U.S. holds infants, Americans in East African secret prisons
by Shashank Bengali and Jonathan S. Landay, McClatchy Newspapers
March 13, 2007
NAIROBI, Kenya -- A network of U.S. allies in East Africa secretly have transferred to prisons in Somalia and Ethiopia at least 80 people who were captured in Kenya while fleeing the recent war in Somalia, according to human rights advocates here.
At least 150 prisoners, who included men and women of 17 nationalities and children as young as 7 months, were held in Kenya for several weeks before most of them were transferred covertly to Somalia and Ethiopia, where they're being held incommunicado, the groups charge.
The transfers, which authorities reportedly carried out in the middle of the night and made public only after a recent court order in Kenya, violated international law, according to the rights groups.
They charge that the program is being driven by the United States, which has built a close relationship with Kenya and Ethiopia in the war on terrorism.
Kenyan authorities made the arrests as part of a U.S.-backed, four-nation military campaign in December and January against Somalia's Islamist militias, which Bush administration officials have linked to al-Qaida.
At least 150 prisoners, who included men and women of 17 nationalities and children as young as 7 months, were held in Kenya for several weeks before most of them were transferred covertly to Somalia and Ethiopia, where they're being held incommunicado, the groups charge.
The transfers, which authorities reportedly carried out in the middle of the night and made public only after a recent court order in Kenya, violated international law, according to the rights groups. They charge that the program is being driven by the United States, which has built a close relationship with Kenya and Ethiopia in the war on terrorism.
At least one of the transferees is an American citizen identified on a flight manifest as Amir Mohamed Meshar. Meshar was flown from Nairobi to Baidoa, the seat of Somalia's transitional government, on Feb. 10, according to Islamic human-rights groups. His whereabouts, and those of 12 other detainees aboard that chartered flight, are unknown.
Commentary by Helen & Harry Highwater:
The new America, under Bush-Cheney, uses secret prisons, hoping to keep Americans from knowing about the torture and war crimes clearly sanctioned at the highest levels of the Bush-Cheney administration.
It's worth noting, as we've noted before, that even the existence of these secret prisons is a violation of the Geneva convention.
From Article 23: "Detaining Powers shall give the Powers concerned, through the intermediary of the Protecting Powers, all useful information regarding the geographical location of prisoner of war camps."
Has America done this? No — and it's a violation of the Geneva Conventions.
From Article 70: "Immediately upon capture, or not more than one week after arrival at a camp, even if it is a transit camp, likewise in case of sickness or transfer to hospital or another camp, every prisoner of war shall be enabled to write direct to his family, on the one hand, and to the Central Prisoners of War Agency provided for in Article 123, on the other hand, a card similar, if possible, to the model annexed to the present Convention, informing his relatives of his capture, address and state of health. The said cards shall be forwarded as rapidly as possible and may not be delayed in any manner."
Has America done this? No — and it's a violation of the Geneva Conventions.
The existence of secret prisons is simply and inarguably illegal. The subject was decided in 1949, when American officials signed the document. But things like international law matter little to Bush and Cheney. They hold themselves above all laws of men or God.
"We do not torture," Bush lies over and over again — we only use "harsh interrogation" and "tactics we cannot reveal." The Geneva Conventions, though, leave no room for such silly wordplay.
From Article 17: "No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever. Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to any unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind."
Compare the plainly written rules of international law to what you know goes on in these secret prisons, to what you know is being done with Bush-Cheney's OK.
Perhaps more importantly, compare what you know is happening to your own sense of right, wrong, and conscience.
"These are enemy combatants who are waging war on our nation," says the American President. "We have a right under the laws of war, and we have an obligation to the American people, to detain these enemies and stop them from rejoining the battle."
How easily Bush and Cheney claim an alleged "right under the laws of war", while holding prisoners in secret and subjecting them to torture in clear and obvious violation of those same laws of war.
When will Americans grow weary of having war criminals in the White House?
When will Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld be hauled away in irons, to face trial at the Hague for what they've done?
Soon, I pray — and never, I know.
When will Americans stand up and demand some shred of human decency from their leaders? We'd better demand it soon, or it's only a matter of time before these tyrants turn their tactics of terror and torture onto Americans.
Helen & Harry
American officials in Kenya declined to comment on the allegations that they were involved in the detentions or renditions. In Washington, the State Department had no immediate comment.
Representatives of Islamic groups who'd visited detainees in late January in their jail cells in Nairobi, Kenya's capital, said they'd spotted U.S. diplomatic vehicles outside the holding facilities. They also said some detainees had reported being questioned by U.S. law enforcement agents.
The Bush administration has come under fire for the practice of so-called extraordinary renditions: the transfer of detainees without court proceedings to foreign countries where they can be interrogated, often in secret, and sometimes -- according to critics -- subjected to torture. The new allegations mark the first time that such renditions have been suspected in East Africa, where U.S.-friendly regimes often are accused of treating prisoners brutally.
December's military intervention in Somalia was a well-orchestrated campaign involving four countries: Somalia's interim government; Ethiopia, whose ground forces drove the Islamists from power; Kenya, which sent troops to seal the border with Somalia and prevent fighters from escaping; and the United States, which gave a green light to the invasion, provided intelligence and training support to the Ethiopians and conducted surveillance of Somalia that apparently was used to track the Islamists' escape. The United States also launched two air strikes on suspected terrorist targets in January.
But the campaign hasn't netted any al-Qaida figures, and U.S. officials think that they're hiding in Somalia. Critics of the intervention charge that the allies now are conspiring to illegally hold prisoners, many of whom are described by family members as teachers or small-business owners who went to Somalia in search of jobs.
"There is clearly some sort of cooperation that if you fight together, you can deal with prisoners together," said Hassan Omar, a member of the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights who's followed the issue closely.
"There has been massive foreign interference on the issue of terrorism. Quite a number of foreign agencies' hands are tainted," he said.
Details of the detention program -- little reported in the news media in Kenya or overseas -- emerged in recent weeks only after a Nairobi-based consortium of community groups, the Muslim Human Rights Forum, challenged Kenyan authorities in court.
After the Ethiopian invasion in late December, Kenyan security forces captured at least 150 people on both sides of the Kenya-Somalia border, including some 17 women and 12 children. The detainees included citizens of Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Tunisia and Ethiopia.
According to Muslim leaders, Kenyan police refused them access to the prisoners, among them a woman who had a bullet lodged in her back but was denied medical treatment. The police shuffled the prisoners among several facilities in the Nairobi area to keep them out of sight.
Under a judge's order, authorities produced flight manifests that showed that at least 80 detainees had been transferred to Somalia on three chartered flights: Jan. 20 and 27 and Feb. 10. The manifests appeared to be filled out hastily, with spaces for such details as the departure and arrival airports left blank.
What's happened to the detainees since then is unclear. One detainee phoned the rights group earlier this month from Ethiopia to say that he and several other detainees had been transferred to a prison on the outskirts of the capital, Addis Ababa. The line went dead before he could say more.
Dozens of detainees are thought to be in a holding facility near the bullet-pocked airport in Mogadishu, Somalia's capital, where a mounting insurgency threatens the fragile government's grip on power. But rights groups in Kenya haven't had contact with those prisoners in more than a month.
Ismail Mohammed Hurre, Somalia's foreign minister, confirmed that "quite a number" of detainees were in government custody in Mogadishu, although he declined to offer details. He said they were being treated humanely and that he hoped that foreign governments would order the extraditions of their citizens to face judicial proceedings in their home countries.
"These are people who have Somali blood on their hands," Hurre said. "They have been fighting with jihadi forces. They are, in every sense of the word, international terrorists."
Omar, the member of the Kenyan human rights commission, said returning the detainees to Somalia was a fundamental human-rights violation.
"We are very skeptical of those being deported back to Somalia," he said. "The country does not have peace or stability. All of the prisoners we spoke to told us they were fleeing the hostilities."
Another 45 to 60 detainees -- members of Ethiopia's Ogaden and Oromo rebel groups who allegedly fought alongside Somalia's Islamists -- were flown directly to Ethiopia, according to a representative of an international human-rights group in Nairobi, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation.
At least 19 people were set free in Kenya, and some U.S. and British detainees were deported to their home countries.
One of the U.S. citizens who was held in Kenya is Daniel Joseph Maldonado, 28, who FBI agents say has told them that he traveled to Somalia last year to fight alongside the Islamist militias. Maldonado, who converted to Islam and took the name Daniel Aljugaifi, was flown to Houston last month, where he was charged in federal court with receiving training from al-Qaida in Somalia and conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction.
We believe in liberty and justice for all, so of course, we oppose many US government policies. This doesn't mean we're anti-American, redneck scum, pinko commies, militia members, or terrorist-sympathizers. It means we believe in freedom, as more than merely a cliché.
We believe you have the right to live your own life as you choose, and others have the equal right to live their lives as they choose. It's not complicated.
We believe freedom leads to peace, progress, and prosperity, while its opposite -- oppression -- leads to war, terrorism, poverty, and misery.
We believe it's preposterously stupid to hate people because of their appearance, their race or nationality, their religion or lack of religion, how they have sex with other consenting adults, etc. There are far more apropos reasons to hate most people.
We believe in questioning ourselves, our assumptions, each other -- and we especially believe in questioning authority (the more authority, the more questions). We believe obedience is a fine quality in dogs and young children, but not in adults.
Like America's right-wingers, we believe in
individual responsibility,
hard work to get ahead,
and stern punishment for serious crimes.
We believe big government should not be blindly trusted.
But unlike most right-wing leaders, we mean it.
Like America's left-wingers, we believe in
equal treatment under law,
war as a last (not first) resort,
and sensible stewardship of natural resources.
We believe big business should not be blindly trusted.
But unlike most left-wing leaders, we mean it.
Like libertarians, we believe it's wrong and reprehensible to arrest people for what they think, believe, look like, wear, eat, smoke, drink, inhale, inject, or otherwise do to themselves.
But unlike many libertarians, we're not obsessed with the gold standard, we don't believe incorporation is humanity's highest achievement, and we don't believe everything in life comes down to dollars and cents. We've read and enjoyed Ayn Rand's novels, but we understand that they're works of fiction.
We're skeptical, and we're sick of so-called 'journalists' who aren't skeptical at all.
These pages are published by Harry and Helen Highwater, happily married low-income nom de plumes and rabble-rousers from Madison, Wisconsin (with a few friends scattered around the world helping out).
We try to spotlight news that hasn't gotten enough (or appropriate) attention in American media, along with our opinions and yours.
We bang our keyboards against the wall, because it doesn't hurt as much as banging our heads.
