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The runway and air operations area
of the U.S. military facility on Diego Garcia is seen in an aerial view.
The tiny, secluded Indian Ocean atoll of Diego Garcia, which is in effect
an aircraft carrier, is also said to house a secret detention centre operated
by the CIA. |
From satellite pictures, Diego Garcia looks like paradise.
The small, secluded atoll in the Indian Ocean, with its coral beaches, turquoise
waters and vast lagoon in the centre, is 1,600 kilometres from land in any direction.
A perfect hideaway. But no one is allowed to set foot on it.
The little-known British possession, leased to the United States in 1970, was
a major military staging post in the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. It continues
to be, in effect, a floating aircraft carrier, housing 1,700 personnel who call
it Camp Justice.
But intelligence analysts say Diego Garcia's geographic isolation is now being
exploited for other, darker purposes.
They claim it is one in a network of secret detention centres being operated
by the Central Intelligence Agency to interrogate high-value terrorist suspects
beyond the reach of American or international law.
These prisoners are known as "ghost detainees" or the "new disappeared,"
and they're being subjected to treatment that makes the abuses at the military-run
Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad and Guantanamo Bay camp in Cuba look small-time,
say intelligence analysts.
Last year, Federal Bureau of Investigation director Robert Mueller said CIA
interrogation techniques "violate all American anti-torture laws,"
and instructed FBI agents to step outside of the room when the CIA steps in.
Analysts say there are at least a score of unacknowledged facilities around
the world. Among them, several in Afghanistan (one known as "the pit")
and Iraq, in Pakistan, Jordan, in a restricted unit at Guantanamo, and one,
they suspect, on Diego Garcia, where two navy prison ships ferry prisoners in
and out.
This week, the United Nations said it will investigate a number of allegations
from reliable sources that the U.S. is detaining terrorist suspects in undeclared
holding facilities, including on board ships believed to be in the Indian Ocean.
"Diego Garcia is an obvious place for a secret facility," says American
defence analyst John Pike. "They want somewhere that's difficult to escape
from, difficult to attack, not visible to prying eyes and where a lot of other
activity is going on. Diego Garcia is ideal."
The British government has flatly denied detainees are being held covertly
on the island. When asked last year, U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state
Lawrence DiRita didn't deny it outright, saying only, "I don't know. I
simply don't know."
What is known about CIA activities is that, since 2001, the agency has been
transferring or "rendering" suspects to third countries for aggressive
interrogation.
Syrian-born Canadian Maher Arar was snatched in New York and dispatched to
Syria, where he says he was tortured. Last month, an Italian judge ordered the
arrest of 13 CIA agents and operatives on charges they seized an Egyptian cleric
on a Milan street two years ago and flew him to Egypt for interrogation.
The rendition policy was initiated in 1998 by the Clinton White House after
the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed by terrorists. The
intent, says intelligence specialist Wesley Wark, was to bring Al Qaeda and
Taliban suspects to the U.S. for prosecution.
"It was legalized kidnapping," he says, "and they did grab a
few and bring them back. But after 9/11, the policy got changed to `extraordinary
rendition' and suspects began being shipped, not to the U.S. and into the legal
system, but elsewhere. And it started to be used for a whole assortment of people."
Since 2001, according to The New York Times, between 100 and 150 individuals
have been rendered to Egypt, Morocco, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Thailand, Malaysia
and Indonesia, all countries with records of practising torture.
But rendering means giving up control to the other country, says Pike, which
in turn means only low-value suspects are transferred.
"The CIA keeps the high-level ones to themselves," he says. "And
they work them over."
It's known that in August of 2002, the CIA approved the adoption of "enhanced"
interrogation measures and stress and duress techniques. They're believed to
include "water-boarding" — in which a prisoner's head is forced
under water until the point of drowning — denial of pain medication and
mock burial. A month later, Cofer Black, then CIA director of operations and
now head of counterterrorism at the U.S. State Department, told the congressional
intelligence committee he couldn't elaborate on what was "highly classified"
information: "All you need to know is, there was a before 9/11, and there
was an after 9/11. After 9/11, the gloves came off."
Despite the contention of many specialists that torture doesn't yield valuable
evidence, Pike says the agency firmly believes in "hostile interrogation."
"It would be nice," he says, "to think that torture was inhumane,
illegal and ineffective, but the dilemma is, it is effective. The CIA knows
that from past experience."
Because the agency operates outside the law, doing what the government doesn't
want to be publicly associated with, "it isn't bound by international treaties,"
says Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org.
The White House has said it doesn't consider that the "unlawful combatants"
in the war on terror (now referred to as "security detainees") are
covered by the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war, which prohibits "violence
to life and person, cruel treatment and torture."
But critics point out the convention also states "no one in enemy hands
can fall outside the law."
Moreover, they say the U.S. is also bound by the International Covenant on
Civil and Political Rights, which it ratified a decade ago. The covenant prohibits
incommunicado detention, requires that detention centres be officially recognized,
that identities be registered, that families be told of the detention and that
the times and places of all interrogations and names of those present be documented.
None of these provisions is being met with the ghost prisoners, says David
Danzig, spokesman for Human Rights First, a legal advocacy group that has produced
two reports on U.S. treatment of suspects, both those in the military system
and the unacknowledged phantom system. Danzig says the International Red Cross
has a list of 36 individuals, almost exclusively high-value detainees, that
the U.S. admits it is holding but will not say where.
"But our conversations with government officials, former detainees and
others suggest it's safe to say hundreds, probably thousands, is more accurate
for the number of people being held in secret."
Among them, it's claimed, are three top Al Qaeda lieutenants: Khalid Shaikh
Mohammed (who Pike believes is being held on Diego Garcia), Ramzi Binalshibh
and Abu Zubaida. The Southeast Asian terrorist Nurjaman Riduan Isamuddin, known
as Hambali, is also one of the disappeared, according to Danzig's organization
and another advocacy groups.
They have little doubt the secrecy surrounding their detention makes the use
of torture "not only likely, but inevitable."
In a blistering report, Beyond the Wire, released in March, Human Rights First
outlined the suspected scope of the global network of covert detention facilities.
"The U.S. government is holding prisoners in a secret system of offshore
prisons beyond the reach of adequate supervision, accountability or law,"
it stated, referring to the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison as "just the tip
of the iceberg."
Since the Abu Ghraib revelations last year, there have been three major Pentagon
reports on the treatment of detainees in military prisons and a new manual on
interrogation techniques was introduced in April. Human Rights First wants a
full-scale investigation into the covert CIA detention network and use of rendering,
and for months has been calling for an independent bipartisan inquiry akin to
the 9/11 commission.
But a veil of silence continues to shroud the ghost detainees, says Danzig,
head of the organization's End Torture campaign.
"Both the (Bush) administration and the CIA are stonewalling and blocking
efforts to get a credible investigation," he says. "The Pentagon reports
are enough, they say. Though there is evidence of a lot of wrongdoing, the CIA
detention centres are a giant black hole."
But Danzig says "the landscape is starting to change."
Calls for a commission are starting to grow in congressional circles, with
a major Republican, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, joining in last week.
The U.S. needs "to prove to the world that we are a rule-of-law nation,"
he said.
Even conservative Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly, normally a staunch defender
of Bush administration policies, says an independent commission should be set
up to investigate U.S. detainee policy "across the board."
"The president must take the offensive on this, or else the country's
image will continue to suffer and the jihadists and their enablers will win
another victory."
It's alarming, if not surprising, that so little is known about secret detention
sites, says lawyer Noah Novogrodsky, director of the University of Toronto International
Human Rights Program. But that they exist he has no doubt. When a regime is
threatened by something it can't identify, by an unknown enemy, it counters
by throwing in everything, including the kitchen sink, he says.
"It would be hard to systematically torture in known detention centres,
but you can't track a secret world. The secret locales are one part of the whole
picture, the dark underbelly, and they're absolutely outside of the law."