Rights Groups Call for End to Secret Detentions
By SCOTT SHANE
New York Times
WASHINGTON, June 6 — Six human rights groups on Wednesday released a list of 39 people they believe have been secretly imprisoned by the United States and whose whereabouts are unknown, calling on the Bush administration to abandon such detentions.
The list, compiled from news media reports, interviews and government documents, includes terrorism suspects and those thought to have ties to militant groups. In some suspects’ cases, officials acknowledge that they were at one time in United States custody. In others, the rights groups say, there is other evidence, sometimes sketchy, that they had at least once been in American hands.
The list includes, for instance, Hassan Ghul, a Pakistani who is accused of being a member of Al Qaeda and whose capture in northern Iraq in January 2004 was announced by President Bush. At the other extreme, two unnamed Somali nationals are on the list because they were overheard in 2005 by another prisoner who was later released, Marwan Jabour, in the cell next to his at a secret American detention center, possibly in Afghanistan.
Meg Satterthwaite, of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University, one of the six groups, said the recent American practice mimiced “disappearances” of political opponents under Latin American dictators. “Enforced disappearances are illegal, regardless of who carries them out,” she said.
The other groups that compiled the list were Amnesty International, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Human Rights Watch and two British groups, Reprieve and Cage prisoners. Three of the groups are suing under the Freedom of Information Act to learn what became of the prisoners.
(Continued here.)
New York Times
WASHINGTON, June 6 — Six human rights groups on Wednesday released a list of 39 people they believe have been secretly imprisoned by the United States and whose whereabouts are unknown, calling on the Bush administration to abandon such detentions.
The list, compiled from news media reports, interviews and government documents, includes terrorism suspects and those thought to have ties to militant groups. In some suspects’ cases, officials acknowledge that they were at one time in United States custody. In others, the rights groups say, there is other evidence, sometimes sketchy, that they had at least once been in American hands.
The list includes, for instance, Hassan Ghul, a Pakistani who is accused of being a member of Al Qaeda and whose capture in northern Iraq in January 2004 was announced by President Bush. At the other extreme, two unnamed Somali nationals are on the list because they were overheard in 2005 by another prisoner who was later released, Marwan Jabour, in the cell next to his at a secret American detention center, possibly in Afghanistan.
Meg Satterthwaite, of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University, one of the six groups, said the recent American practice mimiced “disappearances” of political opponents under Latin American dictators. “Enforced disappearances are illegal, regardless of who carries them out,” she said.
The other groups that compiled the list were Amnesty International, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Human Rights Watch and two British groups, Reprieve and Cage prisoners. Three of the groups are suing under the Freedom of Information Act to learn what became of the prisoners.
(Continued here.)
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