Secret Detention in CIA Black Sites P1

New terrorism laws should adhere to human rights principles. John von Doussa QC

Extreme Changes Kate Ellis MP not punishing people Senator Despoja responsive politicians PC How To: Antonios Symeonakis People need practical help Senator Linda Kirk For the benefit of all Australians Senator Grant Chapman

United States of America / Yemen

Secret Detention in CIA "Black Sites"

"They came to take our father at night, like thieves…"

Fatima al-Assad, age 12, daughter of Muhammad al-Assad,
who "disappeared" after his arrest in 2003

"Brother, what is your name, what village are you from?" It was distinctive Yemeni Arabic that greeted Muhammad al-Assad as he stumbled, still hooded and shackled, from the plane at Sana’a. For the first time in nearly 18 months he knew what country he was in. He heard the question repeated twice more, as Salah Nasser Salim ‘Ali and Muhammad Faraj Ahmed Bashmilah emerged onto the hot tarmac. He still could not see them, and had not known they were on the plane with him, but he could hear one of them shouting over and over again: "I am Bashmilah, I am Bashmilah, I am from Aden".

The three, all Yemeni nationals, had "disappeared" in 2003, and had been kept in complete isolation – even from each other – in a series of secret detention centres apparently run by US agents. Senior Yemeni officials have told Amnesty International that they first heard of the men in May 2005, when the US Embassy in Yemen informed them that the three would be flown to Sana’a and transferred to Yemeni custody the following day. No further information or evidence against the men was provided, but the Yemenis say they were instructed by the US to keep them in custody. All three continue to be held in a kind of extralegal limbo; they have not been charged with any offence, given any sentence, or brought before any court or judge. The only improvement in their situation, they say, is that their families now know that they are alive.

Muhammad al-Assad’s odyssey began on the night of 26 December 2003, in Dar-es Salaam, Tanzania, where he had lived since 1985. As he told Amnesty International, he had just sat down to dinner with his Tanzanian wife, Zahra Salloum, and her brother and uncle. An immigration officer and two men from the state security forces came to the door, and ordered Muhammad al-Assad to surrender his passport and mobile phone. As he crossed over to his office to get the passport, he was grabbed from behind, a hood was forced over his head, and his hands were cuffed behind his back. He was thrown into the back of a car, which sped away. "I was very frightened," he said, "very frightened, and kept asking what was happening to me."

His captors did not reply. They took him to a flat, and questioned him for some four hours about his passport. He was then taken directly to a waiting airplane. Still hooded, he could see nothing, but heard the roar of the engines. As he was pushed up the stairs he asked where he was going. The guard told him: "we don’t know, we are just following orders, there are high-ranking ones who are responsible".

Muhammad al-Assad thought it was probably a small plane, his head was pushed down as he went through the door. He told Amnesty International he was too frightened to ask any further questions, instead he prayed to have patience, until the authorities discovered their mistake and let him go home. He is still waiting.

Muhammad al-Assad calculates that he is about 45 years old. He has a short beard, and a perpetually anxious expression. His father described him as a "very gentle man, who is always laughing". When Amnesty International interviewed him, in his cell at the political security prison in al-Ghaydah, in the governate of al-Mahra in eastern Yemen, he was solemn, and so soft-spoken in his replies that he was sometimes hard to hear, but there was never even the ghost of a smile on his face.

Tanzanian immigration authorities initially told Zahra Salloum that her husband had been deported to Yemen because his passport was not valid, and this story was repeated in the local media.(1) When she phoned Muhammad al-Assad’s 75-year-old father, Abdullah al-Assad, in Yemen, he traveled the 1,300 km from al-Ghaydah to the capital, Sana’a, to find his son. The Yemeni government gave him written assurances, which Amnesty International has seen, that his son had never entered the country. He carried on to Dar es Salaam, where he filed a habeas corpus petition with the Tanzanian courts. He was eventually told by Tanzanian officials that his son had been turned over to US custody, and that no one knew where he was.

Two months earlier, in October 2003, Salah ‘Ali Nasser Salim ‘Ali and Muhammad Faraj Ahmed Bashmilah had been arrested in Jordan(2), and held there briefly before they too were turned over to US custody. Their cases were first documented by Amnesty International in a report released in August 2005.(3)

Illegal detentions, rendition and reverse rendition
All three had entered the USA’s network of illegal detentions, secret transfers and unacknowledged prisons, where suspects are arbitrarily shuttled in and out of US custody, in what journalist Stephen Grey called "a worldwide traffic in prisoners".(4) According to a former senior US intelligence official, the rules of this game were simple: "Grab whom you must. Do what you want."(5)

The goal of the network is not just to hold terrorist suspects and their supporters, but to collect intelligence through long-term interrogation, free from any legal restrictions or judicial oversight. The bulk of the work is carried out at facilities under US military control in Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay in Cuba and Iraq, which together hold at least 11,000 people.(6) Most of them were detained in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, but others were transferred from countries including Albania, Bosnia, Croatia, Gambia, Indonesia, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Libya, Pakistan, Macedonia, Malaysia, Sudan, Tanzania, and Zambia.(7)

Long before Guantánamo opened its gates to "war on terror" detainees, however, the USA had been secretly transferring terror suspects into the custody of other states, states where physical and psychological brutality feature prominently in interrogations. Known to the US Administration as "extraordinary rendition," and to its critics as the "outsourcing of torture", the program has expanded considerably, reportedly under a classified directive signed by President Bush in late September 2001.(8) It has been estimated that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), often using covert airplanes leased by fictional front companies,(9) has flown hundreds of war on terror suspects to countries including Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Syria.(10)