THAILAND: One of the first CIA black sites known as "Cat's Eye" is located outside of Bangkok. Al-Qaeda operatives were flown there to be interrogated and tortured, including waterboarding. Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri were videotaped there. Some 92 videotapes were made and stored and subsequently destroyed by the CIA. In 2005 ABC News reported Zubaydah was held in an unused warehouse on an airbase where he was made to stand in a cold cell and waterboarded.
UZBEKISTAN: The New York Times reported in May, 2005, the U.S. had sent dozens of suspects to Tashkent.
YEMEN: U.S. handed over prisoners, including some from its Bagram prison, to Yemen, where they allegedly were tortured.
ZAMBIA: According to UK's Guardian Jan. 23, 2009, Zambia is one of countries with a CIA secret prison facility.
In addition to the prisons in the above-cited nations, the U.S. operates a number of illegal floating prisons.
U.S. PRISON SHIPS: On June 2, 2008 UK's Guardian reported, "The US has admitted that the Bataan and Peleliu were used as prison ships between December 2001 and January 2002". According to Reprieve, the U.S. may have used 17 ships as "floating prisons" since 2001. Detainees are interrogated on ships and may be rendered to other, undisclosed locations. Reprieve expressed concern over the time the U.S.S. Ashland spent off Somalia in early 2007. According to The Guardian, "At this time many people were abducted by Somali, Kenyan and Ethiopian forces in a systematic operation involving regular interrogations by individuals believed to be members of the FBI and CIA. Ultimately more than 100 individuals were "disappeared' to prisons in locations including Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Guantanamo Bay. Reprieve believes prisoners may have also been held for interrogation on the USS Ashland and other ships in the Gulf of Aden during this time."
The U.S. Navy, through a spokesman, said, "There are no detention facilities on US navy ships" but Commander Jeffrey Gordon told The Guardian some individuals had been put on ships "for a few days" during initial days of detention.
Reprieve quoted one prisoner released from Guantanamo who was on one of the U.S. ships who said there were 50 other prisoners in cages in the bottom of the ship and they were beaten even more severely than in Guantanamo. Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve's legal director, is quoted as saying, "They choose ships to try to keep their misconduct as far as possible from the prying eyes of the media and lawyers. We will eventually reunite these ghost prisoners with their legal rights."
From all of the above, it would be difficult to conclude anything other than that the U.S., with the help of a score of other nations, illegally seized and then processed countless innocent persons from the Middle East who were held incommunicado in scores of facilities where they were abused, tortured, denied all legal rights, and where approximately 100 of them that we know of died in Iraq alone, probably the victims of homicide.
Professor Boyle of the University of Illinois said he would submit the findings of this article to the Prosecutor of the ICC in support of his previous Complaint calling on the ICC to open "an international criminal investigation of these (President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, etc.) former U.S. governmental officials."
#
(Sherwood Ross is an award-winning journalist who formerly reported for the Chicago Daily News and worked as a columnist for several wire services. Reach him at sherwoodross10@gmail.com. Ross wishes to express his gratitude to the journalists whose works he quoted for their original research that exposed the conditions in prisons described above, and particularly to the Associated Press.)
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
1
