SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) – Two Yemeni men say they were held in solitary confinement in secret, underground U.S. detention facilities in an unknown country and interrogated by masked men for more than 18 months without being charged or allowed any contact with the outside world, Amnesty International said Wednesday.
The report appeared to confirm long-standing allegations that the United States has held “secret detainees” in its war on terror, according to Amnesty and human rights lawyers.
“We fear that what we have heard from these two men is just one small part of the much broader picture of U.S. secret detentions around the world,” said Sharon Critoph, a researcher at Amnesty International who interviewed the men in Yemen.
In its report, Amnesty urged the United States to provide details about these and other prisoners.
“The U.S. authorities must disclose the identities of all people who are being held in secret, where they’re being held, and open these places up to international scrutiny,” Critoph said.
U.S. officials have previously denied allegations of secret detention facilities, saying they hold terror suspects only at the U.S. Naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In June, U.S. officials denied a suggestion from the U.N.'s special expert on torture, Manfred Nowak, that some undeclared holding areas could include American ships cruising international waters. Others have suggested “high-value” detainees could be held secretly in Diego Garcia, a British-held island in the Indian Ocean that the United States rents as a strategic military base.
Lawyers who represent detainees at Guantanamo have long believed that the CIA or other U.S. government agencies have used clandestine jails for terror suspects.
“The fact that there are underground CIA facilities somewhere where people are being tortured has been known for a while,” said Michael Ratner of the U.S. Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City.
Amnesty interviewed Salah Nasser Salim Ali and Muhammad Faraj Ahmed Bashmilah in a jail in Yemen in late June. The group also spoke to a Yemeni government official who said the men were being held in that country only because it was a condition of their release from U.S. custody.
Salah told the rights group that he was originally detained in Indonesia in August 2003 and then flown several days later to Jordan; Muhammad said he was detained in Jordan in October 2003 while on a trip to visit his mother.
Both men claimed they were tortured by Jordanian intelligence agents for four days and then flown to what they believe were underground jails in an unknown location.
Once there, they were held in solitary confinement for more than 18 months, interrogated daily by U.S. guards who dressed “like Ninjas” and blared Western music all day and night. No charges were ever filed against them, they said.
The men said their first jail was underground, surrounded by high walls and that it took more than 4 hours to fly there from Jordan. After six to eight months they were transferred to a modern prison run by U.S. officials a three-hour plane journey away that also appeared to be underground.
“These men were stripped of their dignity, at times beaten, spat on, deprived of sleep and threatened with sexual abuse and electric shocks,” William F. Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International USA , said in a statement. “Their testimony will hopefully shed light on U.S. detention centers just as sinister, yet less well-known, than Guantanamo.”