The Disappeared

By Steve Hynd

ProPublica has a list today of thirty five people who were imprisoned in Bush's secret CIA prisons and who have now disappeared - no-one will acknowledge holding them. If former CIA director Michael Hayden was telling the truth when he said only about 100 detainees were ever held at CIA black sites, then over a third have been simply disappeared without trace.

"Making the Justice Department memos on the CIA's secret prison program public was an important first step, but the Obama administration needs to reveal the fate and whereabouts of every person who was held in CIA custody," said Joanne Mariner, director of the Terrorism and Counterterrorism Program at Human Rights Watch. "If these men are now rotting in some Egyptian dungeon, the administration can't pretend that it's closed the door on the CIA program."

In particular, it cannot say it has closed the door on the Bush administration's criminal conduct in concealing these prisoners' identies and whereabouts in contravention of international laws. Yet another charge to be added to illegal detention, torture and illegal kidnapping for the purposes of detention and torture.

Perhaps Senator Leahy, who has promised to proceed with his own hearings in the Senate Judiciary Committee if there aren't enough Republicans remaining with an intact moral compass to create Obama's "bipartisan" hearings, can add The Disappeared to the list of hard questions to be asked.

And if, by some miracle, there are enough Republicans with both guts and intact morals, we can ask Germany if Nuremberg is available as a nicely bipartisan venue for such hearings.

Comments

[Curmudgeon]

There's a case missing from ProPublica's list: the Pakistani (?) woman who was kidnapped with her children in Pakistan, broken in a US detention camp in Afghanistan, and given some form of judicial hearing before being disappeared again. Nobody knows what happened to her kids.