On 6 September 2006, US President George W Bush announced the transfer of 14 men from secret Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) custody to military detention at the US Naval Base in Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. This was the first time that the US program of clandestine interrogation and detention, long an open secret, had been publicly acknowledged. Although the President noted that no-one was then being held by the CIA, he emphasized that the secret detention program would “continue to be crucial”. Indeed, the transfer of a 15th so-called “high value” detainee, ‘Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, from CIA custody to Guantánamo in April 2007 demonstrated the continuing operation of the CIA’s program. In June 2007, President Bush issued an executive order effectively re-authorizing the CIA’s use of secret detention and interrogation. That order remains in force.
In September 2007 CIA Director General Michael Hayden defended the program, including on the grounds that “fewer than 100 people” had been subjected to it.“These programs are targeted and selective,” he added. “They were designed for only the most dangerous terrorists and those believed to have the most valuable information, such as knowledge of planned attacks.” He and other US officials have used similar reasoning to defend the CIA’s use of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. In testimony to the US Senate Intelligence Committee on 5 February 2008, for example, General Hayden tried to justify the torture technique of “waterboarding”, simulated drowning, against three detainees in 2002 and 2003 as a means to obtain information from detainees at a time of perceived threat to public safety, and because the intelligence community “had limited knowledge about al-Qa’ida and its workings.” Such justifications fly in the face of the absolute prohibition of torture and other ill-treatment under international law.
The same goes for secret detention. No matter how carefully targeted the program is, the bottom line is that secret detention, in and of itself, violates international human rights and humanitarian law, as contained in treaties binding on the USA. Torture and enforced disappearance, which frequently accompany the use of secret incommunicado detention, are both crimes under international law. The illegality of the CIA’s secret program has been accompanied by a complete absence of accountability for such crimes.
The CIA has operated its secret detention program in covert prisons outside the USA, known as “black sites”. The locations of these sites are unknown, their operations are classified at the highest level of secrecy, they are not open to any scrutiny or inspection, the identity of those detained is not disclosed to family members, lawyers, or humanitarian organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), and detainees are isolated from each other and from the outside world. According to a November 2005 report in the Washington Post, there had been “black sites” in at least eight countries [...]
Khaled Abdu Ahmed Saleh al-Maqtari is one of those most recently released. He was held in CIA “black sites” in Afghanistan and in an unknown country until days before President Bush’s 6 September 2006 announcement, when the CIA network of secret jails appears to have been at least temporarily cleared. Khaled al-Maqtari has been held both at the notorious hard site at Abu Ghraib– where he has described a regime of beatings, sleep deprivation, suspension upside down in stressful positions, intimidation by dogs, induced hypothermia and other forms of torture – and in CIA “black sites” in Afghanistan and an unidentified third country, where he spent nearly three years in complete isolation, the victim of an enforced disappearance.
