated by the CIA, dozens of flights that have passed through Spanish airports, and copious documentation from the Bush administration.

It also includes reports on international investigations carried out in the United States, Pentagon memos and circulars, and responses from legal advisers consulted on how to apply certain "interrogation techniques" or deny detainees protection under the Geneva Conventions without running afoul of the country's own federal courts or the International Criminal Court.