Extrajudicial prisoners of the United States, in the context of the early twenty-first century War on Terrorism, refers to foreign nationals the United States detains outside of the legal process required within United States legal jurisdiction. In this context, the U.S. government is maintaining torture centers, called black sites, operated by both known and secret intelligence agencies. [1] [2] Such black sites were later confirmed by reports from journalists, investigations, and from men who had been imprisoned and tortured there, and later released after being tortured until the CIA was comfortable they had done nothing wrong, and had nothing to hide.
Of these prisoners being held by the U.S., some were suspected of being from the senior ranks of al Qaeda, referred to in U.S. military terms as "high value detainees." According to the Swiss senator Dick Marty's reports on Secret Detentions and Illegal Transfers of Detainees involving Council of Europe Member States, about a hundred persons had been kidnapped by the CIA on European territory and subsequently rendered to countries where they were tortured. [1] [2]
Former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, had described the men detained in Camp Delta at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as "the worst of the worst.", despite concerns about the mental capacity of several of the detainees. But, before September 2006, many of those detainees suspected of having the highest intelligence value were not detained at Guantanamo, but were held at CIA's black sites in Eastern Europe and other countries, including Afghanistan.
In August 2010, it was reported that four high-value detainees: Abu Zubaydah, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, had first been transferred to Guantanamo on September 24, 2003. They were held at "Strawberry Fields", a secret camp in the facility constructed for their detention. [3] Worried that a pending Supreme Court decision on habeas corpus rights might go against the Bush administration and compel releasing the men's names and other details, the CIA took back custody of the four men and moved them out of Guantanamo on March 27, 2004. [3] [4]
The United States Supreme Court ruled in Rasul v. Bush (2004) that detainees at Guantanamo Bay detention camp had the habeas corpus right to challenge their detentions before an impartial tribunal. As a result, the US allegedly continued to hold many ghost detainees outside Guantanamo Bay and the United States in order to avoid any review of their cases.
These four men and other high-value CIA detainees were not transferred again to military custody at Guantanamo until September 2006. At that time, the Bush administration was assured of passage by Congress of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which included provisions preventing detainees from using habeas corpus petitions outside the newly authorized system of military tribunals.
Ghost detainees are extrajudicial prisoners whose identities have not been revealed and whose families (and frequently, governments) have not been informed of their status. They are deprived of all legal rights. Ghost detainees' identities, and capture, have been kept secret. As such they are a subset of extrajudicial prisoners, which includes all the detainees who were held in Guantanamo, etc..[ citation needed ]
On September 6, 2006, U.S. President George W. Bush confirmed, for the first time, that the CIA had held "high-value detainees" in secret CIA prisons. [5] He also announced that 14 senior captives were being transferred from CIA custody to military custody at Guantanamo Bay. He said that these 14 captives could expect to face charges before Guantanamo military commissions.
Critics, and elements of the FBI, had long speculated that the captives held in the secret facilities had been subjected to actual torture. They said that evidence derived from such interrogation techniques was not admissible in court and could not be used to prosecute the men.[ citation needed ]
JTF-GTMO ISN | Name | Notes |
---|---|---|
10011 | Mustafa al-Hawsawi |
|
10012 | Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani |
|
10013 | Ramzi bin al-Shibh |
|
10014 | Waleed Muhammad bin Attash |
|
10015 | Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri |
|
10016 | Abu Zubaydah |
|
10017 | Abu Faraj al-Libi |
|
10018 | Ali Abdul Aziz Ali | |
10019 | Hambali |
|
10020 | Majid Khan |
|
10021 | Mohamad Farik Amin |
|
10022 | Mohammed Nazir Bin Lep | |
10023 | Gouled Hassan Dourad |
|
10024 | Khalid Sheikh Mohammed |
|
American intelligence officials have made public the names of some of the suspects the CIA has reported to have been held. The capture of other detainees is not acknowledged.[ citation needed ] According to the US military, this is in order to spread disorder among their opponents, and fear among those who might be considering supporting them.[ citation needed ]
Name | Notes |
---|---|
Jamil al-Banna |
|
Muhammed al-Darbi |
|
Omar al-Faruq |
|
Abd al-Salam Ali al-Hila |
|
Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi |
|
Adil al-Jazeeri | |
Yassir al-Jazeeri | |
Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi |
|
Bisher al-Rawi |
|
Abdul Rahim al-Sharqawi |
|
Mohammed Omar Abdel-Rahman |
|
Musaad Aruchi | |
Hassin Bin Attash |
|
Abdul Aziz | |
Abu Faisal | |
Hassan Ghul |
|
Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan |
|
Muhammed Khudayr al-Dulaymi | |
Tariq Mahmood | |
Binyam Mohammed |
|
Khalid El-Masri |
|
Shortly after the Invasion of Afghanistan, the Bush administration announced a policy that combatants captured "on the battlefield" in Afghanistan would not be afforded the protections of POW status as described in the Geneva Conventions. This policy triggered debate both within and outside of the US government. The Bush administration claimed that the Geneva Conventions signed by the US protected only the fighters of recognized states, thus disqualifying al Qaeda fighters from these privileges as per the Bush administration's views. They argued that, since the Taliban was not a legitimate government either, their combatants did not qualify either. They saw Afghanistan as a "failed state," one without a legitimate government.
The Bush administration categorized such captives as "illegal combatants." These terms are not explicitly used in the Geneva Conventions, but the Third Geneva Convention of 1949 defines the term "lawful combatant", from which the term 'unlawful combatant' is derived. The Convention obliges signatories to afford captured lawful combatants significant rights and protections. Such captives are entitled to be classified as prisoners of war (POW). Internal critics within the US military and US government argue that failing to afford POW protections to combatants captured in the global war on terror would endanger American military personnel when they were captured in current and future conflicts. Other critics argue that classifying all combatants as illegal combatants is in violation of Article 5 of the Third Geneva Convention, which describes how a captor should treat combatants who are suspected of violating the Geneva Conventions such that they strip themselves of its protections. Article 5 says that combatants suspected of violations of the Conventions are to be afforded POW protection until the captors have convened a "competent tribunal." However, the Conventions never explicitly impose a limitation regarding the detention of detainees without trial during and after an armed conflict.
The Bush administration expanded the criteria for classifying captives as illegal combatants. Individuals captured around the world are now classified as such if US intelligence officials believe they have sufficient evidence to tie the individual to Islamic terrorism.
In Rasul v. Bush (2004), the US Supreme Court ruled that detainees held by the United States did have the habeas corpus right to challenge their detentions before a competent tribunal. This decision led the Bush administration to bolster the prevalence of black sites overseas.
The US intelligence community has debated what techniques should be used on the detainees. [14] The debate was triggered over the interrogation of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, described as the first senior al Qaeda captive.[ citation needed ] It was reported that initially his interrogation was being conducted by the FBI because they had the most experience interrogating criminal suspects.[ citation needed ] Their interrogation approach was based on building rapport with suspects and they did not use coercive techniques.[ citation needed ] They argued that coercive techniques produced unreliable false confessions, and that using coercive techniques would mean that the evidence they gathered could not be used by the prosecution in a trial in the US judicial system. [14]
Fear and desire for actionable intelligence led the administration to legal opinions (the Torture Memos, including the Bybee memo) by the Office of Legal Counsel, United States Department of Justice, issued to the CIA in August 2002 authorizing the use of 12 enhanced interrogation techniques (since 2009, these have been legally defined as torture and prohibited from use) with detained suspects.
Similarly, on March 14, 2003, five days before the US started its 2003 invasion of Iraq, the OLC issued a memo to William J. Haynes, General Counsel of the United States Department of Defense, concluding that federal laws against the use of torture and other coercion did not apply to interrogations overseas. In reaction to the release of the abuse pictures from Abu Ghraib in Iraq in April and May 2004, and the leak that summer of the Bybee memo, the administration advised agencies to suspend actions based on those memos. CIA suspended the use of enhanced interrogation techniques. [20]
Secretary Rumsfeld assured the world that the detainees held at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base were going to be treated in a manner consistent with the treatment of Geneva Convention POWs. In 2004, confidential memos surfaced that discussed the limits to how much pain, discomfort and fear could be used in the interrogation of detainees in the global war on terror. The memos showed that debate within the Bush administration had been resolved in favor of what was later legally determined to be torture.
In 2005, US Senator John McCain, a former POW from the Vietnam War, attached a passage to a military spending bill that would proscribe inhumane treatment of detainees and restrict US officials to use only the interrogation techniques in the US Army's field manual on interrogation. Ninety of the one hundred Senators supported this amendment.
On Thursday, October 20, 2005, Vice President Dick Cheney proposed a change to McCain. Cheney tried to get McCain to limit the proscription to just military personnel, thus allowing CIA personnel the freedom to use harsher techniques. McCain declined to accept Cheney's suggestion. [21]
The United States government, through the State Department, makes periodic reports to the United Nations Committee Against Torture. In October 2005, the report focused on pretrial detention of suspects in the war on terrorism, including those held in Guantanamo Bay and Afghanistan. This was the first official response of the U.S. government to allegations that prisoners were mistreated at Guantanamo Bay detention camp. The report denies the allegations. However, the report does not address detainees held elsewhere by the CIA. Recently, the Director of the CIA, Michael Hayden has acknowledged that some detainees had been subject to waterboarding, in accordance with several OLC (Office of Legal Counsel) memos. General Hayden states that in February 2008, waterboarding was not part of the authorized interrogation techniques for U.S. agents.
The CIA's Inspector General investigated cases in which men were captured and transported through "erroneous renditions." There were said to be 3,000 individuals who were held in CIA custody. [22]
On July 20, 2007, President Bush issued an executive order officially banning torture of POWs by intelligence officials. [23] Amnesty International points out that the Bush administration has narrowly defined torture under the Bybee memo, at the time, the only known one of the Torture Memos. While the US is a signatory to the Geneva Conventions of 1949, it has failed to ratify that portion of the Geneva Convention, Protocol I, which would grant such persons POW status as the detainees at Guantanamo. [23] [ clarification needed ] The US is one of only six countries that have not.
ISN | Name | Current location | Allegations | Notes |
---|---|---|---|---|
10024 | Khalid Sheikh Mohammed | Guantanamo | Various |
|
892 | Rafiq Bashir al-Hami | Transferred to Slovakia in 2010 | Suspicious acquaintances |
|
893 | Tawfiq Nasir Awad al-Bihandi | Guantanamo | Unknown |
|
Hikmat Nafi Shaukat | Unknown | Suspicious acquainces |
| |
1209 | Lufti al-Arabi al-Gharisi | Unknown | Unknown |
|
1461 | Muhammad Ahmad Ghulam Rabbani | Transferred to Pakistan in 2023 | Alleged KSM lieutenant |
|
Gul Rahman | Murdered in custody |
| ||
10015 | Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri | Guantanamo | USS Cole bombing |
|
10013 | Ramzi Bin al-Shibh | Guantanamo | Alleged KSM lieutenant | |
Mohammed Omar Abdel-Rahman | Extradited to Egypt and released in 2010 | Unknown | ||
10011 | Mustafa al-Hawsawi | Guantanamo | Suspected "finacier" | |
Abu Khalid | Unknown | Unknown | ||
Laid Ben Dohman Saidi aka Abu Hudhaifa | unknown | Mistaken identity |
| |
Abd al-Karim aka Al-Shara'iya | Unknown | Unknown |
| |
Abu Hazim | Unknown | Unknown | ||
Sayyid Ibrahim | Unknown | Unknown | ||
Suleiman Abdullah | Unknown | Unknown |
|
Location | Details |
---|---|
USS Bataan | John Walker Lindh, a United States citizen, was held for two months in a secure facility aboard the USS Bataan. |
The Salt Pit |
|
Abu Zubaydah is a Palestinian citizen born in Saudi Arabia currently held by the U.S. in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba. He is held under the authority of Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists (AUMF).
Riduan Isamuddin, also known by the nom de guerreHambali, is the former military leader of the Indonesian terrorist organization Jemaah Islamiyah (JI). He is currently in American custody at Guantanamo Bay detainment camp in Cuba. He is currently awaiting trial in a military commission.
Mustafa Ahmed Adam al-Hawsawi is a Saudi Arabian citizen. He is alleged to have acted as a key financial facilitator for the September 11 attacks in the United States.
Ghost detainee is a term used in the executive branch of the United States government to designate a person held in a detention center, whose identity has been hidden by keeping them unregistered and therefore anonymous. Such uses arose as the Bush administration initiated the War on Terror following the 9/11 attacks of 2001 in the United States. As documented in the 2004 Taguba Report, it was used in the same manner by United States officials and contractors of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2003–2004.
The Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRT) were a set of tribunals for confirming whether detainees held by the United States at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp had been correctly designated as "enemy combatants". The CSRTs were established July 7, 2004 by order of U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz after U.S. Supreme Court rulings in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld and Rasul v. Bush and were coordinated through the Office for the Administrative Review of the Detention of Enemy Combatants.
Martin Mubanga is a joint citizen of both the United Kingdom and Zambia. He was held, without charge, and interrogated at the American prison at Guantanamo Bay for 33 months.
Lahcen Ikassrien is a citizen of Morocco who was held in extrajudicial detention in the United States Guantanamo Bay detainment camps, in Cuba. Ikassrien's Guantanamo ISN was 72. The Department of Defense reports that Ikassrien was born on October 2, 1972, in Targuist, Morocco.
Hassan Muhammad Salih bin Attash is a citizen of Saudi Arabia, held by the United States in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba. Joint Task Force Guantanamo counter-terrorism analysts estimate that bin Attash was born in 1985, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
The Guantanamo Bay detention camp, also known as GTMO, GITMO, or just Guantanamo Bay, is a United States military prison within Naval Station Guantanamo Bay (NSGB), on the coast of Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. It was established in January 2002 by U.S. President George W. Bush to hold terrorism suspects and "illegal enemy combatants" during the Global War on Terrorism following the attacks of September 11, 2001. As of August 2024, at least 780 persons from 48 countries have been detained at the camp since its creation, of whom 740 had been transferred elsewhere, 9 died in custody, and 30 remain; only 16 detainees have ever been charged by the U.S. with criminal offenses.
Musab Omar Ali Al Mudwani is a citizen of Yemen who was held in extrajudicial detention in the United States Guantanamo Bay detainment camps, in Cuba.
Mohammed Ahmad Ghulam Rabbani is a citizen of Pakistan who was extrajudicially detained by the United States military at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba from 2004 to 2023. He was never charged with a crime, was never tried, and was a subject of enhanced interrogation techniques.
Majid Shoukat Khan is a Pakistani who was the only known legal resident of the United States held in the Guantanamo Bay Detainment Camp. He was a "high value detainee" and was tortured by U.S. intelligence forces.
Sharqawi Abdu Ali al-Hajj, also known as Riyadh the Facilitator, is a Yemeni alleged Al-Qaeda associate who is currently being held in the United States' Guantanamo Bay detention camps, in Cuba. He is accused of being a "senior al-Qaida facilitator who swore an oath of allegiance to and personally recruited bodyguards for Osama Bin Laden".
"Enhanced interrogation techniques" or "enhanced interrogation" was a program of systematic torture of detainees by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and various components of the U.S. Armed Forces at remote sites around the world—including Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Bucharest, and Guantanamo Bay—authorized by officials of the George W. Bush administration. Methods used included beating, binding in contorted stress positions, hooding, subjection to deafening noise, sleep disruption, sleep deprivation to the point of hallucination, deprivation of food, drink, and medical care for wounds, as well as waterboarding, walling, sexual humiliation, rape, sexual assault, subjection to extreme heat or extreme cold, and confinement in small coffin-like boxes. A Guantanamo inmate's drawings of some of these tortures, to which he himself was subjected, were published in The New York Times. Some of these techniques fall under the category known as "white room torture". Several detainees endured medically unnecessary "rectal rehydration", "rectal fluid resuscitation", and "rectal feeding". In addition to brutalizing detainees, there were threats to their families such as threats to harm children, and threats to sexually abuse or to cut the throat of detainees' mothers.
In United States law, habeas corpus is a recourse challenging the reasons or conditions of a person's detention under color of law. The Guantanamo Bay detention camp is a United States military prison located within Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. A persistent standard of indefinite detention without trial and incidents of torture led the operations of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp to be challenged internationally as an affront to international human rights, and challenged domestically as a violation of the Due Process Clause of the Fifth and Fourteenth amendments of the United States Constitution, including the right of petition for habeas corpus. On 19 February 2002, Guantanamo detainees petitioned in federal court for a writ of habeas corpus to review the legality of their detention.
Tolfiq Nassar Ahmed Al Bihani is a citizen of Saudi Arabia held in the United States's Guantanamo Bay detention camps, in Cuba. His Guantanamo Internment Serial Number is 893.
Muhammad Rahim is an Afghan national who is held in captivity by the United States Government at Guantanamo Bay. He was born in eastern Afghanistan. Muhammad Rahim worked for an Afghan government committee that worked to eliminate opium poppies from the nation. He was forced to leave his job by the Taliban. In 1979, Rahim fled Afghanistan with his brother over the border of Pakistan. Their departure was triggered by the Soviet Union invasion into Afghanistan.
Rafiq Bin Bashir Bin Jalud al Hami is a citizen of Tunisia, who was formerly held for over seven years without charge or trial in the United States's Guantanamo Bay detention camps, in Cuba. His Guantanamo Internment Serial Number was 892. The Department of Defense reports that he was born on 14 March 1969, in Tunisia.
In 2003, a secret compound, known as Strawberry Fields, was constructed near the main Guantanamo Bay detention camps, in Cuba. In August 2010 reporters found that it had been constructed to hold CIA detainees classified as "high value". These were among the many men known as ghost detainees, as they were ultimately held for years for interrogation by the CIA in its secret prisons known as black sites at various places in Europe, the Mideast, and Asia, including Afghanistan.
Following the September 11 attacks of 2001 and subsequent War on Terror, the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) established a "Detention and Interrogation Program" that included a network of clandestine extrajudicial detention centers, officially known as "black sites", to detain, interrogate, and often torture suspected enemy combatants, usually with the acquiescence, if not direct collaboration, of the host government.
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: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)You probably haven't heard many of these names before. But they are important, both in terms of the terrorist plots they either planned or executed, and in how the U.S. government treated them once they became prisoners, according to the newly released Senate Intelligence Committee's torture report.