NEW YORK, Feb 27: The US government should account for all the missing detainees once held by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Human Rights Watch said in a report released on Tuesday.
The 50-page report, "Ghost Prisoner: Two Years in Secret CIA Detention," issued by the New York-based watchdog group contains a detailed description of a secret CIA prison by a Palestinian former detainee who was released from custody last year.
Human Rights Watch has also sent a public letter to US President George Bush requesting information about the fate and whereabouts of the missing detainees.
"President Bush told us that the last 14 CIA prisoners were sent to Guantanamo, but there are many other prisoners 'disappeared' by the CIA whose fate is still unknown," said Joanne Mariner, terrorism and counterterrorism director at Human Rights Watch. "The question is: what happened to these people and where are they now?"
In early September, 14 detainees were transferred from secret CIA prisons to military custody at Guantanamo Bay. In a televised speech on September 6, President Bush announced that with those 14 transfers, no prisoners were left in CIA custody.
Former CIA detainee Marwan Jabour told Human Rights Watch about a number of other people who were in CIA detention but whose present whereabouts are unknown. Jabour saw one of these men, Algerian terrorism suspect Yassir al-Jazeeri, as recently as July 2006 in CIA custody.
"The Bush administration needs to provide a full accounting of everyone who was 'disappeared' into CIA prisons, including their names, locations, and when they left US custody," Mariner said.
PAKISTAN: Marwan Jabour was arrested by Pakistani authorities in May 2004 in Pakistan and held for more than a month at a secret facility in Islamabad operated by both US and Pakistani personnel, during which time he was badly abused. In June, he was flown to another secret prison, which he believes was in Afghanistan, where all or nearly all of the personnel were American.
His clothes were taken from him when he arrived, and he was left completely naked for a month and a half, including during questioning by women interrogators and filming. He was chained tightly to the wall of his small cell so that he could not stand up, placed in painful stress positions so that he had difficulty breathing, and told that if he did not cooperate he would be put in a suffocating "dog box".
During the more than two years that he was held in this secret prison, Jabour spent nearly all of his time alone in a windowless cell, with little human contact besides his captors. Although he worried incessantly about his wife and three young daughters, he was not allowed even to send them a letter to reassure them that he was alive.
"It was a grave," Jabour later told Human Rights Watch. "I felt like my life was over."
The wife of another former CIA detainee whose whereabouts remain unknown told Human Rights Watch that she has had to lie to her four children about her husband's "disappearance." She explained that she could not bear telling them that she did not know where he was.
Human Rights Watch expressed grave concern about President Bush's stated view that the Military Commissions Act of 2006 permits the government to restart the CIA's secret prison programme. It called upon the Bush administration to reject the use of secret detention and coercive interrogation as tactics in fighting terrorism, and announce that the CIA's detention and interrogation program has been permanently discontinued.