CIA held suspect in secret prison for months

The CIA held an alleged al-Qaida leader in a secret prison since autumn and transferred him a week ago to the US military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, officials said on Apr. 27. The disclosure revealed that the Bush administration reopened its detention program within three months of announcing that no secret prisoners remained in the CIA's custody. The detainee, Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, an Iraqi Kurd who they claim joined al-Qaida in the late 1990s and ascended to become a top aide to Osama bin Laden, is the first terrorism suspect known to have been held in secret CIA jails since President Bush announced the transfer of 14 captives to Guantánamo Bay in September. Human rights advocates expressed anger that the United States continued a program of secret detention. The CIA's secret detention of terrorism suspects has been widely criticized by human rights organizations and foreign governments as a violation of international law that relied on interrogation methods presumably verging on or including torture. The Bush administration's continuing reliance on secret CIA prisons violates basic human rights standards, Human Rights Watch said. The group called the secret detention "a blatant violation of international law." The group said the announcement that al-Iraqi was transferred to the Guantánamo Bay detention facility from CIA custody raises worrying questions about how long he has been detained by the CIA, where he was held, what kind of treatment he endured, and whether other prisoners still remain in CIA detention. The CIA has previously held numerous detainees for months and even years. "The CIA's secret detention of Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi is a blatant violation of international law," said Joanne Mariner, terrorism and counterterrorism director at Human Rights Watch. "This transfer shows that Congress will have to act to end the CIA's illegal detention program." Numerous detainees previously transferred from CIA custody to Guantánamo have claimed that they were subjected to torture. Human Rights Watch renewed its call to have suspected criminal detainees at Guantánamo transferred to federal courts and prosecuted under US federal criminal law. "If al-Hadi and other detainees committed the crimes they're accused of, they should be tried for acts of terrorism in federal court, under a fair and transparent system," said Mariner. On Sept. 6, 2006, President Bush publicly revealed the existence of the CIA's secret detention and interrogation program. Although he stated that, as of that moment, there were no prisoners in CIA custody, he did not promise that the program was closing permanently. US officials have told journalists that al-Hadi was arrested in late 2006, meaning that al-Hadi has been in secret CIA custody for at least five months. It is possible that the president's statement that the CIA's prisons were empty in September 2006 was true only in a technical sense, and that in fact prisoners were being held in "proxy detention"–held in another country on behalf of the United States. "We're skeptical that President Bush was telling the whole story when he said the CIA prisons were empty," Mariner said. "It's quite possible that his claim was based on legal niceties: that while detainees were in the custody of other countries, the CIA had the power to determine their fate."