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Prisoner Accounts Suggest Detention At Secret Facilities
Rights Group Draws Link to the CIA
By Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writer
11/07/05 "
Washington Post" -- -- Three Yemeni nationals who were
arrested in late 2003 say they were transferred to U.S. custody and
kept isolated in at least four secret detention facilities that
Amnesty International officials believe could be part of a covert
CIA prison system.
The three detainees have not said they were physically abused while
in U.S. custody, but they describe being whisked away in airplanes
to unknown locations where they were interrogated by Americans in
civilian clothes, according to an Amnesty International report. At
one prison, the detainees were guarded by people in all-black
"ninja" suits, who communicated using hand gestures.
During their separate incarcerations, the detainees were never
visited by the International Committee of the Red Cross, never had
access to lawyers, were unable to correspond with their families and
had no contact with the outside world, the report said. Their
families believed they were dead or were told that they had gone to
Iraq to fight the United States.
The accounts, taken in independent interviews by Amnesty
International researchers over the past few months, appear to be
consistent with reports of a network of secret CIA detention
facilities, according to the report. The detainees could not
determine where they were because they were hooded during the
flights, but because of the travel time they assumed they were in
Europe or the Middle East, according to Amnesty International.
"We've tried working out where they might have been, but it's so
subjective," said Anne FitzGerald, senior adviser on research policy
for Amnesty International, who interviewed the detainees in two
Yemeni prisons. "It's clear they were in facilities that were
designed to hold many people, not just them. But they really didn't
know where they were."
The CIA declined to comment Friday.
In a telephone interview from London last week, FitzGerald said she
believes the detainees' stories are credible because they were each
detained separately and were unable to communicate with one another
before the United States turned them over to the Yemeni government
in May. One of the detainees has never met the other two and is now
kept in a separate facility, yet his story is consistent, she said.
Muhammad Assad was arrested in his home of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania,
on Dec. 26, 2003, for alleged passport problems. A Yemeni native,
Assad had lived in Tanzania for 20 years.
After his arrest and initial questioning, Assad was taken to a
waiting airplane, and his family was told that he was deported to
Yemen, according to Amnesty International. Yemeni authorities denied
that Assad had entered the country, and Tanzania later informed
Assad's father that he had been turned over to U.S. officials.
Assad believes he was arrested because of his connections to a
charity that was "blacklisted" after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist
attacks for allegedly funding terrorism. The al Haramain Islamic
Foundation, a Saudi Arabian charity, had rented space in a building
Assad owned. It is the only topic Assad was questioned about in his
15 months of incarceration.
He was first taken on a small airplane that flew for about two to
three hours, and was interrogated for two weeks by Arabic-speaking
people, according to the report. He was then flown elsewhere, a
flight that he believes lasted about 11 hours, with a one-hour
stop-over. When he arrived, his surroundings were much colder, and
he was interrogated by white men who spoke what he believed to be
American English.
"There was nothing haphazard or makeshift about the detention
regime, it was carefully designed to induce maximum disorientation,
dependence and stress in the detainees," according to the 20-page
report. "The men were subjected to extreme sensory deprivation; for
over a year they did not know what country they were in, whether it
was night or day, whether it was raining or sunny. They spoke to no
one but their interrogators, through translators, and no one spoke
to them."
Salah Ali and Muhammad Bashmilah, who were living in Indonesia, were
arrested in August and October 2003, respectively; Ali in Jakarta
and Bashmilah in Amman, Jordan. They were taken to a Jordanian
prison and tortured -- badly beaten and chained in uncomfortable
positions -- by Jordanian authorities before being transferred to
U.S. custody, according to Amnesty International. Both men had
traveled to Afghanistan in 2000 to learn about jihad, but neither
man fought against the United States, according to FitzGerald.
Ali said he was stripped and beaten with sticks by a ring of masked
soldiers. "They tried to force me to walk like an animal, on my
hands and feet, and I refused," Ali told Amnesty, "so they stretched
me out on the floor and walked on me and put their shoes in my
mouth."
Ali and Bashmilah recount similar stories after their transfer to
U.S. custody in a place Amnesty International believes could have
been Eastern Europe. They were put into a windowless, underground
facility, each was isolated in a tiny cell, and their jailers and
interrogators spoke English with American accents. In April 2004,
they were moved to a new facility with "no pictures or ornaments on
the walls, no floor coverings, no windows, no natural light,"
according to the report. It was here that the guards dressed in all
black.
FitzGerald said that the two Indonesian detainees were barely
interrogated after their first few weeks, perhaps an acknowledgment
that they did not know much. All three were released to Yemeni
authorities in May. Ali and Bashmilah are in the central prison in
Aden, and Assad is at a security prison at Al Ghaydah. Their
families now know they are alive, FitzGerald said.
"The cases of the three 'disappeared' Yemenis documented in this
report . . . suggest that the network of clandestine interrogation
centres is not reserved solely for high-value detainees, but may be
larger, more comprehensive and better organized than previously
suspected," the report says.
Such "incommunicado" detentions are against international standards
but are consistent with recent reports of how the CIA operated its
detention network.
Manfred Nowak, the U.N. rapporteur on torture, said in an interview
last week that secret facilities are a particularly important issue
because there is no outside oversight and no ability to know which
detainees are in custody or where they are held. He condemned the
practice.
"Incommunicado detention forms inhumane treatment in and of itself,"
Nowak said.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
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