Amid Details on Torture, Data on 26 Who Were Held in Error
By SCOTT SHANEDEC. 12, 2014
One quiet consequence of this week’s sensational release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the C.I.A. detention program was a telephone call that a human rights lawyer, Meg Satterthwaite, placed to a client in Yemen, Mohamed Bashmilah. For eight years since Mr. Bashmilah, 46, was released from C.I.A. custody, Ms. Satterthwaite and other advocates had been trying without success to get the United States government to acknowledge that it had held him in secret prisons for 19 months and to explain why. In the phone call on Wednesday, she told him that the Senate report listed him as one of 26 prisoners who, based on C.I.A. documents, had been “wrongfully detained.” “Na’am,” he answered simply in Arabic. “Yes.” He said he had had faith that someday his ordeal would be acknowledged. Then he thanked the lawyers who have taken up his case over the years, Ms. Satterthwaite said.
Mr. Bashmilah has told them of being tortured in Jordan before he was handed over to the C.I.A., which at times kept him shackled alone in freezing-cold cells in Afghanistan, subjected to loud music 24 hours a day. He attempted suicide at least three times, once by saving pills and swallowing them all at once; once by slashing his wrists; and once by trying to hang himself. Another time he cut himself and used his own blood to write “this is unjust” on the wall. After learning the news, Mr. Bashmilah pressed Ms. Satterthwaite, who heads the global justice program at New York University Law School, to tell him what might follow from the Senate’s recognition. Would there be an apology? Would there be some kind of compensation?
While the gruesome details of torture and the dispute over its results have drawn the greatest media coverage, the Senate report also represents the fullest public account by any branch of government of the C.I.A.’s secret prison program. It exposes some of the mistakes made in the agency’s rush to grab people with possible links to Al Qaeda in the first years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Until 9/11, the United States had officially condemned secret imprisonment as a violation of the basic international standards of human rights. But like the prohibition on torture, it was set aside in the frantic effort to stop another attack.
The Senate Democratic staff members who wrote the 6,000-page report counted 119 prisoners who had been in C.I.A. custody. Of those, the report found that 26 were either described in the agency’s own documents as mistakenly detained, or released and given money, evidence of the same thing. The C.I.A. told the Senate in its formal response that the real number of wrongful detentions was “far fewer” than 26 but did not offer a number. Human rights advocates who have tracked the C.I.A. program believe that considerably more than 26 were wrongfully detained. Another Yemeni client of Ms. Satterthwaite, for instance, Mohammed al-Asad, was left out of the Senate’s count, even though he languished for months in C.I.A. prisons without being questioned, was sent home to Yemen and was never charged with a terrorism-related crime. “The U.S. caused a great deal of suffering to people who posed no threat,” said Anne FitzGerald, director of research and crisis response at Amnesty International, who visited Yemen eight times to talk to Mr. Bashmilah, Mr. Asad and others who appeared to be former C.I.A. detainees. “International standards are there for a reason — they protect everyone.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/13/us/politics/amid-details-on-torture-data-on-26-held-in-error-.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0
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much pressure those patriots were under. Now I suppose that you're going to whine about the fact that some of these torturees were innocent. Well, I can almost guarantee that it was probably only around 26 out of the hundreds that were interrogated enhancingly! So get off your high liberal horse and learn how politics works!
