It Can [Has] Happen[ed] Here

Tweet "It is not only that the United States has swept people off the streets and held them in secret overseas prisons where, by many credible accounts, they were tortured. Now a collaboration of six domestic and international human rights groups has concluded that 39 of those who were in U.S. custody at one time or another since the 9/11 attacks still are unaccounted for. These are not the 14 “high-value detainees” transferred in the past few months to the military penal colony at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. No one knows where these 39 are—or if they are still alive. "They are missing. Or, in the language of international law, they have undergone a “forced disappearance.”

"At some point, the list of the missing included at least three minors—two of them the children of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. “We don’t have any information that the children are still in custody, and I really don’t think they are,” says Joanne Mariner, terrorism and counterterrorism director for Human Rights Watch and one of the authors of the report. Wives also were detained. Their fate also is unknown, Mariner said in an interview, though it is likely they are living among relatives somewhere.

"The rights groups compiled the list by examining accounts the United States gave when it acknowledged having a person in custody, eliminating those whose whereabouts later were disclosed. Investigators looked at names some members of Congress had placed in the Congressional Record last year as “terrorists no longer a threat”—though no official definition of that term was given. They reviewed public pronouncements—often made by the Pakistani government—that a terrorism suspect had been turned over to the United States. And they pored over accounts of former detainees who said they’d seen a certain individual while in detention, and compared this account with other bits and pieces of evidence.

"It is unknown whether the missing remain in some secret U.S.-run facility, or were transferred to foreign governments whose security apparatuses routinely practice secret detention and torture. It is not known if they are dead or alive.