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Gold9472
06-07-2007, 09:18 AM
US called to account for 'disappeared' detainees

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2097726,00.html

Ian Cobain
Thursday June 7, 2007
Guardian Unlimited

Dozens of people who have vanished after allegedly being detained by the United States during counter-terrorism operations were named in a report published by human rights groups.

Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and four other groups, are demanding that the US government accounts for the whereabouts 39 people whom they believe have been held at secret CIA prisons since the attacks of September 11 2001.

The detainees include a number of al-Qaida suspects, including a former British resident who has been charged with plotting the 1998 east African embassy bombings in which 225 people died.

The list also includes a number of children, including the two young sons of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. The two boys have not been seen by family members since they were detained in Pakistan almost five years ago during a raid in search of their father.

If accurate, the report flatly contradicts assurances given by President Bush that the CIA's secret detention programme has been closed down and all the agency's prisoners handed moved to Guantánamo Bay.

Joanne Mariner of Human Rights Watch said: "What we're asking is where are these 39 people now, and what has happened to them since they 'disappeared'?"

In a related move, a number of the human rights groups filed a lawsuit in a US federal court seeking information about the so-called ghost detainees under freedom of information laws.

Information about the detainees was gathered during interviews with former prisoners, and with officials in the US, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Yemen. Some of the information is sketchy, but Amnesty said that information about at least 21 of the detainees has been confirmed by two or more independent sources.

The list includes Hassan Ghul and Ali Abd al-Rahman al-Faqasi al-Ghamdi, who were both named as al-Qaida operatives in the official US report into the 9/11 attacks.

Another is Mustafa Setmarian Nasar, named as one of the FBI's "most wanted terrorists." US officials have confirmed that he was captured in Pakistan.

Another is Anas al-Libi, a Libyan who lived in the UK before moving to Afghanistan, allegedly to avoid prosecution over the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa. He is reported to have been captured in Khartoum.

The report also expresses concern over the fate of Yusuf al-Khalid and Abed al-Khalid, the sons of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. They were taken into custody, aged nine and seven, in September 2002, during an attempt to capture their father. A former detainee says that he saw them in March the following year, around the time their father was captured, in a secret prison where the guards tormented them with insects.

CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano dismissed the report, telling Reuters news agency that the agency acts in "strict accord with American law", and that its counter-terrorist initiatives are "subject to careful review and oversight". He added: "The United States does not conduct or condone torture."

President Bush acknowledged the existence of secret CIA prisons in September last year, but said that they had been emptied and all detainees transferred to the US prison at Guantánamo Bay.

One of the authors of the report published yesterday, entitled Off the Record, said she suspects that the secret detention programme is still operating. Anne Fitzgerald, a senior adviser for Amnesty International, said: "We wanted (the detainees') names in the public eye because of the impression that this is over, this is finished, and they're not doing this any more. That's clearly not the case."