For those who may have been wondering where the US disappears their super-secret captives, Haaretz is claiming to know:
Most of the Al-Qaida detainees who were arrested in Afghanistan in the course of the war or its aftermath were transfered to the American base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. A minority were held in Pakistan, where some had been picked up, and were later moved to Jordan.
It is not known where precisely in the Hashemite kingdom they are being held, but they are thought to be at a secret facility belonging to Jordanian intelligence or at a secret base.
Their detention outside the U.S. enables CIA interrogators to apply interrogation methods that are banned by U.S. law, and to do so in a country where cooperation with the Americans is particularly close, thereby reducing the danger of leaks.
According to the Human Rights Watch report, the CIA was granted special permission by the U.S. law enforcement authorities to operate “other laws” at the secret facility with regard to interrogation methods.
Detainees are subjected to physical and psychological pressure that includes the use of simulated drowning, loud music, sleep deprivation, and sensory deprivation. Some of these methods were exposed with the revelation of torture techniques used by American interrogators at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
The CIA’s prisoners at the facility in Jordan include Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, considered Al-Qaida’s head of operations and number three in the Al-Qaida hierarchy after Osama bin Laden and Aiman al-Zawahiri, who have eluded capture.
On this topic, zeynep at Under the Same Sun makes this perceptive observation:
Human Rights Watch has tracked down 11 people that the U.S. won’t even acknowledge are in custody. The fact that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as well as Abu Zubaydah are amone the eleven will make many people think, oh, well — those are bunch of terrorists. Frankly, I’d find it hard to get excited about anyone who planned the mass murder of thousands of people. But this is not about them, but about what kind of society are.
In fact, people’s reluctance to respect the rights of the guilty –or those perceived to be guilty as those freed from death-row will testify– is why we have courts and laws. How do we know it’s only eleven people who’ve disappeared down this Gulag? How do we know they’re guilty? Why can’t they be brought to justice, be tried in court? What are they hiding?
History is crystal clear on this topic: once a society okays the disappearance of a few without accountability, the unaccountable inevitably widen their scope of operations. We’ve been warned.