FATE OF MANY "GHOST PRISONERS" STILL UNKNOWN

by Eli Clifton

(IPS) WASHINGTON -- The U.S. government should account for all "ghost prisoners" detained by the Central Intelligence Agency in secret prisons around the world, urges a new report by Human Rights Watch (HRW).

The report, "Ghost Prisoner: Two Years in Secret CIA Detention," contains detailed descriptions from a Palestinian detainee of his experience in a secret CIA prison before his release last year.

On Sept. 6, 2006, President Bush said that all CIA prisoners have either been released or sent to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, but HRW claims that many other prisoners were simply "disappeared" by the CIA.

"The question is: what happened to these people and where are they now?" said Joanne Mariner, terrorism and counterterrorism director at HRW, in a statement.

Marwan Jabor, the former CIA detainee, says that a number of these "disappeared" individuals are still in CIA prisons and that he personally saw one of these men, Algerian terrorism suspect Yassir al-Jazeeri, in July 2006 in CIA custody.

The location of the missing detainees is unknown but one possibility is that they have been moved from CIA "black sites," U.S. prisons rumored to be present in Thailand, Afghanistan, Jordan, Pakistan, Morocco, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Armenia, Georgia, Latvia, and Bulgaria, to foreign prisons where they remain under CIA control, and may face torture at the hands of U.S. or local interrogators.

In May 2004, Marwan Jabor was arrested by Pakistani authorities and held for more than a month at a "black site" in Islamabad staffed by both U.S. and Pakistani personnel, during which time he was badly tortured.

In June, he was taken to a secret prison, believed to have been in Afghanistan, where the personnel were nearly all U.S. nationals.

Upon arrival at the secret prison, he says he was left completely naked for a month and a half, during which time he was questioned by female interrogators and filmed.

He was chained to the wall of his cell so he could not stand up, placed in stress positions so that he had difficulty breathing and told that if he did not cooperate he would be put in a suffocating "dog box."

Jabor says he worried incessantly about his wife and three young daughters but was not allowed to send a letter to reassure them he was alive during his more than two years spent in a windowless cell.

"It was a grave," Jabor told HRW, "I felt like my life was over."

The report not only calls attention to the trauma experienced by the detainees but also addresses the hardships and confusion faced by the families of detainees whose husbands, fathers and sons have been "disappeared."

HRW offers recommendations for how the U.S. and foreign governments should confront the human rights failures posed by the CIA rendition of terrorism suspects.

It urges the U.S. to repudiate the use of secret detention and coercive interrogation as counterterrorism tactics and permanently discontinue the CIA's detention and interrogation program, and to disclose the identities, fate and whereabouts of all detainees previously held at the facilities operated or controlled by the CIA since 2001.

Other governments should refuse to assist or cooperate in any way with CIA detention, interrogation and rendition operations, and disclose any information that they have about such operations, HRW says.

The release of the report was accompanied by a letter to President Bush, expressing the group's concern over the use of secret prisons to hold people suspected of involvement in terrorism.

"By holding such people in unacknowledged, incommunicado detention, the United States violated fundamental human rights norms, in particular, the prohibition on enforced disappearance," the letter states.

Although 14 CIA detained terrorism suspects were transferred to Guantanmo Bay, after Bush acknowledged the transfer and said there were no more secret CIA prisoners, Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte, publicly acknowledged there were three dozen people in detention in April 2006, three months before Bush's announcement.

HRW does not believe satisfactory information has been released about every person detained since 2001 in CIA prisons, states the letter.

The message to Bush concludes with a list of 16 people believed to have once been held at CIA prisons and whose current whereabouts are unknown and a separate list of 22 people who were possibly once held in CIA prisons and whose current whereabouts are unknown.

Earlier this month, the European Parliament released a report accusing Britain, Germany, Italy and other European nations of tolerating CIA flights transporting terrorism suspects to secret prisons, a practice known as "extraordinary rendition," in an apparent breach of EU human rights standards.