Dozens of prisoners held by CIA still missing, fates unknown

by Dafna Linzer (ProPublica)
22 Apr, 2009

Last week, we pointed out that one of the newly released Bush-era memos inadvertently confirmed that the CIA held an al-Qaeda suspect [1] named Hassan Ghul in a secret prison and subjected him to what Bush administration lawyers called "enhanced interrogation techniques." The CIA has never acknowledged holding Ghul, and his whereabouts today are secret.

But Ghul is not the only such prisoner who remains missing. At least three dozen others who were held in the CIA's secret prisons overseas appear to be missing as well. Efforts by human rights organizations to track their whereabouts have been unsuccessful, and no foreign governments have acknowledged holding them. (See the full list. [2])

In September 2007, Michael V. Hayden, then director of the CIA, said [3] "fewer than 100 people had been detained at CIA's facilities." One memo [4] (PDF) released last week confirmed that the CIA had custody of at least 94 people as of May 2005 and "employed enhanced techniques to varying degrees in the interrogations of 28 of these ".”

Former President George W. Bush publicly acknowledged the CIA program in September 2006, and transferred 14 prisoners from the secret jails to Guantanamo. Many other prisoners, who had "little or no additional intelligence value," Bush said, "have been returned to their home countries for prosecution or detention by their governments."

Bush did not reveal their identities or whereabouts -- information that would have allowed the International Committee for the Red Cross [5] to find them -- or the terms under which the prisoners were handed over to foreign jailers. The U.S. government has never released information describing the threat that any of them posed.

Some of those prisoners have since been released by third countries holding them. But it is still unclear what has happened to dozens of others.

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