Clive Stafford Smith, legal director of British human rights group Reprieve, told the UK Guardian June 2, 2008: "By its own admission, the US government is currently detaining at least 26,000 people without trial in secret prisons, and information suggests up to 80,000 have been "through the system' since 2001. The US government must show a commitment to rights and basic humanity by immediately revealing who these people are, where they are, and what has been done to them." Note: The UN Commission on Human Rights asserts prolonged incommunicado detention itself can "constitute a form of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or even torture."
A brief look at the prison operations of America's accomplices follows:
AFGHANISTAN: Human Rights First says since Nov., 2001, the U.S. has operated approximately 25 detention facilities in Afghanistan. Secret prisons at Bagram Air Force Base include the "Dark Prison" and "Salt Pit." It was in Salt Pit in Nov., 2002, that guards stripped an Afghan prisoner naked, chained him to the concrete floor and left him in below-zero temperatures all night. He was dead in the morning, Der Spiegel reported. Other prisons include Rissat and Rissat2, north of Kabul, and Prison Number 3. At Kandahar Air Force Base, U.S. army officers hung prisoners from the ceiling for days. At times, the prison held up to 40 detainees. Other Afghan sites include transient facilities near Asadabad, Gereshk, Jalalabad, Tycze, Gardez, and Khost. A federal Grand Jury in North Carolina indicted CIA contractor David Passaro for allegedly beating detainee Abdul Wali to death at Khost in June, 2003. Officials there also told the family of Sher Mohammed Khan he was killed by snakebite when his body showed marks of abuse. Another base, according to the Feb. 15, 2010, issue of The Nation, is Rish-Khor, an Afghan army facility atop a mountain overlooking Kabul. The magazine also reported there are nine Field Detention Sites the Red Cross is aware of that "are enveloped in a blanket of official secrecy." There may, however, "be other sites whose existence on the scores of U.S. and Afghan military bases that dot the country have not been disclosed," writes the magazine's Anand Gopal. At Bagram, Gopal wrote, former detainees allege they were "regularly beaten, subjected to blaring music twenty-four hours a day, prevented from sleeping, stripped naked and forced to assume what interrogators term "stress positions." It is routine to hold prisoners at Bagram for two or three years without access to lawyers, Red Cross, or their families. And the official U.S. detention center in Kandahar is known among former inmates as "Camp Slappy."
AZERBAIJAN: prisoners have been detained in behalf of the U.S. in Baku, the capital. The country is known for imprisoning journalists and other critics, some of whom have been tortured and murdered by authorities.
ALGERIA: The U.S. transferred prisoners there from Guantanamo. Amnesty International has warned against transfer of prisoners to Algeria based on the country's history of torture and warned "Algeria has become a prime ally of the United States (US) and other governments preoccupied with the so-called War on Terror." According to Wikipedia, Manfred Nowak, a special reporter on torture, has catalogued in a 15-page U.N. report that the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and other nations have violated international human rights conventions by deporting terrorist suspects to countries such as Algeria.
BOSNIA: the Eagle Base in Tuzla is a black site. The British Telegraph said Eagle is part of a U.S. military facility where alleged Al-Qaeda members were tortured.
DIEGO GARCIA(UK): a British possession in the Indian Ocean the U.S. has transformed into a powerful military base to dominate the Middle East and Asia. Reportedly, the CIA has a facility there that was used in 2005-06 to hold Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, a Syrian-Spanish national. According to Reprieve, "the UK has a significant military and administrative presence on Diego Garcia, which has its own independent administration run by the East Africa Desk of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London." Reprieve further stated, "In October, 2003, Time Magazine cited interrogation records from the US prisoner Hambali that had reportedly been taken on the island, while respected international investigators at the Council of Europe and the United Nations expressed similar suspicions. US officials went on to make seemingly careless public statements confirming the use of Diego Garcia for secret detentions."
DJIBOUTI: said to have three CIA-run prisons, according to the UK Guardian. The former French foreign legion base Camp Lemonnier is a U.S. facility at Djibouti-Ambouli International Airport.
EGYPT: said to operate six prisons in behalf of the CIA, where numerous victims have been rendered, one of them being the General Intelligence Directorate in Cairo. U.S. officials are alleged to have participated in interrogation/torture sessions there where prisoners are hung from hooks and electrical shocks administered. On June 13, 2004, the UK Observer reported, "Egypt has also received a steady flow of militants from American installations." The paper also identified Mulhaq al-Mazra prison as a facility used in behalf of the U.S.
ETHIOPIA: has held detainees on behalf of CIA. U.S. agents interrogated one man there for three months. An investigation by the Associated Press published April 3, 2007, found, "CIA and FBI agents hunting for al-Qaida militants in the Horn of Africa have been interrogating terrorism suspects from 19 countries held at secret prisons in Ethiopia, which is notorious for torture and abuse." Three prisons are used for such purposes, the report said.
GAMBIA: in Banjul, the capital, safe houses in a residential area were used to jail Bisher Al-Rawi. He was also jailed in Guantanamo where he was said to be subjected to cold temperatures and had his prayer rug taken away when he tried to use it as a blanket.
GUANTANAMO: In addition to Camp Delta, a military prison, this base is the site of "Camp No" about a mile to the north, that is either CIA or under Joint Special Operations Command. It was to this camp, according to Harper's, where three prisoners were taken and never again seen alive. In 2006, the UN called for closing Guantanamo. According to The Miami Herald's Carol Rosenberg, (Jan. 29, 2010) Guantanamo has held about 770 prisoners since it opened eight years ago and nearly 580 have been released over the years. What's more, a review by DOD and five other agencies agreed unanimously that "roughly 110" more are eligible for release, meaning there was not enough evidence on 690 of the 770 prisoners to prosecute them---further proof, if any is needed, of the fraudulent nature of the War on Terror. Amnesty International called for Guantanamo detainees to be either released from their "super max" high security cells or allowed to stand trial. Irene Khan, Amnesty International's general secretary, termed Guantanamo "the gulag of our time."
IRAQ: The U.S. and its allies have operated at least 20 prisons. In 2006, Human Rights First documented 98 deaths in U.S. custody there, including five in CIA custody. Every detainee in Iraq "is detained because he poses a security threat to the government of Iraq, the people of Iraq, or coalition forces," said a spokesman for U.S.-led detainee operations in Iraq, Army Lt. Col. Keir-Kevin Curry. This statement is hard to credit as virtually all of the tens of thousands of persons arrested have never been charged with an offense and the vast majority of them have been let go. Scott Horton wrote in Harper's that the U.S. "is holding 19,000 Iraqis at its two main detention centers, at Camp Cropper and Camp Bucca." Horton noted Iraqi law requires any detention to be justified before a magistrate in a matter of only a few days but the U.S. has "complete contempt for the requirements of Iraqi law." It should be noted that Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki's government complained U.S. detention violates Iraq's national rights. In March, 2006, UN Secy.-Gen. Kofi Annan said the extent of arbitrary detention in Iraq is "not consistent with provisions of international law governing internment on imperative reasons of security." Since, as of this January, the U.S. is said to hold only 5,000 detainees in Iraq, apparently tens of thousands of persons have been released without ever being charged. Between June, 2004, and Sept., 2006, alone, the U.S. released some 18,700 Iraqi detainees, according to a reliable source.
This points to a massive conspiracy to deprive innocent people of their rights by the U.S. on a scale not seen since the U.S. interned its own Japanese-American population during World War II. "It was hard to believe I'd get out," Baghdad shopkeeper Amjad Qassim al-Aliyawi, told the Associated Press after his release, without charge. "I lived with the Americans for one year and eight months as if I was living in hell." It was in the U.S. Forward Operating Rifles Base in Al Asad where Abdul Jaleel was murdered in Jan., 2004, after being beaten and tied by his hands to the top of a door frame. At the U.S. detention facility in Al Qaim, Baghdad, former Iraqi Major-General Abed Hamad Mowhoush, was tortured and smothered to death in Nov., 2003. At Camp Bucca, in the southern desert, said to hold 9,500, detainees were forcibly showered with cold water and exposed to cold air. At Site 4, a prison run by Iraq's Ministry of Interior and which in May, 2006, held some 1,431 detainees, there was evidence of systematic physical and psychological abuse and in a prison in the Green Zone run by Baghdad Brigade detainees suffered severe ill treatment.
At the notorious Abu Ghraib, Ms. Umm Taha, an Iraqi woman detainee, told of tortures she witnessed. Soldiers made prisoners stand one leg "then they kicked them to make them fall to the ground." She said she watched GI Lynndie England use a rubber glove to snap the detainees on their genitals. "The soldiers also made all the men lay on the ground, face down, spread their legs, then men and women soldiers alike kicked the detainees between their legs. I can still remember their screaming." Ms. Taha was interviewed by Nagem Salam, an American journalist, according to Islam Online of June 14, 2004. At its peak occupancy in 2004, Abu Ghraib, also known also known as the Baghdad Central Correctional Facility, was said to hold 7,000 prisoners. At Al-Jadiriya prison, in Baghdad many prisoners were detained off the books, and at least 168 unlawfully detained were abused there. Among the main detention facilities in Iraq are Camp Redemption and Camp Ganci, both located at Abu Ghraib, as well as Camp Cropper, near the Baghdad Airport. Other major facilities include Camp Bucca in Umm Qasr and Talil Air Force Base south of Baghdad, also known as Whitford Camp. Additional Iraqi bases where prisoners were held included Al-Rusafa, Al-Kadhimiyya, and Al-Karkh, in Baghdad and Camp Falcon, near Baghdad; the Al-Diwaniyya Security Detainee Holding Area; Ashraf Camp MEK near Al-Ramadi; FOB Tiger in Anbar province; an FOB near Al-Asad, outside Mosul; a temporary holding camp near Nasiriyah; an FOB in Tikrit, in northern Iraq; Al-Qasr al-Jumhouri and Al-Qasr al-Sujood. Another facility, Camp Sheba, is under British command.
According to GlobalSecurity.org, Camp Whitehorse is a Marine-run detention site near Nasiriyah in Southern Iraq: "Prisoners were held at Whitehorse until they could be interrogated by a Marine "human exploitation team,' which would determine whether the detainees should be released or transferred elsewhere. Prisoners were forced to stand 50 minutes of every hour, in heat sometimes topping 120 degrees, for up to 10 hours at a time. Prisoners were forced to stand until interrogators from the Human Exploitation Team arrived. If the team failed to get the information it wanted, prisoners were forced to continue standing."
GlobalSecurity.org reported further, "In October 2003 the US military charged eight US Marine reservists, including two officers, with brutal treatment of Iraqi prisoners of war that may have resulted in the death of one Iraqi man. The eight fought in Iraq as part of the First Marine Division and were detailed to guard prisoners at Camp Whitehorse. Military prosecutors allege that an Iraqi man named Nagem Sadoon Hatab died at Camp Whitehorse in early June 2003 following a possible beating by US guards."
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