- On January 28 in TomDispatch.com, Anand Gopal headlined,
"Night Raids, Hidden Detention Centers, the 'Black Jail,' and the
Dogs of War in Afghanistan," recounting unreported US media stories
about killings, abductions, detentions, interrogations, and torture in
"a series of prisons on US military bases around the country."
Bagram prison, for example, is "a facility with a notorious reputation
for abusive behavior," including brutalizing torture and cold-blooded
murder.
-
- Even worse is the "Black Jail," a facility
consisting of individual windowless concrete cells with bright 24-hour
lighting, described by one former detainee as "the most dangerous
and fearful place" in which prisoners endure appalling treatment.
-
- The pattern is predictable. US/NATO convoys are attacked
or reports of Taliban forces are received. Americans respond accordingly,
rounding up suspects, mostly innocent civilians, and detaining them for
interrogations, torture, abuse and degrading treatment - not just in Afghanistan
but in secret black sites globally, according to a January 26 UN Human
Rights Council (HRC) report detailing practices engaged in by various countries
including America, by far the world's worst offender in its war on terror
- one waged against humanity for unchallengeable power and total global
dominance.
-
- Besides Guantanamo, Afghanistan and Iraq, HRC said the
CIA runs scores of offshore secret prisons in over 66 countries worldwide
for dissidents and alleged terrorists - in Egypt, Algeria, Jordan, Morocco,
Syria, Libya, Tunisia, India, Pakistan, Russia, Uzbekistan, Sudan, Zimbabwe,
Ethopia, Djibouti, Kenya, Poland, Romania, Bosnia, Kosovo, Thailand, Diego
Garcia, and elsewhere.
-
- Post-9/11, "the United States embarked on a process
of reducing and removing various human rights and other protection mechanisms"
through numerous laws and administrative acts including:
-
- -- the September 18, 2001 joint House-Senate Authorization
for Use of Military Force (AUMF) for "the use of United States Armed
Forces against those responsible for the recent attacks launched against
the United States";
-
- -- the October 2001 USA Patriot Act (just renewed) that
shredded civil liberty protections, including due process, freedom of association,
and the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures;
-
- -- the October 2002 House-Senate "Joint Resolution
to Authorize the Use of the United States Armed Forces Against Iraq,"
even though the country (and Afghanistan) posed no threat to America, had
no ability or intention to strike, or did so on 9/11 or any other time;
-
- -- the November 2001 Military Order Number 1 authorizing
the president to capture, kidnap or otherwise arrest non-citizens (and
later citizens) anywhere in the world for any reason and hold them indefinitely
without charge, evidence, or due process and judicial fairness protections
in a civil court;
-
- -- numerous presidential Executive Orders, memorandums,
findings, National and Homeland Security Presidential Directives, and other
documents authorizing the abduction, detention, torture, and killing of
alleged terrorists;
-
- -- National Presidential Directive 51 granting the president
dictatorial power to declare a national emergency, followed by martial
law without congressional approval;
-
- -- the February 2002, a presidential memorandum declaring
Geneva's Common Article 3 (prohibiting torture and other lawless acts)
and Third Geneva, pertaining to prisoners of war, null and void for "al-Qaeda
or Taliban detainees;"
-
- -- the November 2002 Homeland Security Act creating a
national Gestapo;
-
- -- the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act denying detainees
habeas rights and authorizing the use cruel, abusive, inhumane or degrading
treatment in the interests of national security;
-
- -- the 2006 Military Commissions Act, known as "the
torture authorization act," granted the executive sweeping unconstitutional
powers to detain, interrogate and prosecute alleged terror suspects and
collaborators (including US citizens), imprison them indefinitely in military
prisons without proof of guilt, and deny them habeas and judicial fairness
protections; and
-
- -- various other actions subverting the letter and spirit
of international and US laws to pursue a global war on terror, including
worldwide detention centers, claiming human rights laws there don't apply.
-
- "One of the consequences of this policy was that
many detainees were kept secretly and without access to the protection
accorded to those in custody" under international and US laws.
-
- Secret Detention Under International Law
-
- For purposes of HRC's report, they occur when governments
authorize, consent, support or acquiesce to depriving persons of their
liberty; where they're denied contact with the outside world, including
legal counsel; or when states neither confirm or deny knowledge or involvement
in detaining alleged terrorists or suspected collaborators.
-
- The practice is abhorrent and irreconcilable with international
human rights and humanitarian law. Under no circumstances is it justified,
yet America is a serial offender.
-
- As arbitrary arrests, they deny personal liberty and
security. Among other international law provisions, they violate Article
1 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) stating:
-
- "Everyone has the right to liberty and security
of person. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest or detention,"
and other provisions affirming fundamental international law rights.
-
- The UN's High Commissioner for Human Rights Working Group
on Arbitrary Detention calls secret ones arbitrary and illegal by denying
detainees information on charges against them, a prompt hearing before
a judge, and right to a fair trial according to established international
law principles.
-
- Secret detentions take many forms, including black sites
for "High Value Detainees (HVD)," where they're physically and
psychologically tortured for extended periods to extract confessions that
are inadmissible in courts, according to international law.
-
- The UN's study showed detainees held incommunicado often
aren't charged with a crime, informed of charges, provided counsel, allowed
time to prepare a proper defense, or tried by impartial tribunals to establish
their guilt or innocence.
-
- Under the International Convention for the Protection
of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, the practice places individuals
outside legal protections, and is conducive to coercing confessions under
torture and other abusive treatment.
-
- The Rome Statute's Article 7 calls "enforced disappearance
of person" a crime against humanity if it's committed as part of a
widespread or systematic attack directed against a civilian population."
In all respects, it's abhorrent, illegal, and unjustifiable.
-
- Geneva, applying to all conflicts, allows war prisoner
and civilian detentions - the former to be released when hostilities end;
the latter held under very strict conditions, namely:
-
- -- if it's "necessary for imperative reasons of
security," and
-
- -- for penal prosecutions for individuals charged with
a crime.
-
- America's "unlawful enemy combatant" designation
has no legitimacy in international law under any conditions or circumstances.
-
- Geneva mandates detainees be registered and held in officially
recognized facilities. Incommunicado detentions are strictly prohibited.
-
- America's Secret Gulag
-
- HRC called a country complicit in secret detentions under
these conditions:
-
- -- when one nation asks another to do it;
- -- when a country won't identify persons on airplanes
passing through their airports or airspace after information about CIA
detentions are known; and
-
- -- when a nation "knowingly (takes) advantage of
the situation by sending questions to the State which detains the person
or by soliciting or receiving information from persons" held secretly;
this applies to at least the following states:
-
- -- Britain;
-
- -- Germany;
-
- -- Canada;
-
- -- Australia;
-
- -- Italy;
-
- -- Kenya; and
-
- -- Macedonia.
-
- In June 2007, in a report for the Council of Europe,
Swiss politician and former state prosecutor, Dick Marty, said he had:
-
- "enough evidence to state that secret detention
facilities run by the CIA did exist in Europe from 2003 to 2005, in particular
in Poland and Romania. (He noted that) the majority of detainees brought
to Romania were extracted 'out of theater(s) of conflict.' This phrase
pertains to transfers from Afghanistan and Iraq.
-
- In August 2009, The New York Times also reported that
former US intelligence officials oversaw the construction of three small
CIA facilities, each for about a half dozen detainees, one being "a
renovated building on a busy street in Bucharest, Romania."
-
- In Poland from 2003 - 2005, eight High Value Detainees
(HVDs) were allegedly held in Stare Kiejkuty village, including Khalid
Sheik Mohammed, the alleged 9/11 mastermind based on his torture-extracted
confession, rendering it void and inadmissible according to law. Besides
the UN Convention Against Torture, the Supreme Court ruled Brown v. Mississippi
(February 1936):
-
- "The rack and torture chamber may not be substituted
for the witness stand," and an earlier Court (in Fisher v. State -
November 1926) called coerced confessions "the chief iniquity, the
crowning infamy (and) the curse of all countries."
-
- Yet Mohammed's will be used against him in a planned
kangaroo proceeding. So will those extracted from his four alleged co-conspirators,
denying them any measure of justice, even though, in all likelihood, they're
innocent.
-
- Marty reported information from civil aviation records
on CIA-operated planes landing at Szymany airport in northeastern Poland
and the Mihail Kogalniceanu military airfield in Romania from 2003 - 2005.
He also explained how they were disguised using fake flight plans.
-
- HRC's report revealed further evidence about front company
flights from Bangkok, Thailand to Szymany on December 5, 2002 ("disguised
under multiple layers of secrecy" to avoid US "fingerprints")
and others from December 3 - 6, 2002.
-
- Other data "demonstrate(d) that a Boeing 737 aircraft
flew to Romania in September 2003" from Dulles Airport, Washington
DC on September 20, 2003.
-
- Romania supplied information about secret CIA detention
centers and flights to and from the nation's territory, but wouldn't confirm
or deny if prisoners left planes on its soil.
-
- However, Lithuanian officials gave the CIA a building
for as many as eight alleged terrorists where they were held for over a
year until late 2005, after which they were moved because of public disclosure.
In November 2009, it was learned that the facility was built inside an
exclusive riding academy in Antaviliai, and that Lithuania cooperated with
CIA detentions in 2004. Two Afghanistan to Vilnius flights were identified
- on September 20, 2004 and on July 28, 2005.
-
- In November 2009, the Lithuanian government confirmed
that its State Security Department (SSD) received requests to "equip
facilities....suitable for hold detainees," but it wouldn't admit
they were used for that purpose.
-
- When late 2005 Washington Post and ABC News reports revealed
Eastern European detentions, prisoners were allegedly moved from Europe
to other undisclosed black sites, possibly in war zones or Africa.
-
- Guantanamo has at least one black site, "unnamed
and officially unacknowledged" out of sight about a mile north of
Camp Delta. "The unacknowledged 'Camp No' is described as having no
guard towers and being surrounded with concertina wire, with one part of
the compound having 'the same appearance as the interrogation centers at
other prison camps.' " It's not known if the CIA or Joint Special
Operations Command runs it.
-
- Other reports reveal American black sites at Camp Bondsteel
in Kosovo and Eagle Base in Tuzla, Bosnia. The Council of Europe's Human
Rights Commissioner, Alvaro Gil-Robles, told Le Monde he was "shocked"
by Camp Bondsteel's facility, "a smaller version of Guantanamo."
In December 2005, UN Kosovo Ombudsman, Marek Antoni Nowicki, said:
-
- "There can be no doubt that for years there has
been a prison in the Bondsteel base with no external civilian or judicial
oversight. (It) looks like the pictures we have seen of Guantanamo Bay."
A Tuzla detainee said he was also held at a secret Diego Garcia facility.
He's now at a Syria black site.
-
- Afghanistan hold hundreds of detainees in numerous facilities,
including three well-known ones at Bagram airbase (called "The Hanger),
and two others near Kabul - the "Dark Prison" (with no lights,
heating or decoration) and the "Salt Pit." Another is in the
Panjshir valley, north of Kabul, and three others are called Rissat, Rissat
2, and "Prison Number Three."
-
- In all US and black site facilities, former detainees
(ones lucky to be released) describe nightmarish treatment, including:
-
- -- being hooded or blindfolded;
-
- -- painfully shackled for extended periods;
-
- -- exposed to extreme heat and cold;
-
- -- kept naked;
- -- waterboarded numerous times;
-
- -- held in isolation or tiny cells with other prisoners
where sleeping must occur in shifts;
-
- -- severe physical and psychological treatment creating
permanent trauma for many;
-
- -- beatings;
-
- -- continuous blaring noises or music;
-
- -- 24-hour bright light or total darkness;
- -- sleep deprivation for days;
-
- -- painful stress positions for extended periods;
- -- being sodomized;
-
- -- denied food, too little, or inedible kinds;
-
- -- painful force-feeding for hunger strikers;
- -- denied medical care;
-
- -- coerced to confess to offenses they never committed;
- -- hung from steel bars in their cells or from metal
hooks in interrogation rooms for extended periods;
- -- kept in tubs of ice water creating hypothermia;
- -- threatened with or attacked by dogs;
-
- -- given electro-shocks; and
- -- other cruel, abusive and degrading treatment.
-
- In Iraq, the same practices occurred, exposed at Abu
Ghraib, but at other facilities as well throughout the country, including
at Forward Operating Base Tiger in Al-Anbar Province, a base outside Mosul,
a temporary holding camp near Nasiriyah, a Tikrit Forward Operating Base,
and others.
-
- In 2005, it was learned that America secretly captured,
transferred and detained alleged terrorists at its own sites, sending many
to secret ones in other states.
-
- After the 2001 Afghan invasion, the CIA was involved
straightaway in US and foreign black site detentions and torture, yet in
its January 13, 2006 report to the Committee Against Torture, the Bush
administration claimed:
-
- "The United States does not transfer persons to
countries where (it's believed) it is 'more likely than not' that they
will be tortured. The United States obtains assurances, as appropriate,
from a foreign government to which a detainee is transferred that it will
not torture the individual being transferred."
-
- Clear evidence shows otherwise - that prisoners were
subjected to cruel, inhumane, abusive and degrading treatment at US and
foreign sites, contrary to Bush administration assurances and later from
the equally culpable Obama administration.
-
- After promising to respect human rights and close Guantanamo
and other detention facilities as expeditiously as possible, and refrain
from operating new ones, it's kept them open, endorsed preventive detentions
without charges, continues extraordinary renditions to black sites, and
embraces torture as official US policy like the Bush administration.
-
- America's torture prisons still flourish as secretly
and abusively as under George Bush despite promises of more humane practices,
quickly broken to pursue America's imperial agenda for unchallengeable
power and total global dominance.
-
- Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre
for Research on Globalization. He lives in Chicago and can be reached at
lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
-
- Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and
listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive
Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central
time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy
listening.
-
- http://prognewshour.progressiveradionetwork.org/
-
- http://lendmennews.progressiveradionetwork.org/
-
-
-
-
-
-
- box and h and DP
-
-
- America's Secret Prisons
-
-
- By Stephen Lendman
-
- 3-16-10
-
-
- On January 28 in TomDispatch.com, Anand Gopal headlined,
"Night Raids, Hidden Detention Centers, the 'Black Jail,' and the
Dogs of War in Afghanistan," recounting unreported US media stories
about killings, abductions, detentions, interrogations, and torture in
"a series of prisons on US military bases around the country."
Bagram prison, for example, is "a facility with a notorious reputation
for abusive behavior," including brutalizing torture and cold-blooded
murder.
-
- Even worse is the "Black Jail," a facility
consisting of individual windowless concrete cells with bright 24-hour
lighting, described by one former detainee as "the most dangerous
and fearful place" in which prisoners endure appalling treatment.
-
- The pattern is predictable. US/NATO convoys are attacked
or reports of Taliban forces are received. Americans respond accordingly,
rounding up suspects, mostly innocent civilians, and detaining them for
interrogations, torture, abuse and degrading treatment - not just in Afghanistan
but in secret black sites globally, according to a January 26 UN Human
Rights Council (HRC) report detailing practices engaged in by various countries
including America, by far the world's worst offender in its war on terror
- one waged against humanity for unchallengeable power and total global
dominance.
-
- Besides Guantanamo, Afghanistan and Iraq, HRC said the
CIA runs scores of offshore secret prisons in over 66 countries worldwide
for dissidents and alleged terrorists - in Egypt, Algeria, Jordan, Morocco,
Syria, Libya, Tunisia, India, Pakistan, Russia, Uzbekistan, Sudan, Zimbabwe,
Ethopia, Djibouti, Kenya, Poland, Romania, Bosnia, Kosovo, Thailand, Diego
Garcia, and elsewhere.
-
- Post-9/11, "the United States embarked on a process
of reducing and removing various human rights and other protection mechanisms"
through numerous laws and administrative acts including:
-
- -- the September 18, 2001 joint House-Senate Authorization
for Use of Military Force (AUMF) for "the use of United States Armed
Forces against those responsible for the recent attacks launched against
the United States";
-
- -- the October 2001 USA Patriot Act (just renewed) that
shredded civil liberty protections, including due process, freedom of association,
and the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures;
-
- -- the October 2002 House-Senate "Joint Resolution
to Authorize the Use of the United States Armed Forces Against Iraq,"
even though the country (and Afghanistan) posed no threat to America, had
no ability or intention to strike, or did so on 9/11 or any other time;
-
- -- the November 2001 Military Order Number 1 authorizing
the president to capture, kidnap or otherwise arrest non-citizens (and
later citizens) anywhere in the world for any reason and hold them indefinitely
without charge, evidence, or due process and judicial fairness protections
in a civil court;
-
- -- numerous presidential Executive Orders, memorandums,
findings, National and Homeland Security Presidential Directives, and other
documents authorizing the abduction, detention, torture, and killing of
alleged terrorists;
-
- -- National Presidential Directive 51 granting the president
dictatorial power to declare a national emergency, followed by martial
law without congressional approval;
-
- -- the February 2002, a presidential memorandum declaring
Geneva's Common Article 3 (prohibiting torture and other lawless acts)
and Third Geneva, pertaining to prisoners of war, null and void for "al-Qaeda
or Taliban detainees;"
-
- -- the November 2002 Homeland Security Act creating a
national Gestapo;
-
- -- the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act denying detainees
habeas rights and authorizing the use cruel, abusive, inhumane or degrading
treatment in the interests of national security;
-
- -- the 2006 Military Commissions Act, known as "the
torture authorization act," granted the executive sweeping unconstitutional
powers to detain, interrogate and prosecute alleged terror suspects and
collaborators (including US citizens), imprison them indefinitely in military
prisons without proof of guilt, and deny them habeas and judicial fairness
protections; and
-
- -- various other actions subverting the letter and spirit
of international and US laws to pursue a global war on terror, including
worldwide detention centers, claiming human rights laws there don't apply.
-
- "One of the consequences of this policy was that
many detainees were kept secretly and without access to the protection
accorded to those in custody" under international and US laws.
-
- Secret Detention Under International Law
-
- For purposes of HRC's report, they occur when governments
authorize, consent, support or acquiesce to depriving persons of their
liberty; where they're denied contact with the outside world, including
legal counsel; or when states neither confirm or deny knowledge or involvement
in detaining alleged terrorists or suspected collaborators.
-
- The practice is abhorrent and irreconcilable with international
human rights and humanitarian law. Under no circumstances is it justified,
yet America is a serial offender.
-
- As arbitrary arrests, they deny personal liberty and
security. Among other international law provisions, they violate Article
1 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) stating:
|
