USA: Bush administration ‘disappears’ prisoners

This video is called ACLU Challenges Jeppesen Dataplan and CIA Rendition.

From the American Civil Liberties Union:

The ACLU filed a federal lawsuit against Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc., a subsidiary of Boeing Company, on behalf of three victims of the U.S. government’s unlawful “extraordinary rendition” program.

The lawsuit charges that Jeppesen knowingly provided direct flight services to the CIA that enabled the clandestine transportation of Binyam Mohamed [see also here, and here], Abou Elkassim Britel and Ahmed Agiza to secret overseas locations where they were subjected to torture and other forms of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.

From the blog of Craig Murray, ex British ambassador to Uzbekistan, sacked by Tony Blair for opposition to human rights violations there:

June 7, 2007

The Vanished

The United Nations has held that “disappearance” of persons is in itself a form of torture, because of the mental anguish heaped both on the “disappeared”, and on their family.

Yet the US continues to do it.

As Reuters reports, human rights groups have named 39 people disappeared while in US custody.

Stephen Grey, author of the brilliant Ghost Plane, believes that the numbers disappeared by the USA might reach the hundreds.

As Uzbekistan is one of the torture destinations for extraordinary rendition, experience would indicate that many of these will have been murdered and the bodies dumped or cremated.

Groups list 39 ‘disappeared’ in U.S. war on terror
Thu Jun 7, 2007
By Claudia Parsons

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Six human rights groups urged the U.S. government on Thursday to name and explain the whereabouts of 39 people they said were believed to have been held in U.S. custody and “disappeared.”

The groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, said they filed a U.S. federal lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act seeking information about the 39 people it terms “ghost prisoners” in the U.S. “war on terror.”

“Since the end of Latin America’s dirty wars, the world has rejected the use of ‘disappearances’ as a fundamental violation of international law,” professor Meg Satterthwaite of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University’s School of Law said in a statement.

The report said suspects’ relatives, including children as young as seven, had been held in secret detention on occasion.

See also here.