Three major human rights organizations have declared the Department
of Defense was running secret prisons at Bagram and in Iraq, actively
sought ways around the terms of the Geneva conventions and cooperated
with the CIA's "ghost detention" program which saw prisoners hidden
from Red Cross oversight.
The arrival of the documents comes on the same day the ACLU published
two unredacted pages of a government report which reveals detainees
in US custody were tortured to death
"These newly released documents confirm our suspicion that the tentacles
of the CIA’s abusive program reached across agency lines," said Margaret
Satterthwaite, Director of the NYU International Human Rights Clinic,
in
a Thursday advisory. "In fact, it is increasingly obvious that
defense officials engaged in legal gymnastics to find ways to cooperate
with the CIA’s activities. A full accounting of all agencies must
now take place to ensure that future abuses don’t continue under a
different guise."
The papers, part of a
volley of responses to Freedom of Information Act requests, were
released by Amnesty International USA, the Center for Constitutional
Rights and the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice.
(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)
The entire package, which
encompasses hundreds of pages, was boiled down to several key
points by the CCR in a
report by Mother Jones writer Steve Aquino.
"One heavily redacted page mentions
(PDF, page 34) an 'undisclosed detention facility' at Bagram Air Base
in Afghanistan," he noted.
"Another, dated May 2004, highlights
(PDF, page 17) how the Geneva Conventions can be interpreted to allow
the CIA and the DoD to ghost detainees' identities so they can be
denied a visit from the International Committee of the Red Cross.
"This was done, according to a memo from the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
to 'maximize intelligence collection efforts.' In other words, give
them more time to interrogate inmates."
And perhaps most outrageous, a
Feb. 2006 e-mail disclosed by the groups highlights an effort
to limit bad press by delaying the release of a detainee "for 45 days
or so until things cool down."
"It is astonishing that the government may have delayed releasing
men from Guantánamo in order to avoid bad press," said CCR attorney
Gitanjali Gutierrez, who represents many of the men held in Guantánamo,
in an Amnesty International release. "Proposing to hold men for a
month and a half after they were deemed releasable is inexcusable.
The Obama Administration should avoid repeating this injustice and
release the innocent individuals with all due haste."
"Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said Thursday that he had not seen
the documents and wasn't aware of the story," reported
CNN.
After Washington Post reporter Dana Priest revealed the existence
of the CIA's secret prisons in
a November 2005 report, RAW STORY was the first publication to
uncover
the exact location of one such "black site" in Eastern Europe.
President Obama has signed an order mandating the closure of the CIA's
secret prisons and the US military prison Guantanamo Bay within
a year of Jan. 22, 2009.
