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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
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April 5th,
2007 - Ethiopia Secret Prisons Under Scrutiny News article by the Associated
Press |
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Ethiopia Secret Prisons
Under Scrutiny By Anthony Mitchell Associated Press April 5, 2007 Nairobi, Kenya - Ethiopia
was under pressure Thursday to release details on detainees from 19 countries
held at secret prisons in the country where U.S. agents have carried out
interrogations in the hunt for al-Qaida in the Horn of Africa. Canada, Eritrea and Sweden
were lobbying for information about their citizens. Human rights groups say
hundreds of prisoners, including women and children, have been transferred
secretly and illegally to the prisons in Ethiopia. An investigation by The
Associated Press found that CIA and FBI agents have been interrogating the
detainees. Officials from Ethiopia were
not immediately available for comment, but in the past have refused to
acknowledge the existence of the prisons. Ethiopia has a long history
of human rights abuses. In recent years, it has also been a key U.S. ally in
the fight against al-Qaida, which has been trying to sink roots among Muslims
in the Horn of Africa. Canadian citizen Bashir
Makhtal is among the detainees, Canadian authorities said. "We know that he is in
Ethiopia," Canadian Foreign Affairs spokesman Rejean Beaulieu said.
"We've been making, and continue to make, representations both here in
Ottawa and in Ethiopia to get access to him," Beaulieu said. Some detainees were swept up
by Ethiopian troops who drove a radical Islamist government out of
neighboring Somalia late last year, according to Kenyan officials and police.
Others have been deported from Kenya, where many Somalis have fled the
continuing violence in their homeland, they said. They are kept without charge
or access to lawyers and families. The CIA began an aggressive
program in 2002 to interrogate suspected terrorists at an unknown number of
secret locations from Southeast Asia to Europe. Prisoners were frequently
picked up in one country and transferred to a prison in another, where they
were held incommunicado by a cooperative intelligence service. But President
Bush announced in September that all the detainees had been moved to military
custody at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. U.S. government officials
contacted by AP have acknowledged questioning prisoners in Ethiopia. But they
said American agents were following the law and were fully justified in their
actions because they are investigating past attacks and current threats of
terrorism. The detainees include at
least one U.S. citizen and some from Canada, Sweden and France, according to
a list compiled by a Kenyan Muslim rights group and flight manifests obtained
by AP. They also include citizens from Eritrea, Saudi Arabia, Tanzania,
Rwanda, Tunisia and Morocco. Eritrea is asking Kenyan
authorities for details on three of its citizens, handed over to Somalia on
Jan. 20. Human rights groups say they are in Ethiopia. "At this juncture, the
Government of Eritrea again calls on the Kenyan authorities to get the three
Eritrean citizens released at the earliest and repatriate them to their
country," according to a statement by Eritrea's Information Ministry. "Furthermore,
it reminds the Kenyan authorities that the responsibility for the lives of
the Eritrean citizens rests on them." Eritrea and Ethiopia are
bitter rivals and have no diplomatic relations. Kenyan government spokesman
Alfred Mutua said the government had no comment to make until it received an
official communication from the Eritrean government. Swedish Foreign Ministry
spokeswoman Nina Ersman said they had managed to gain access to its nationals
still being detained, including two Swedish citizens and one who holds a
permanent residence permit. "We have visited them,
but not in recent days," she told the AP. She said she did not know the
dates of the visit. Jonathan Hafetz, a lawyer at
the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law who
has been assisting the family of a detained U.S. citizen, 24-year-old Amir
Mohamed Meshal, said Thursday he had still not spoken to him. The State Department said
late Wednesday that a U.S. Embassy official made a third visit to Meshal on
Wednesday. In a message passed from the
official to his parents, Amir Meshal asked his family to be
"patient." Associated Press writers
Karl Ritter in Stockholm, Sweden, and Rebecca Santana in Tinton Falls, New
Jersey, contributed to this report. External link: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/wire/sns-ap-ethiopia-secret-prisons,1,2149344.story |