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| US has secret prisons: rights group |
| By Reuters |
| Published: 06/18/2004 |
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The United States is holding terrorism suspects in more than two dozen detention centers worldwide, about half of which operate in total secrecy, according to a new human rights report. Human Rights First said in a report that secrecy surrounding the facilities made "inappropriate detention and abuse not only likely but inevitable". The director of the group's US law and security program, Deborah Pearlstein, potential abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad and the Guantanamo Bay military prison in Cuba "cannot be addressed in isolation". "This is all about secrecy, accountability and the law," Ms Pearlstein told a news conference. The report coincided with news that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordered military officials to hold a suspect in a prison near Baghdad without telling the Red Cross. Mr Pearlstein says that would be a violation of the Geneva Conventions and Defense Department directives. She says the United States is holding thousands of security detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as locations elsewhere which the military refused to disclose. "The US Government is holding prisoners in a secret system of off-shore prisons beyond the reach of adequate supervision, accountability of law," the report said. Ms. Pearlstein says multiple sources report US detention centers in, among other places, Kohat in Pakistan near the border with Afghanistan, on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia and at Al Jafr prison in Jordan, where the group said the CIA had an interrogation facility. Prisoners are also being held at the Naval Consolidated Brig in Charleston, South Carolina, and others were suspected of being held on US warships. A Defense Department spokesman told Reuters he would comment when he had more information about the report. |
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