I've been commenting for days, if not a few months, the the CIA still had Secret Prisons. I had based this on the CIAs refusal to confirm they if they were still using Secret Prisons when asked by the Press. All they would comment was that all the ones Bush had talked about, had been closed.
U.S. officials would not say where al-Iraqi was captured, but sources ruled out all of Iraq's immediate neighbors, as well as Pakistan and Afghanistan, and said he was not stopped at a border crossing. Officials said that several recent reports that al-Iraqi was operating freely were erroneous and that he has been in custody, in a third country, since late December. WaPo
The spin is:
"What the president said in September was that there was no one in CIA custody at that time," an intelligence official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "This individual was captured late last year, well after the president's speech
Back in Sept of 06 there was plenty of news about the prisons, much of which now seems false to have been pure spin and deception. I'm sure not many of us are surprised by this. One of the more curious things to me is the claim that the secret hells had been closed because the CIA refused to run them anymore. If that is true, who has been running them and where are they ?
The Bush administration had to empty its secret prisons and transfer terror suspects to the military-run detention centre at Guantánamo this month in part because CIA interrogators had refused to carry out further interrogations and run the secret facilities, according to former CIA officials and people close to the programme.
http://www.ft.com/...
Lest we forget why Bush had finally said he closed the CIA prison, it was because SCOTUS had told him he had to abide by the Geneva Convention and other Treatys. This from Human Rights Watch.
Does holding persons in secret violate international human rights law?
When a person is forcibly detained by government officials who refuse to acknowledge the detention and who keep the person from the protection of the law, this is called a forced disappearance.12 The U.S. has long condemned other countries that engage in forced disappearances, and was instrumental in drafting and approving United Nations statements that condemn all enforced disappearances with no exceptions for national security or emergencies. As described by the ICRC, "No matter how legitimate the reasons for a person's detention, no one has the right to keep that person's fate or whereabouts secret or to deny that he or she is being detained."
"Disappeared" detainees are cut off from the outside world and from the protection of the law and thus subject to the whim of their captors. This has the effect of suspending the rights of "disappeared" persons and placing them in a situation of complete defenselessness, making them especially vulnerable to torture and other ill-treatment.
Do the laws of war apply to these detainees?
The U.S. has claimed that all persons captured in the "global war on terror" are "enemy combatants" who may be detained without charges for the duration of the conflict. Even if this were the case, a view Human Rights Watch contests,15 the U.S. has not met even its basic obligations for detainees held under the laws of war. The U.S. has never stated the legal basis for the detention of any of detainees disappeared into secret prisons, the circumstances of their capture, or their individual status as combatants or terrorism suspects – the U.S. does not even acknowledge they are being held. hrw
Poor Nancy has been handed on a Silver platter the High Crimes to Impeach Bush with. This had been admitted to,and not only that Bush has defied SCOTUS. He has not only tried to make Congress useless, he has now done the same to SCOTUS. Can you say Unitary Executive ? From the WaPo piece this about says it all.
Human Rights Watch said in a statement, referring to al-Iraqi. The group called the secret detention "a blatant violation of international law."
You have enough info and links to make your own judgments about all this so I will close with a quote from the late Sir Winston Churchill.
"The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgement of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist." --Sir Winston Churchill, November 21, 1943.