Cheney's Rules for the Press

There was some question at the time about whether there had in fact been more than 14 prisoners in those sites, but the press let that question go.

Human Rights Watch, however, did not.

Dafna Linzer and Julie Tate write in The Washington Post: "Human Rights Watch has identified 38 people who may have been held by the CIA and remain unaccounted for. Intelligence officials told The Post that the number of detainees held in such facilities over nearly five years remains classified but is higher than 60. Their whereabouts have not been publicly disclosed."

Linzer and Tate chronicle the story of Marwan Jabour, an accused al-Qaeda paymaster.

"His release from a secret facility in Afghanistan on June 30, 2006, was a surprise to Jabour -- and came just after the Supreme Court rejected the Bush administration's assertion that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to prisoners like him.

"Jabour had spent two years in 'black sites' -- a network of secret internment facilities the CIA operated around the world. His account of life in that system, which he described in three interviews with The Washington Post, offers an inside view of a clandestine world that held far more prisoners than the 14 men President Bush acknowledged and had transferred out of CIA custody in September. . . .

"Jabour's experience -- also chronicled by Human Rights Watch, which yesterday issued a report on the fate of former 'black site' detainees -- often does not accord with the portrait the administration has offered of the CIA system, such as the number of people it held and the threat detainees posed. Although 14 detainees were publicly moved from CIA custody to the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, scores more have not been publicly identified by the U.S. government, and their whereabouts remain secret. Nor has the administration acknowledged that detainees such as Jabour, considered so dangerous and valuable that their detentions were kept secret, were freed. . . .

"Jabour said he was often naked during his first three months at the Afghan site. . . .

"He was . . . chained up and left for hours in painful positions more than 20 times and deprived of sleep for long periods. Sometimes he would have one hand chained to a section of his cell wall, making it impossible to stand or sit."

From Human Rights Watch: "'President Bush told us that the last 14 CIA prisoners were sent to Guantanamo, but there are many other prisoners "disappeared" by the CIA whose fate is still unknown,' said Joanne Mariner, terrorism and counterterrorism director at Human Rights Watch. 'The question is: what happened to these people and where are they now?' . . .

"Human Rights Watch expressed concern about what may have happened to the missing prisoners. One possibility is that the US may have transferred some of them to foreign prisons where they remain under the CIA's effective control.

"Another worrying possibility is that prisoners were transferred from CIA custody to places where they may face torture. A serious concern is that some of the missing prisoners might have been returned to their countries of origin, which include Algeria, Egypt, Libya and Syria, where the torture of terrorism suspects is common."