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Prisoner Accounts Suggest Detention At Secret Facilities
Muhammad Assad is one of three Yemeni men arrested in 2003. He believes he was arrested because of ties to a charity that was "blacklisted" after Sept. 11.
(By Anne Fitzgerald For The Washington Post)
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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.
