Reed Brody IHT
Monday, October 11, 2004
Ghost detainees of the U.S.
NEW YORK The prisoner was taken away in the middle of the night 19 months ago. He was hooded and brought to an undisclosed location. He has not been heard of since. Interrogators reportedly used graduated levels of force on the prisoner, including the "water boarding" technique - known in Latin America as the "submarino" - in which the detainee is strapped down, forcibly pushed under water and made to believe he might drown. His 7- and 9- year-old sons were also picked up, presumably to induce him to talk. <snip>
In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration has violated the most basic legal norms in its treatment of security detainees. Many have been held in offshore prisons, the best known of which is at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
As we now know, prisoners suspected of terrorism - and many against whom no evidence exists - have been mistreated, humiliated and tortured. But perhaps no practice so fundamentally challenges the foundations of U.S. and international law as the long-term secret, incommunicado detention of Al Qaeda suspects in "undisclosed locations." <snip>
According to the recent Schlesinger panel on detainee operations, the CIA has been allowed "to operate under different rules." Those rules stem in part from an August 2002 Justice Department memo, in response to a CIA request for guidance, which said that torturing Al Qaeda detainees "may be justified," and that international laws against torture "may be unconstitutional if applied to interrogations" conducted in the war on terrorism. <snip>
Reed Brody, special counsel with Human Rights Watch, is the author of a new report, “Disappeared: the United States' Ghost Detainees.”
http://www.iht.com/articles/542979.html
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