Red Cross to Obama: What did U.S do with terror Suspects?
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The CIA quietly moved scores of detainees out of its own "black site" prisons in recent years and turned them over to foreign governments, refusing to provide the International Red Cross any information about their treatment or whereabouts, according to a report made public this week.
Although President Bush made a brief public allusion to the transfers in September 2006, the U.S. government has never offered any accounting of precisely how many detainees were moved and what became of them.
The issue became a major bone of contention between the Red Cross and the CIA, according to little-noticed language in the Feb. 14, 2007, Red Cross report to CIA acting general counsel John Rizzo that was publicly posted on a magazine Web site this week.
There is substantial reason to believe that these "ghost detainees" included some high-profile suspects, including Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a Libyan-born jihadist captured in Afghanistan whose claims about ties between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were prominently used by top Bush administration officials to justify the war in Iraq, according to human-rights activists who have closely followed the issue.
Following the U.S. invasion, al-Libi recanted those claims, saying he fabricated his story about Iraq-Qaeda ties in order to get his interrogators to stop their abusive treatment of him. After his recantation became known in 2004, U.S. government officials dropped all public references to him and he was never heard from again—even though he was once hailed as the U.S. military's first big "catch" after the 9/11 attacks.
Although President Bush made a brief public allusion to the transfers in September 2006, the U.S. government has never offered any accounting of precisely how many detainees were moved and what became of them.
The issue became a major bone of contention between the Red Cross and the CIA, according to little-noticed language in the Feb. 14, 2007, Red Cross report to CIA acting general counsel John Rizzo that was publicly posted on a magazine Web site this week.
There is substantial reason to believe that these "ghost detainees" included some high-profile suspects, including Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a Libyan-born jihadist captured in Afghanistan whose claims about ties between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were prominently used by top Bush administration officials to justify the war in Iraq, according to human-rights activists who have closely followed the issue.
Following the U.S. invasion, al-Libi recanted those claims, saying he fabricated his story about Iraq-Qaeda ties in order to get his interrogators to stop their abusive treatment of him. After his recantation became known in 2004, U.S. government officials dropped all public references to him and he was never heard from again—even though he was once hailed as the U.S. military's first big "catch" after the 9/11 attacks.
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When Red Cross officials later pressed for information about what happened to such "ghost" detainees, U.S. government officials insisted they were returned to their country of origin under assurances they would be given "humane" treatment, the report states. But the Red Cross was never given access to the detainees—
- 2 years ago
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