While browsing around ArabNews.com looking for anything at all about the helicopter that was downed in Afghanistan, I was startled by this headline..
US Holding Prisoners on Warships: UN Official
The article goes on to mention that the accusations are at this point, merely ‘rumors’, but the UN, seriously stymied at the moment in efforts to launch an inquiry into Guantanamo, is interested in investigating.
“This opens the door to very tough interrogations on key prisoners before it even has been revealed that they have been captured,” said Tusa, an editor for the British magazine Jane’s Intelligence Review.
To be honest with you, I don’t know if I’ve heard anything about prison ships before or not – sometimes the horrors just pile up and blur together into an incomprehensible mess for me. But I’m guessing that the UN taking an interest in floating Guantanamos is relatively new news… so I googled.
The BBC ran a brief article yesterday,
US faces prison ship allegations
Um… that kind of sealed it for me, not exactly ‘lies and unfounded propaganda’ from that arab ‘enemy’.
…….
He told the BBC there were a number of allegations from reliable sources that the US was holding terrorist suspects in secret places of detention, including vessels abroad.
He said that according to the reports, the ships were believed to be in the Indian Ocean.
The LA Times has something this morning – titled “Expert: UN Seeks US Detention Centers” – but I don’t have a registration. Anyone care to dig that up for me?
That’s really all I’ve found at this point. Has anyone else heard anything about this? Is this old news, has it already been covered somewhere?
Update: The San Jose Mercury News has picked it up.
Manfred Nowak, the U.N.’s special expert on torture, said some undeclared holding areas could include U.S. Navy ships in international waters. He said there were “serious” allegations to that effect from Amnesty International and other non-governmental human rights groups.
…….
Nowak said he and three fellow experts decided last week to launch the inquiry without waiting for assurances of U.S. cooperation after holding off for more than three years in hopes Washington would give members access to Guantanamo Bay and other facilities holding suspected terrorists.
…..
Nowak said team members had begun interviewing former suspects held and subsequently released by U.S. authorities in efforts to establish conditions in the prisons and their exact locations.
and from CBS News
The United States has criticized the commission because its members include countries with poor human rights records. But the experts operate independently and sometimes reproach their own countries for violations.
…..
Nowak, who reports to the Geneva-based Human Rights Commission as well as the U.N. General Assembly in New York expressed disappointment at a lack of U.S. response.
Am I getting excited over not-much-of-anything, or is this unusual behavior for the UN?
nothing. This is a small world these days. At some point all of this stuff is going to have to be addressed. It isn’t just going to go away. I would rather be informed now than later.
Old news apparently. In a report(pdf) published in June of 2004 by Human Rights first (page 11)…
footnote #19 reads….
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:TvjFsWzKUU4J:https://www.navsoc.navy.mil/esg1/pdf/dhowtakedown.
pdf+questioning+Peleliu&hl=en ; “Searching a Suspected Compound: Marines Investigate Abandoned Taliban Compound Amid Speculation Over Omar Search,” ABC News.com, Jan. 1, 2002, available at
http://more.abcnews.go.com/sections/world/dailynews/strike_main020101.html ; Grant Holloway, “Australia to Question al
Qaeda Fighter,” CNN.com, Dec. 19, 2001, available at
http://www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/asiapcf/auspac/12/19/aust.talbandit20.12/ ; “Australian Taliban Fighter Handed Over to
U.S. Military Forces in Afghanistan,” Associated Press, Dec. 17, 2001, available at
http://multimedia.belointeractive.com/attack/military/1217australia.html.
Only a couple of the links still work.
good work zander
.
U.S. Naval Base on Diego Garcia and U.S. military ships, particularly the USS Bataan and the USS Peleliu.
The prisoner ships had to be abandoned, this was the primary site which was linked to the Pacific Tsunami warning by the Navy as I recall from December 2004.
None of the reports on the tsunami however, reminds us that Diego Garcia is one of the locations where the CIA has been hiding its secret detainees, torturing them through “stress and duress” measures as sleep deprivation and painful shackling, and “rendering” the uncooperative among them to foreign intelligence services. E.g. Jordan, Morocco, and Syria, to which Washington outsources its harshest tortures.
The off-limits patch of ground at Bagram is one of a number of secret detention centers overseas where U.S. due process does not apply, according to several U.S. and European national security officials, where the CIA undertakes or manages the interrogation of suspected terrorists. Another is Diego Garcia, a somewhat horseshoe-shaped island in the Indian Ocean that the United States leases from Britain.
In contrast to the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, where military lawyers, news reporters and the Red Cross received occasional access to monitor prisoner conditions and treatment, the CIA’s overseas interrogation facilities are off-limits to outsiders, and often even to other government agencies. In addition to Bagram and Diego Garcia, the CIA has other secret detention centers overseas, and often uses the facilities of foreign intelligence services. (Dana Priest and Barton Gellman, “U.S. Decries Abuse but Defends Interrogations: ‘Stress and Duress’ Tactics Used on Terrorism Suspects Held in Secret Overseas Facilities,” Washington Post, December 26, 2002, p. A1)
The circumstances under which Washington obtained leases to Diego Garcia — eventually turning it into a satellite spy station, a staging ground for air strikes against Iraq, and a secret detention facility — are little known in the United States. John Pilger calls the expulsion of the Chagos islanders from Diego Garcia to make way for the US military a “crime that tells us how a whole system works behind its democratic facade”.
DG – the Plantation
USA WELCOME: Make Yourself Known @BooMan Tribune and add some cheers!
Thanks Oui – You’re right, I do recall. Though not the names of the ships of course, I’m terrible with details.
I guess what I’m wondering now is this… can the UN statements be taken as… well, predictable and empty statements that will not and can not ever amount to anything – or are their actions on this quite extraordinary? This is a team assigned by the Human Rights Commission to investigate the US without their consent or co-operation with the intention of publishing a public report…
Does anyone with an understanding of the UN have a grasp on this? I seems a little shocking to me… am I just clueless?
My husband has been there so many times. We even have an old t-shirt with Diego Garcia on it.
Fond memories for my husband. Biking. Being chased by fiddler crabs(?) or somet type of crab.
The first time it was “reported” that Diego might be being used for such shitcrimes, my husband went into the back room and just.. sat.
He is so angry right now at… everything.
I guess that makes us “UnAmerican” when we are so disappointed in our government and what they are doing and how they are ruing the military.
* my husband was in the USN. Among other “things” he was in the Third Platoon.
His great memories of Diego are like so many other things are fucked over by Bush and his Bloodshed Agenda.
Mission Accomplished.
Great Diary Zander.
From the LA Times article
A US Air Force Lt. Col. has gone on the record with a denial….
The department’s “detainee detention facilities are in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo,” Skinner said.
But there’s not much else that hasn’t already been covered.
Gone on record with a denial, eh? How shocking. Perhaps he’ll claim he could deny this by simply splitting a few linguistic hairs: ” ‘detainee detention facilities’ is completely different from ‘enemy combatant interrogation rooms,’ you see, so technically this reportage is false.”
Sadly, I’m not surprised at all by this. Good work–let’s keep following up on where it leads!
The CIA isn´t part of the defense department, right?
So if the CIA is responsible for the facilities then technically that statement would be totally true.
And misleading…
thank you – hadn’t thought of that… I tend to miss the obvious….
I wish I could say this surprised me–but after all, these guys (Bushco) are the intellectual heirs of the 1980s Reaganites who saw nothing wrong with providing tacit or even direct support for right wing death squads in Central America (see the Jack Lemmon movie Missing to get a good sense of what went on). It certainly goes against everything I believe–but then, I’d much rather we had a single world government, and not have any “international waters” beyond the rule of law.
-Alan
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Support Hugo Chavez: Fill up your car at CITGO!
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Slacker, you’ve got to explain this to me…
This isn’t about yet another american horror show, but the UN reaction. How’s your grasp of the UN? Here’s where I’m confused – The entire liberal half of the country lost it’s collective mind over Bolton’s nomination. But in the days before he could score a recess appointment – the UN actually does something seemingly sudden and impressive (at least to me in my cluelessness) – and there is resounding silence. I really don’t get it…
Did y’all see that “the UN doesn’t exist” clip just a few too many times? I’m really having a hard time figuring this out…
That’s a great point. I was similarly surprised that there wasn’t more reaction to the “Daughter of the 9/11 Commission” report that the Bush admin wasn’t doing enough to protect us from nuclear terror. And I don’t just mean to pout that my diary didn’t garner much response–beyond that, I didn’t understand why the blogosphere wasn’t already up in arms about it before I posted about it.
One theory I could throw out there is that liberal bloggers, or people generally, tend to be personality oriented instead of issue oriented. “Bush sucks, his nominees suck, let’s block his nominees and impeach Bush.” Which is true as far as it goes, but Bush and Bolton are just the latest superficial manifestations of the same old corrupt right wing oligarchy–and that’s the real enemy.
Mea Culpa… the Bush admin wasn’t doing enough to protect us from nuclear terror – it just doesn’t resonate with me at all… I think that the US is the biggest threat of nuclear terror in the world, the idea of Bush doing anything to protect anyone just um… seems laughable.
One other thing that occurred to me.
It really does undercut the U.N. Commission on Human Rights that there are dictatorships represented on it. Yes, I know this sounds like a GOP talking point, but it would give them so much credibility if they restricted membership at least to those nations that NGOs like Amnesty Int’l could vouch for as being in the upper 50 percent of the U.N.’s member nations in terms of their human rights records…KWIM?
Zander what is it that you don’t get, is it that we are not all over this….what….
Bolton’s nomination was about the power of the Pres. and whether Dems. could have some control and stop and never ending grab of power that he is engaged in.
He was a bad choice for Ambassador, and thus a bad representative of the US.
Ya, you’re right. I guess I’m frustrated by my lack of understanding of the UN – and interested in it’s potential to challenge the US. Bolton would obviously neuter any potential it may have, but he’s not the end of the story for me.
That this is an awesome diary!
I think Susan or someone did a diary on this the other day….I don’t know what to make of it….It doesn’t surprise me anything the US is doing, the admin. has no morals and apparently the congress does not have many.
I am happy for every entity that investigates anything…
I must have missed Susan’s diary. I don’t think I’m so much surprised by the US – but I am shocked and confused about the UN. This had to come from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Did I miss something? I really didn’t see this coming at all…
Though I’ve found that the original United Nations press release was dated June 23…
UN EXPERTS ADDRESS CONCERNS REGARDING GUANTANAMO BAY DETAINEES (bit of snark – worth reading for that alone)
Various UN groups have been ‘requesting’ since January 2002. Last week the ‘we’re disappointed’ that we’ve been completely ignore report was release by… “four independent experts of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights with the endorsement of all participants at the twelfth Annual Meeting of the Special Rapporteurs/representatives, independent experts and chairpersons of the working groups of the Special Procedures of the Commission on Human Rights”
Which has one week later become ‘we’re going to investigate period with the intention of publishing our report’…
I’m still trying to figure out how to interpret this…
This administration has pushed the envelope on so many issues. It is up to us to draw the line in the sand.
I better call my lawyer.”
What an asshole.
on the heels of all the other sad days… sigh…
Great Work Zander! Randi Rhodes was all over this on her program yesterday (Wed), and she doesn’t go with things she can’t back up with chapter and verse. And I think most Americans don’t have a clue that the UN does anything. I think they have a view of it as “symbolic”.
And like so many other atrocities this Administration has and is comitting, there is a RWCM blackout on it. I hope every last horrible act that this government is perpetrating comes out full blown in all the worlds press until we have to recognize it and stop it.
Keep digging. And great diary.
Then Spielberg can do adventure films where the universal bad guys are not the Nazis… but the Bush Administration… which means “Us” sadly – the Americans.
I hear it’s getting more and more unsafe for even Bush Hating Americans to find a place outside of the States.
Which to us means ONE thing… cause we have brains – to the Warmongers it will mean “SEE! They hate our freedumb”
gawd what morons we have in our country.
NO!!! Not morons… Apathetic witnesses to a country turning to shit so they can feel closer to their idea of a G-d.
Well, I say FUCK GOD. FUCK “God Bless America”
I’m tired of a “G-d” that insists on hate, bloodshed, torture, death…
How many more shall die and be killed in the name of some entity? I don’t know which I can’t stand more.. Bush, Inc or the sheeple who call themselves “Christian Right”.
It’s those “Christians” that are more ofa threat to me and my kids than any Taliban or Terrorist could ever be.
Sorry.. rant over.
A righteous rant. And the threat at home from our own government and misguided wingnut so-called Christians is indeed a far greater threat than we face anywhere in the world.
I cannot fathom that people can choose to be so blind as to not see the things they are teaching and preaching in their churches ARE NOT PRINCIPLES THAT THE ONE CALLED JESUS TAUGHT! I am quite taken aback that people are so willing to blindly follow, no matter what or where it leads them.
The one I knew/know as Jeshua ben Joseph would be angered and devistated at the same time to see what has been done to his teachings of love, tolerance, forgiveness, and charity. The crimes and horrors commited in his name would tear his heart apart. Just as it does yours and mine.
Okay, enough. . .already has put me into Warrior Mode. . . . .
I think that’s exactly what I’ve been thinking about – the UN as a ‘symbolic’ entity.
Latest reports say that they have begun investigating, but also that they are ‘calling on the US to cooperate’.
Well, which is it? It’s obvious that not only will there be no cooperation of any kind, but more likely active and aggressive obstacle building on the part of the US….
I’m having the hardest time trying to imagine how this will play out.
Illegal in any nation? Try international waters! Military law got you down? Have a contractor do it who is not subject to US or military law!
This is more of the same of never doing what is right,
just figuring out how to get over.
BTW: Here is an ship to hold foreign workers offshore the US to do high tech work more cheaply. Unbelievable.
Great diary also.