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Pinochet gone, but his methods are still with us

Adnan Siddiqui and Victoria Brittain

A new report collating first-hand accounts gives the clearest view yet of the torture going on in the U.S. secret prisons.

TORTURE, SECRET prisons and disappearances: all feature prominently in the legacy of Augusto Pinochet. It is a matter of great regret that the former Chilean dictator "brought to power in a CIA-backed coup on September 11, 1973" avoided trial for gross abuses of human rights.

It is a matter of even greater regret that the same tools and the same sponsors are back in action today, with the same impunity, as part of the "war on terror" launched after September 11, 2001.

When the Bush administration brought 14 of its most highly valued terrorism suspects to Guantanamo Bay from secret prisons in various countries in September, the U.S. President himself acknowledged for the first time the existence of a network of CIA prisons. This was intended to close a chapter that had become embarrassing to Washington. The U.S. practice of illegal kidnapping known as "extraordinary rendition," and the secret detention and torture that was part of it, had after more than four years finally become a scandal condemned by many European politicians, United Nations officials and international lawyers, as well as U.S.-based human-rights groups.

But as a new report from the British monitoring group Cageprisoners reveals, the men held in Guantanamo Bay are only the tip of the iceberg: thousands more are hidden elsewhere, outside the law. The "war on terror" is taking a terrible toll on Muslim families and societies through a vast programme of secret detention and torture.

Since January 2002, when the first Muslim men were flown from Afghanistan to Guantanamo, an estimated 14,000 men have been held. They have been hidden in prisons, army barracks, holes in the ground, private houses, hotels, and schools. Those responsible for them have been in overlapping chains of command, including the U.S. Department of Defence, the CIA, and the national intelligence services of many countries, such as Britain.

Meticulous record

The Cageprisoners report is a meticulous record of information cross-correlated from the testimony of numerous released prisoners in many countries and of lawyers such as Clive Stafford Smith and his team at Reprieve, who represent some of the men in Guantanamo and have been able to talk to them.

But Mr. Stafford Smith's own statement that as many as three-quarters of the men in Guantanamo have never seen a lawyer, and that the Guantanamo men represent only 4 per cent of all those imprisoned in the war on terror, is a chilling reminder of just how little outsiders have been able to penetrate this dark, illegal world.

Nonetheless, we now have a mass of detail, much of it new, that has never been collated before.

The countries listed as being used by the U.S. include Thailand, Germany, Greece, Jordan, Egypt. and Syria, while some men have been held on U.S. Navy vessels. Different prisons and other detention centres are listed for each country, and in many cases the names of prisoners who were held there. But in some cases the prisoners giving the testimony had no idea where they had been held, and could only describe the temperature, the accents of the guards, and other clues. Muhammad al-Assad, for instance, was flown for about three hours from Tanzania to somewhere very hot where the accents of the guards in Arabic seemed to be Somali or Ethiopian, as was the bread. He was interrogated by a white Western man who spoke good Arabic.

Two women prisoners rendered from Pakistan are reported to have been held in a prison in Damascus. Canadians who were rendered there by the U.S., including Mahar Arar and Abdullah al-Maliki, have described this and other Syrian prisons and the appalling conditions, including torture, under which they were held. Syria and Yemen use only their own nationals in their prisons.

But in Afghanistan, Indonesia, Jordan, Pakistan, Egypt, Malawi, Mauritania, Morocco, and Bosnia, CIA and other U.S. or U.K. personnel are heavily involved in the prisons. One thread running through the report is the presence of British intelligence personnel in many of the interrogations.

The experiences of prisoners such as Muhammad al-Assad, Muhammad Faraj Ahmed Bashmilah and Salah Nasir Salim Ali Qaru, who suffered extreme sensory deprivation during months in a "black site," are also described. All the guards covered their faces and said nothing, so there was no way to even guess their nationality.

Innocent men such as Mahar Arar, from Canada, and Khaled el-Masri, from Germany, were lucky to be released from this archipelago of secret prisons, but have had no apology or compensation, nor seen any hint of charges being brought against those responsible for their kidnapping and torture. But, like Pinochet's victims, they will not give up the fight for justice.

Few tears were shed at the news of Pinochet's death, which came, aptly enough, on International Human Rights Day.

But the near unanimous condemnation of his U.S.-sponsored crimes loses its moral weight if not accompanied by an equally vociferous denunciation of the similar abuses being perpetrated today.

- Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

(Dr. Adnan Siddiqui is a London-based GP and trustee of Cageprisoners. Victoria Brittain was the co-author of Moazzam Begg's book Enemy Combatant.)

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