Group lists 39 secret detainees
WASHINGTON — A human rights group Tuesday published the names of 38 men and one woman it believes have been locked up in secret overseas facilities, and asked President Bush to disclose the identity and fate of all detainees the CIA has held since 2001.
Among those that Human Rights Watch suspects of being held by the CIA now or at one time is Khalid Zawahiri, an Egyptian allegedly picked up in the South Waziristan region of Pakistan in February 2004. Officials from the group say Zawahiri is probably the son and former associate of Ayman Zawahiri, said to be second in command of Al Qaeda.
Another on the list is Aafia Siddiqui, a woman who made the FBI's Most Wanted list for her possible role in alleged Al Qaeda plots to launch attacks on U.S. soil.
The New York-based human rights organization included those and other names in a Monday letter to Bush that was made public Tuesday.
The group also released a report titled "Ghost Prisoner: Two Years in Secret CIA Detention," which tells the story of another terrorism suspect, Marwan Jabour, a Palestinian man who claims he was tortured and held incommunicado for more than two years by the United States and Pakistan.
Human Rights Watch officials said the letter and the report were part of an effort to pry loose more information about detainees who have been held by the CIA or other U.S. authorities.
The White House and CIA had not acknowledged that the detainee program existed until September, when Bush announced that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the suspected architect of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and 13 others had been held by the CIA and were being transferred to military custody at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The Defense Department is preparing to try those men, including some accused of being Al Qaeda's most dangerous operatives, in some form of hybrid military-criminal justice proceeding.
Joanne Mariner, director of Human Rights Watch's Terrorism and Counterterrorism Program, said in her letter to Bush that the organization understood the need to detain and incarcerate suspected terrorists. But she also said the United States was breaking the law by holding them in custody without announcing it and by not giving them a way to contest their incarceration.
"If such persons are indeed implicated in terrorist crimes, they should be charged and prosecuted, not subject to enforced disappearance," Mariner wrote.
