- The Guardian, Friday 23 January 2009
When Barack Obama ordered the closure of Guantánamo Bay, human rights activists said it was just the tip of the iceberg. This time he's gone after the iceberg.
The US president's order to close the network of secret prisons around the world - known as CIA "black sites" - which contain an untold number of "ghost detainees" whose existence has never properly been confirmed will be just as satisfying for campaigners.
The black sites were authorised by a classified presidential directive six days after the September 11 attacks in 2001, and only acknowledged five years later in a speech in which George Bush declined to say where they were and insisted only that the interrogation techniques used there were "tough ... safe, and lawful, and necessary".
The point of black sites appears to be to allow detainees to be interrogated in ways that would not have been allowed elsewhere. The black sites that first came to light were in Afghanistan, where Bagram air base and a notorious dungeon codenamed "the Salt Pit" were used as interrogation centres and clearing centres for captives from the around the world to be held before being flown to Guantánamo.
As more detainees emerged and as investigators pieced together the movements of CIA planes used under a secret "rendition" programme, the black site network began to emerge. Thailand was an early venue, after post-9/11 fears that east Asia would become the new front line in the battle against jihadis.
Poland and Romania later hosted secret interrogation units for high-value detainees (HVDs). Some of the most important HVDs, including the alleged 9/11 mastermind, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, appear to have been held at Szymany airport in northern Poland.
US bases in Balkan states - Camp Eagle in Bosnia and Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo - were also used for holding suspected jihadis before they were sent to Afghanistan and then on to Guantánamo. The Council of Europe's human rights envoy described Bondsteel as a "smaller version of Guantánamo". The human rights group Reprieve has since identified a network of secret jails in the Horn of Africa, including Camp Lemonier, a former French foreign legion base now run by the US military in Djibouti, where Clive Stafford Smith, the group's director, says up to a thousand detainees may have been held in recent years.
Stafford Smith also said that up to 17 ships have been used as floating prisons, beyond the reach of Red Cross inspectors, journalists and activists. Reprieve believes that at least one of those ships was near the British-run Indian Ocean island Diego Garcia. It also says that the island, leased to the US military, has been used as a secret detention facility. No one knows how many detainees are still being held in these secret centres. Stafford Smith has suggested there could be as many as 27,000, but that would include prisoners held on the Iraq "battlefield".
As Donald Rumsfeld, the former defence secretary, once said: "We know there are some things we do not know, but there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don't know." If the Obama administration and the Democratic majority in Congress mean what they say, the details seem bound to come to light, and could become the basis of human rights prosecutions against members of the Bush administration.
