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Joanne Mariner, Director - Terrorism/Counterterrorism Division
& Emma Daly, Press Director
Audio Transcript - News Release Download This is Emma Daly. “Ghost Prisoner” is a new report by a counterterrorism expert at Human Rights Watch that offers the most detailed account to date of life inside the CIA’s secret detention program. When President Bush revealed the existence of the program last September, he identified just 14 people who were transferred to Guantanamo, and he said no more prisoners remained in CIA custody. But Joanne Mariner, director of the Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism program at Human Rights Watch, has good evidence that there were many more. In her latest report, Joanne has outlined that 38 other people who may have been in CIA custody are still unaccounted for. The question is what happened to them and where are they now? Marwan Jabour, the prisoner who was interviewed, spent more than 2 years in CIA custody. Joanne Mariner: His story is the most detailed account to date of life inside a secret CIA prison. Jabour said he was arrested in Pakistan in May 2004, held for a few days in Lahore, then for more than a month at a secret facility in Islamabad operated by both US and Pakistani personnel, and finally sent to a secret prison in Afghanistan. In each of these locations, Jabour was severely mistreated. In Islamabad, he was forcibly deprived of sleep, interrogated during the day by US personnel, and then beaten by Pakistani personnel at night. After a month there, Jabour was flown to a facility that he believes was in Afghanistan. All or nearly all of the personnel were American. When Jabour got there, the guards cut his clothes off him, and left him completely naked for a month and a half, including during questioning by women interrogators. He was also chained tightly to the wall of his small cell so that he couldn’t stand up, he was placed in painful stress positions so that he had difficulty breathing, and he was told that if he didn’t cooperate he would be put in a small box, which they showed him –called the “dog box.” Jabour was held in prison for two years, and spent nearly all of his time alone in a windowless cell, with almost no human contact besides his captors. The practice of “disappearing” people – keeping them in secret detention without any legal process – is fundamentally illegal. The kind of physical mistreatment Jabour described is also illegal. And what makes all this worse, is that the US government has tried to justify its reliance on secret detention, and has claimed the right to continue using these prisons. As the most influential and powerful country in the world, the US use of secret detention encourages other countries to employ the tactic. President Bush made a televised speech on September 6, announcing 14 detainees had just been transferred to Guantanamo from secret CIA prisons, and that with those 14 transfers, no prisoners were left in CIA custody. But we don’t think that’s the whole story. Human Rights Watch has identified almost 40 people who may have been in CIA custody at some point during the last 5 years and who remain unaccounted for. Marwan Jabour, the former prisoner I interviewed, saw or spoke to some of them. Besides the 14 who were sent to Guantanamo in early September 2006, there were at least 20 other detainees already at Guantanamo who said they were previously in non-military US custody in Afghanistan. The US may have transferred some of them to foreign prisons where they remain under the CIA’s effective control. Another possibility is that prisoners were transferred from CIA custody to other countries, where they might face torture. We’ve sent a letter to President Bush that names possible detainees who remain missing, and we’ve asked that he reveal what happened to these people. |
