Reply:
Calls for more details on CIA
Replied by( Noman)
Replied on (8/Sep/2006)
The US president's disclosure that terrorism suspects had been held in CIA-run prisons, has drawn approval from activists and defence lawyers, but some have called for more details on the secret jails. George W Bush said in a White House speech on Wednesday that a small number of high-value detainees, including the mastermind of the September 11, 2001, attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, had been kept in CIA custody in order to be "held secretly, questioned by experts and, when appropriate, prosecuted for terrorist acts". International lawmakers and civil rights campaigners have long called on Bush to acknowledge that the US used a network of secret prisons and have transferred prisoners between them on covert flights. Manfred Nowak, the UN special investigator on torture, called Bush's acknowledgment of CIA secret prisons "progress", but said their existence was already known. Nowak said: "We knew there was secret places of detention because we knew there were people who had been arrested and then we lost track of them." The deputy president of Malaysia's largest opposition party, the Pan-Malaysian Islamic party, also said the acknowledgment of the CIA prisons was not surprising. More unpopular Nasharudin Mat Isa said: "To us this is nothing new, Bush's use of military and force to act upon his agenda. This latest boast of his [about CIA secret prisons abroad] will make him even more unpopular among Americans." Nowak, who reports to the UN Human Rights Council, the global body's top rights watchdog, has said the use of secret prisons violate anti-torture commitments under international law because keeping detainees in such places is a form of enforced disappearance. Bush said the programme led to the capture of al-Qaeda leaders He said the transfer of 14 detainees from secret centres to Guantanamo Bay was "an improvement", but said that "of course there are many others". Bush is pressing Congress to quickly pass administration-drafted legislation authorising the use of military commissions for trials of terror suspects after the Supreme Court in June ruled that trying detainees in military tribunals violated US and international law. He said that the interrogation techniques used were tough, but did not constitute torture. Alexander Downer, Australia's foreign minister, has said that the CIA's secret imprisonment and interrogation of terror suspects has achieved a great deal for the war on terrorism. Al-Qaeda link Downer said Australia had benefited directly from the programme, citing the arrests of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was al-Qaeda's link to the Southeast Asian terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah, and that group's operations chief, Indonesian Riduan Isamudin. Jemaah Islamiyah is blamed for a string of deadly attacks in Indonesia, including the Bali nightclub bombings in 2002 that killed 202 people, 88 Australians among them, and an attack on the Australian embassy in Jakarta. Downer conceded that the prison programme was controversial, but said critics should accept that extraordinary measures were needed to deal with the global threat of terrorism revealed by the September 11 attacks. He said the information garnered "has led to the capture and in some cases the killing of terrorists who might have otherwise killed innocent people". Agencies You can find this article at: http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/BC9B5FFB-5FF3-4F01-905E-92ED823A1D53.htm
|