CIA's 'Ghost Prisoners' Spark Rights Concerns

CIA's 'Ghost Prisoners' Spark Rights Concerns
ABC News

Friday 28 January 2005
http://www.truthout.org/docs_05/012905A.shtml

The official wall of silence surrounding the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) so-called 'ghost prisoners' who are being held at secret locations has sparked legal concerns among human rights groups that denounce the practice as abusive.

It is not publicly known exactly how many 'ghost detainees' the CIA is holding, who they are or where they are held, but senior Al Qaeda figures are known to be among their ranks, including Ramzi bin al-Shaibh and Khalid Sheik Mohammed.

Shaibh is one of the presumed coordinators behind the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, while Mohammed was Al Qaeda's third highest ranking member prior to his arrest.

"Ghost prisoners have had their identities and locations withheld from relatives, the International Red Cross and even (the U.S.) Congress," according to U.S. human rights lawyers at the Centre for Constitutional Rights (CCR).

Although the U.S. spy agency does not disclose where it is holding its 'ghost detainees', several locations have been leaked to the U.S. media: Bagram air base in Afghanistan, the remote island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, and in a restricted zone at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The 'ghost prisoners' at Guantánamo are not kept in the same area as the hundreds of war on terror detainees held there by Washington whose detentions are a matter of public record.

"The Bush administration has not wanted to prosecute them (the ghost detainees) because it wanted to interrogate them, and frankly to be able to torture them, or 'coercively interrogate them,' as they say," Kenneth Roth, a director of New York-based Human Rights Watch, said.

"Unless we can get access to information about who these people are and where they are being held, they will remain completely vulnerable to abuse and even torture," said Rachel Meeropol, a CCR lawyer.

The CCR delivered an official request to the U.S. Government in December, based upon a U.S. freedom of information law, seeking the identities of the CIA prisoners, which also sought where they were being held and under what conditions.

"We have not received any document yet," Ms Meeropol said of the request.

However, she said the Justice Department had sent CCR a response indicating that its request would be evaluated on an expedited basis.

Despite this, the rights' lawyer is not holding her breath.

"I think this is a case that we will likely have to litigate ... to really get access to these documents."

According to Ms Meeropol, the cases of 'ghost prisoners' are particularly hard to crack.

"It is really hard. If you don't know who the people are that are being held, and you don't know how to get in touch with their family members, how to get authorisation to represent them, that insulates the government actions from the (legal) review.

"That is part of the problem with the secrecy" cloaking the CIA detentions, she said.

However, she said the CCR's information request was a first step, and that it may well be followed up by a lawsuit.

Despite the information black hole, Ms Meeropol is optimistic.

"When we first started litigating on behalf of Guantánamo detainees, that also seemed almost un-winnable," she said.

But the U.S. Supreme Court last year gave Guantánamo war on terror detainees the green light to challenge their detentions in the U.S. courts, overturning a ruling by the administration of President George W Bush.

The rights' advocate also believes, however, that information requests by groups like the CCR may only create greater secrecy around the CIA's holding of off-the-books prisoners.

"I fear that their solution is to move towards greater secrecy," she said.

Jonathan Turley, a rights professor at George Washington University, says it's doubtful such requests will shine much light on the CIA's prisoners.

He believes more political pressure will likely be brought to bear by the home governments of those being detained.

But he remarked - that so far - "these other countries have remained quiet as the United States has effectively denied their citizens any legal protection".

"There has not even been a demand for a listing of individuals held, a demand that the United States would likely deny but that denial would create a basis for possible action in international court," Mr. Turley added.

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AP: Gitmo Soldier Details Sexual Tactics
By Paisley Dodds
The Associated Press

Thursday 27 January 2005

San Juan, Puerto Rico - Female interrogators tried to break Muslim detainees at the U.S. prison camp in Guantánamo Bay by sexual touching, wearing a miniskirt and thong underwear and in one case smearing a Saudi man's face with fake menstrual blood, according to an insider's written account.

A draft manuscript obtained by The Associated Press is classified as secret pending a Pentagon review for a planned book that details ways the U.S. military used women as part of tougher physical and psychological interrogation tactics to get terror suspects to talk.

It's the most revealing account so far of interrogations at the secretive detention camp, where officials say they have halted some controversial techniques.

"I have really struggled with this because the detainees, their families and much of the world will think this is a religious war based on some of the techniques used, even though it is not the case," the author, former Army Sgt. Erik R. Saar, 29, told AP.

Saar didn't provide the manuscript or approach AP, but confirmed the authenticity of nine draft pages AP obtained. He requested his hometown remain private so he wouldn't be harassed. Saar, who is neither Muslim nor of Arab descent, worked as an Arabic translator at the U.S. camp in eastern Cuba from December 2002 to June 2003. At the time, it was under the command of Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who had a mandate to get better intelligence from prisoners, including alleged al-Qaida members caught in Afghanistan.

Saar said he witnessed about 20 interrogations and about three months after his arrival at the remote U.S. base he started noticing "disturbing" practices.

One female civilian contractor used a special outfit that included a miniskirt, thong underwear and a bra during late-night interrogations with prisoners, mostly Muslim men who consider it taboo to have close contact with women who aren't their wives.

Beginning in April 2003, "there hung a short skirt and thong underwear on the hook on the back of the door" of one interrogation team's office, he writes. "Later I learned that this outfit was used for interrogations by one of the female civilian contractors ... on a team which conducted interrogations in the middle of the night on Saudi men who were refusing to talk."

Some Guantánamo prisoners who have been released say they were tormented by "prostitutes."

In another case, Saar describes a female military interrogator questioning an uncooperative 21-year-old Saudi detainee who allegedly had taken flying lessons in Arizona before the Sept. 11 terror attacks. Suspected Sept. 11 hijacker Hani Hanjour received pilot instruction for three months in 1996 and in December 1997 at a flight school in Scottsdale, Ariz.

"His female interrogator decided that she needed to turn up the heat," Saar writes, saying she repeatedly asked the detainee who had sent him to Arizona, telling him he could "cooperate" or "have no hope whatsoever of ever leaving this place or talking to a lawyer.'"

The man closed his eyes and began to pray, Saar writes.

The female interrogator wanted to "break him," Saar adds, describing how she removed her uniform top to expose a tight-fitting T-shirt and began taunting the detainee, touching her breasts, rubbing them against the prisoner's back and commenting on his apparent erection.

The detainee looked up and spat in her face, the manuscript recounts.

The interrogator left the room to ask a Muslim linguist how she could break the prisoner's reliance on God. The linguist told her to tell the detainee that she was menstruating, touch him, then make sure to turn off the water in his cell so he couldn't wash.

Strict interpretation of Islamic law forbids physical contact with women other than a man's wife or family, and with any menstruating women, who are considered unclean.

"The concept was to make the detainee feel that after talking to her he was unclean and was unable to go before his God in prayer and gain strength," says the draft, stamped "Secret."

The interrogator used ink from a red pen to fool the detainee, Saar writes.

"She then started to place her hands in her pants as she walked behind the detainee," he says. "As she circled around him he could see that she was taking her hand out of her pants. When it became visible the detainee saw what appeared to be red blood on her hand. She said, 'Who sent you to Arizona?' He then glared at her with a piercing look of hatred.

"She then wiped the red ink on his face. He shouted at the top of his lungs, spat at her and lunged forward" - so fiercely that he broke loose from one ankle shackle.

"He began to cry like a baby," the draft says, noting the interrogator left saying, "Have a fun night in your cell without any water to clean yourself."

Events Saar describes resemble two previous reports of abusive female interrogation tactics, although it wasn't possible to independently verify his account.

In November, in response to an AP request, the military described an April 2003 incident in which a female interrogator took off her uniform top, exposed her brown T-shirt, ran her fingers through a detainee's hair and sat on his lap. That session was immediately ended by a supervisor and that interrogator received a written reprimand and additional training, the military said.

In another incident, the military reported that in early 2003 a different female interrogator "wiped dye from red magic marker on detainees' shirt after detainee spit (cq) on her," telling the detainee it was blood. She was verbally reprimanded, the military said.

Sexual tactics used by female interrogators have been criticized by the FBI, which complained in a letter obtained by AP last month that U.S. defense officials hadn't acted on complaints by FBI observers of "highly aggressive" interrogation techniques, including one in which a female interrogator grabbed a detainee's genitals.

About 20 percent of the guards at Guantánamo are women, said Lt. Col. James Marshall, a spokesman for U.S. Southern Command. He wouldn't say how many of the interrogators were female.

Marshall wouldn't address whether the U.S. military had a specific strategy to use women.

"U.S. forces treat all detainees and conduct all interrogations, wherever they may occur, humanely and consistent with U.S. legal obligations, and in particular with legal obligations prohibiting torture," Marshall said late Wednesday.

But some officials at the U.S. Southern Command have questioned the formation of an all-female team as one of Guantánamo's "Immediate Reaction Force" units that subdue troublesome male prisoners in their cells, according to a document classified as secret and obtained by AP.

In one incident, dated June 19, 2004, "The detainee appears to be genuinely traumatized by a female escort securing the detainee's leg irons," according to the document, a U.S. Southern Command summary of videotapes shot when the teams were used.

The summary warned that anyone outside Department of Defense channels should be prepared to address allegations that women were used intentionally with Muslim men.

At Guantánamo, Saar said, "Interrogators were given a lot of latitude under Miller," the commander who went from the prison in Cuba to overseeing prisons in Iraq, where the Abu Ghraib scandal shocked the world with pictures revealing sexual humiliation of naked prisoners.

Several female troops have been charged in the Abu Ghraib scandal.

Saar said he volunteered to go to Guantánamo because "I really believed in the mission," but then he became disillusioned during his six months at the prison.

After leaving the Army with more than four years service, Saar worked as a contractor briefly for the FBI.

The Department of Defense has censored parts of his draft, mainly blacking out people's names, said Saar, who hired Washington attorney Mark S. Zaid to represent him. Saar needed permission to publish because he signed a disclosure statement before going to Guantánamo.

The book, which Saar titled "Inside the Wire," is due out this year with Penguin Press.

Guantánamo has about 545 prisoners from some 40 countries, many held more than three years without charge or access to lawyers and many suspected of links to al-Qaida or Afghanistan's ousted Taliban regime, which harbored the terrorist network.

Paisley Dodds is an Associated Press reporter based in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and has been covering the U.S. prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, since it opened in 2002.

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U.S. Captors' 'Systematic Torture'
By Vikram Dodd
The Guardian U.K.

Thursday 27 January 2005

While anti-terrorism police were yesterday interviewing the four Britons released from Guantánamo Bay further details emerged of the alleged treatment of the men by their U.S. captors.

The U.S. lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, who saw his client, Moazzam Begg, in Guantánamo Bay this month, said the captive had alleged persistent beatings, death threats and psychological torture first at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, then at the Cuba base.

The Pentagon is investigating the abuse and torture allegations after concerns about treatment of prisoners were raised by the FBI.

Mr. Begg, 37, used to run an Islamic bookshop in Birmingham before he went to Afghanistan in 2001 to do charity work, his family said. Mr. Stafford Smith said Mr. Begg was told by his U.S. captors that his wife, Sally, was in Bagram. and that they were torturing her. He could hear a woman screaming, it is alleged.

In 2002, Mr. Begg was allegedly subjected to a month of daily beatings and threatened with death. He is also alleged to have been told by U.S. interrogators that he would be sent to Egypt where the "real" torture would begin. "He was humiliated in every way possible," said Mr. Stafford Smith.

In Guantánamo Bay Mr. Begg was kept in solitary confinement for 19 months.

Gareth Peirce, the British lawyer for Mr. Begg, who sat in on his interviews with anti-terrorism officers, said her client had changed for the worse since she last saw him four years ago. "I see starkly the physical difference in him _ his face is the face of someone who has been through a severe ordeal. He looks like he has been to hell and back."

Mr. Begg was asked by police whom he knew in the UK, what mosques he had attended and where he had been abroad.

Another of the released men, Feroz Abbasi, 24, was questioned about how he came to be in Afghanistan where it is alleged he was captured by Northern Alliance forces in December 2001 while fighting for al-Qaida.

Mr. Abbasi's lawyer, Louise Christian, said that her client had been interviewed by British anti-terrorism police twice. She added: "During the interview he looked distressed and he's finding it difficult."

She added that Mr. Abbasi was struggling to adjust now. "He told me that when they asked him if he wanted a hot drink he said no, he just wanted a glass of water," she said. "He was used to the situation where in Guantánamo when [if] he asked for something he would be abused."

The U.S.-based Center for Constitutional Rights welcomed the news of the men's release last night but said there were