Report: Many CIA 'ghost prisoners' still 'disappeared'

Michael Roston
Raw Story
Feb. 28, 2007

A report released yesterday by Human Rights Watch revealed that at least thirty-eight men detained in the Central Intelligence Agency's secret prisons are still unaccounted for. The report's lead author, Joanne Mariner, said in an interview with RAW STORY that it was time for Congress to boost its oversight in order to "monitor and police the abuses" that were suffered by these detainees.

Yesterday, Human Rights Watch released, Ghost Prisoner: Two Years in Secret CIA Detention. The report prominently features the experiences of Marwan Jabour, a Palestinian who was detained in Pakistan in May 2004 and released in Jordan in July 2006. In the interim, Jabour was "disappeared," and held in a secret prison run by the CIA, which he believes was in Afghanistan. Jabour alleges that he was tortured, beaten, and often deprived of sleep.

Human Rights Watch used Jabour's testimony to help shore up its investigation into the fate of "ghost" inmates in the CIA's secret prison system. In September of last year, the Bush administration transferred fourteen previously secret detainees to Guantanamo Bay. While acknowledging the existence of the secret prison system for the first time, the president said, "There are now no terrorists in the CIA program."

But Human Rights Watch warns that "it is certain that there were many more than 14." It presents partial information on 38 detainees that it believes were in the program. The group warns that the US "may have transferred some of them to foreign prisons where for practical purposes they remain under CIA control."

"Another worrying possibility is that prisoners were transferred from CIA custody to places where they face a serious risk of torture," the report adds.

Mariner, who heads the organization's terrorism and counterterrorism program, said no one could say right now if the 38 are the tip of the iceberg or most of the individuals detained.

"They've done everything in their power to keep this system secret, so all we can do is document what we can find out," she said.

But she explained that Jabour's example demonstrated how prisoners who disappeared for long periods of time can come back to light. The White House, she argued, had a key role to play in making this happen.

"The administration can make public who these people are, what happened to them and where they were transferred," she explained. "It's in their power to inform families of their whereabouts and put the detainees inside a system of legality."

Having no illusions of a sudden change in the administration's approach, Mariner called on the Democratic Congress, particularly the Intelligence Committees, to "shoulder the responsibility of monitoring and policing abuses, and put pressure on the White House to make this information public."

As one bright spot in coming Congressional oversight, she pointed to Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and his promise to press the administration to hand over the directive that created the CIA's secret prisons system.

"It was pretty shameful that the previous Congress didn't even obtain that directive in closed hearings," she remarked. "But the balance of power has changed, and that gives them an opportunity to exercise their power."