America's Secret Afghan Prisons

Image by Truthout.org via Flickr

January 28, 2010

The research for this story was supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism. This article also appears online at TomDispatch.com. You can listen to an interview with Anand Gopal here.

One quiet, wintry night last year in the eastern Afghan town of Khost, a young government employee named Ismatullah simply vanished. He had last been seen in the town's bazaar with a group of friends. Family members scoured Khost's dusty streets for days. Village elders contacted Taliban commanders in the area who were wont to kidnap government workers, but they had never heard of the young man. Even the governor got involved, ordering his police to round up nettlesome criminal gangs that sometimes preyed on young bazaargoers for ransom.

But the hunt turned up nothing. Spring and summer came and went with no sign of Ismatullah. Then one day, long after the police and village elders had abandoned their search, a courier delivered a neat handwritten note on Red Cross stationery to the family. In it, Ismatullah informed them that he was in Bagram, an American prison more than 200 miles away. US forces had picked him up while he was on his way home from the bazaar, the terse letter stated, and he didn't know when he would be freed.

In the past few years Pashtun villagers in Afghanistan's rugged heartland have begun to lose faith in the American project. Many of them can point to the precise moment of this transformation, and it usually took place in the dead of night, when most of the country was fast asleep. In its attempt to stamp out the growing Taliban insurgency and Al Qaeda, the US military has been arresting suspects and sending them to one of a number of secret detention areas on military bases, often on the slightest suspicion and without the knowledge of their families. These night raids have become even more feared and hated in Afghanistan than coalition airstrikes. The raids and detentions, little known or understood outside the Pashtun villages, have been turning Afghans against the very forces many of them greeted as liberators just a few years ago.

One Dark Night in November

November 19, 2009, 3:15 am. A loud blast woke the villagers of a leafy neighborhood outside Ghazni, a city of ancient provenance in the country's south. A team of US soldiers burst through the front gate of the home of Majidullah Qarar, the spokesman for Afghanistan's agriculture minister. Qarar was in Kabul at the time, but his relatives were home, four of them sleeping in the family's one-room guesthouse. One of them, Hamidullah, who sold carrots at the local bazaar, ran toward the door of the guesthouse. He was immediately shot but managed to crawl back inside, leaving a trail of blood behind him. Then Azim, a baker, darted toward his injured cousin. He, too, was shot and crumpled to the floor. The fallen men cried out to the two relatives--both of them children--remaining in the room. But they refused to move, glued to their beds in silent horror.

The foreign soldiers, most of them tattooed and bearded, then went on to the main compound. They threw clothes on the floor, smashed dinner plates and forced open closets. Finally they found the man they were looking for: Habib-ur-Rahman, a computer programmer and government employee. Rahman was responsible for converting Microsoft Windows from English to the local Pashto language so that government offices could use the software. The Afghan translator accompanying the soldiers said they were acting on a tip that Rahman was a member of Al Qaeda.

They took the barefoot Rahman and a cousin to a helicopter some distance away and transported them to a small American base in a neighboring province for interrogation. After two days, US forces released Rahman's cousin. But Rahman has not been seen or heard from since.

"We've called his phone, but it doesn't answer," said his cousin Qarar, the agriculture minister's spokesman. Using his powerful connections, Qarar enlisted local police, parliamentarians, the governor and even the agriculture minister himself in the search for his cousin, but they turned up nothing. Government officials who independently investigated the scene in the aftermath of the raid and corroborated the claims of the family also pressed for an answer as to why two of Qarar's family members were killed. American forces issued a statement saying that the dead were "enemy militants [who] demonstrated hostile intent."

Weeks after the raid, the family remains bitter. "Everyone in the area knew we were a family that worked for the government," Qarar said. "Rahman couldn't even leave the city, because if the Taliban caught him in the countryside they would have killed him."

Beyond the question of Rahman's guilt or innocence, it's how he was taken that has left such a residue of hatred among his family. "Did they have to kill my cousins? Did they have to destroy our house?" Qarar asked. "They knew where Rahman worked. Couldn't they have at least tried to come with a warrant in the daytime? We would have forced Rahman to comply."

"I used to go on TV and argue that people should support this government and the foreigners," he added. "But I was wrong. Why should anyone do so? I don't care if I get fired for saying it, but that's the truth."

The Dogs of War

Night raids are only the first step in the American detention process in Afghanistan. Suspects are usually sent to one of a series of prisons on US military bases around the country. There are officially nine such jails, called Field Detention Sites in military parlance. They are small holding areas, often just a clutch of cells divided by plywood, and are mainly used for prisoner interrogations.

In the early years of the war, these were but way stations for those en route to Bagram prison, a facility with a notorious reputation for abusive behavior. As a spotlight of international attention fell on Bagram in recent years, wardens there cleaned up their act, and the mistreatment of prisoners began to shift to the little-noticed Field Detention Sites.

Of the twenty-four former detainees interviewed for this article, seventeen claim to have been abused at or en route to these sites. Doctors, government officials and the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, an independent Afghan body mandated by the Afghan Constitution to investigate abuse allegations, corroborate twelve of these claims.

One of these former detainees is Noor Agha Sher Khan, who used to be a police officer in Gardez, a mud-caked town in the eastern part of the country. According to Sher Khan, American forces detained him in a night raid in 2003 and brought him to a Field Detention Site at a nearby US base. "They interrogated me the whole night," he recalled, "but I had nothing to tell them." Sher Khan worked for a police commander whom US forces had detained on suspicion of having ties to the insurgency. He had occasionally acted as a driver for this commander, which made him suspicious in American eyes.

The interrogators blindfolded him, taped his mouth shut and chained him to the ceiling, he alleges. Occasionally they unleashed a dog, which repeatedly bit him. At one point they removed the blindfold and forced him to kneel on a long wooden bar. "They tied my hands to a pulley [above] and pushed me back and forth as the bar rolled across my shins. I screamed and screamed." They then pushed him to the ground and forced him to swallow twelve bottles of water. "Two people held my mouth open, and they poured water down my throat until my stomach was full and I became unconscious," he said. "It was as if someone had inflated me." After he was roused, he vomited uncontrollably.

This continued for a number of days. Sometimes he was hung upside down from the ceiling, other times he was blindfolded for extended periods. Eventually he was moved to Bagram, where the torture ceased. Four months later he was quietly released, with a letter of apology from US authorities for wrongfully imprisoning him.

An investigation of Sher Khan's case by the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission and an independent doctor found that he had wounds consistent with the abusive treatment he alleges. American forces have declined to comment on the specifics of his case, but a spokesman said that some soldiers involved in detentions in this part of the country had been given unspecified "administrative punishments." He added that "all detainees are treated humanely," except for isolated cases.

The Disappeared

Some of those taken to the Field Detention Sites are deemed innocuous and never sent to Bagram. Even then, some allege abuse. Such was the case with Hajji Ehsanullah, snatched one winter night in 2008 from his home in the southern province of Zabul. He was taken to a detention site in Khost Province, some 200 miles away. He returned home thirteen days later, his skin scarred by dog bites and with memory difficulties that, according to his doctor, resulted from a blow to the head. American forces had dropped him off at a gas station in Khost after three days of interrogation. It took him ten more days to find his way home.

Others taken to these sites seem to have disappeared entirely. In the hardscrabble villages of the Pashtun south, where rumors grow more abundantly than the most bountiful crop, locals whisper tales of people who were captured and executed. Most have no evidence. But occasionally a body turns up. Such was the case at a detention site on a US military base in Helmand Province, where in 2003 a US military coroner wrote in the autopsy report of a detainee who died in US custody (later made available through the Freedom of Information Act): "Death caused by the multiple blunt force injuries to the lower torso and legs complicated by rhabdomyolysis (release of toxic byproducts into the system due to destruction of muscle). Manner of death is homicide."

In the dust-swept province of Khost one day this past December, US forces launched a night raid on the village of Motai, killing six people and capturing nine, according to nearly a dozen local government authorities and witnesses. Two days later, the bodies of two of those detained--plastic cuffs binding their hands--were found more than a mile from the largest US base in the area. A US military spokesman denies any involvement in the deaths and declines to comment on the details of the raid. Local Afghan officials and tribal elders steadfastly maintain that the two were killed while in US custody. American authorities released four other villagers in subsequent days. The fate of the three remaining captives is unknown.

The matter could be cleared up if the US military were less secretive about its detention process. But secrecy has been the order of the day. The nine Field Detention Sites are enveloped in a blanket of official secrecy, but at least the Red Cross and other humanitarian organizations are aware of them. There may, however, be other sites whose existence on the scores of US and Afghan military bases that dot the country have not been disclosed. One example, according to former detainees, is a detention facility at Rish-Khor, an Afghan army base that sits atop a mountain overlooking the capital, Kabul.

One night last year US forces raided Zaiwalat, a tiny village that fits snugly into the mountains of Wardak Province, a few dozen miles west of Kabul, and netted nine locals. They brought the captives to Rish-Khor and interrogated them for three days. "They kept us in a container," recalled Rehmatullah Muhammad, one of the nine. "It was made of steel. We were handcuffed for three days continuously. We barely slept those days." The plain-clothed interrogators accused Muhammad and the others of giving food and shelter to the Taliban. The suspects were then sent to Bagram and released after four months. (A number of former detainees said they were interrogated by plainclothed officials, but they did not know if these officials belonged to the military, the CIA or private contractors.)

Afghan human rights campaigners worry that US forces may be using secret detention sites like the one allegedly at Rish-Khor to carry out interrogations away from prying eyes. The US military, however, denies even having knowledge of the facility.

The Black Jail

Much less secret is the final stop for most captives: the Bagram Theater Internment Facility. These days ominously dubbed "Obama's Guantánamo," Bagram nonetheless now offers the best conditions for captives during the entire detention process.

Its modern life as a prison began in 2002, when small numbers of detainees from throughout Asia were incarcerated there on the first leg of an odyssey that would eventually bring them to the US detention facility in Guantánamo, Cuba. In later years, however, it became the main destination for those caught within Afghanistan as part of the growing war there. By 2009 the inmate population had swelled to more than 700. Housed in a windowless old Soviet hangar, the prison consists of two rows of serried, cagelike cells bathed continuously in light. Guards walk along a platform that runs across the mesh tops of the pens, an easy position from which to supervise the prisoners below.

Regular, even infamous, abuse in the style of Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison marked Bagram's early years. Abdullah Mujahid, for example, was apprehended in the village of Kar Marchi in the eastern province of Paktia in 2003. Although Mujahid was a Tajik militia commander who had led an armed uprising against the Taliban in their waning days, US forces accused him of having ties to the insurgency. "In Bagram we were handcuffed, blindfolded and had our feet chained for days," he recalled. "They didn't allow us to sleep at all for thirteen days and nights." A guard would strike his legs every time he dozed off. Daily, he could hear the screams of tortured inmates and the unmistakable sound of shackles dragging across the floor.

Then one day a team of soldiers dragged him to an aircraft but refused to tell him where he was going. Eventually he landed at another prison, where the air felt thick and wet. As he walked through the row of cages, inmates began to shout, "This is Guantánamo! You are in Guantánamo!" He would learn there that he was accused of leading the Pakistani Islamist group Lashkar-e-Taiba (which in reality was led by another person who had the same name and who died in 2006). The United States eventually released him and returned him to Afghanistan.

Former Bagram detainees allege that they were regularly beaten, subjected to blaring music twenty-four hours a day, prevented from sleeping, stripped naked and forced to assume what interrogators term "stress positions." The nadir came in late 2002, when interrogators beat two inmates to death.

According to former detainees and organizations that work with them, the US Special Forces also run a second, secret prison somewhere on Bagram Air Base that the Red Cross still does not have access to. Used primarily for interrogations, it is so feared by prisoners that they have dubbed it the "Black Jail."

One day two years ago, US forces came to get Noor Muhammad outside the town of Kajaki in the southern province of Helmand. Muhammad, a physician, was running a clinic that served all comers, including the Taliban. The soldiers raided his clinic and his home, killing five people (including two patients) and detaining both his father and him. The next day villagers found the handcuffed body of Muhammad's father, apparently killed by a gunshot.

The soldiers took Muhammad to the Black Jail. "It was a tiny, narrow corridor, with lots of cells on both sides and a big steel gate and bright lights," he said. "We didn't know when it was night and when it was day." He was held in a windowless concrete room in solitary confinement. Soldiers regularly dragged him by his neck and refused him food and water. They accused him of providing medical care to the insurgents, to which he replied, "I am a doctor. It's my duty to provide care to every human being who comes to my clinic, whether they are Taliban or from the government."

Eventually Muhammad was released, but he has since closed his clinic and left his home village. "I am scared of the Americans and the Taliban," he said. "I'm happy my father is dead, so he doesn't have to experience this hell."

Afraid of the Dark

In the past two years American officials have moved to reform the main prison at Bagram, if not the Black Jail. Torture has stopped, and prison officials now boast that the typical inmate gains fifteen pounds while in custody. In the early months of this year, officials plan to open a dazzling new prison that will eventually replace Bagram, one with huge, airy cells, the latest medical equipment and rooms for vocational training. The Bagram prison itself will be handed over to the Afghans in the coming year, although the rest of the detention process will remain in US hands.

But human rights advocates say that concerns about the detention process remain. The US Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that inmates at Guantánamo cannot be stripped of their right to habeus corpus, but it stopped short of making the same argument for Bagram (officials say that since it is in the midst of a war zone, US civil rights legislation does not apply). Inmates there do not have access to a lawyer, as they do in Guantánamo. Most say they have no idea why they have been detained. They do now appear before a review panel every six months, which is intended to reassess their detention, but their ability to ask questions about their situation is limited. "I was only allowed to answer yes or no and not explain anything at my hearing," said former detainee Rehmatullah Muhammad.

Nonetheless, the improvement in Bagram's conditions begs the question: can the United States fight a cleaner war? That's what Afghan war commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal promised last summer: fewer civilian casualties, fewer of the feared house raids and a more transparent detention process.

The American troops that operate under NATO command have begun to enforce stricter rules of engagement: they may now officially hold detainees for only ninety-six hours before transferring them to the Afghan authorities or freeing them, and Afghan forces must take the lead in house searches. American soldiers, when questioned, bristle at these restrictions--and have ways of circumventing them. "Sometimes we detain people, then, when the ninety-six hours are up, we transfer them to the Afghans," said one marine who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "They rough them up a bit for us and then send them back to us for another ninety-six hours. This keeps going until we get what we want."

A simpler way of dancing around the rules is to call in the Special Operations Forces--the Navy SEALs, Green Berets and others--which are not under NATO command and thus not bound by the stricter rules of engagement. These elite troops are behind most of the night raids and detentions in the search for "high-value suspects." Military officials say in interviews that the new restrictions have not affected the number of raids and detentions at all. The actual change, however, is more subtle: the detention process has shifted almost entirely to areas and actors that can best avoid public scrutiny--small field prisons and Special Operations Forces.

The shift signals a deeper reality of war, say American soldiers: you can't fight guerrillas without invasive raids and detentions, any more than you can fight them without bullets. Seen through the eyes of a US soldier, Afghanistan is a scary place. The men are bearded and turbaned. They pray incessantly. In most of the country, women are barred from leaving the house. Many Afghans own an assault rifle. "You can't trust anyone," said Rodrigo Arias, a marine based in the northeastern province of Kunar. "I've nearly been killed in ambushes, but the villagers don't tell us anything. But they usually know something."

An officer who has worked in the Field Detention Sites says that it takes dozens of raids to turn up a useful suspect. "Sometimes you've got to bust down doors. Sometimes you've got to twist arms. You have to cast a wide net, but when you get the right person, it makes all the difference."

For Arias, it's a matter of survival. "I want to go home in one piece. If that means rounding people up, then round them up." To question this, he said, is to question whether the war itself is worth fighting. "That's not my job. The people in Washington can figure that out."

If night raids and detentions are an unavoidable part of modern counterinsurgency warfare, then so is the resentment they breed. "We were all happy when the Americans first came. We thought they would bring peace and stability," said Rehmatullah Muhammad. "But now most people in my village want them to leave." A year after Muhammad was released, his nephew was detained. Two months later, some other residents of Zaiwalat were seized. It has become a predictable pattern in Muhammad's village: Taliban forces ambush American convoys as they pass through it, and then retreat into the thick fruit orchards nearby. The Americans return at night to pick up suspects. In the past two years, sixteen people have been taken and ten killed in night raids in this single village of about 300, according to villagers. In the same period, they say, the insurgents killed one local and did not take anyone hostage.

The people of Zaiwalat now fear the night raids more than the Taliban. There are nights when Muhammad's children hear the distant thrum of a helicopter and rush into his room. He consoles them but admits he needs solace himself. "I know I should be too old for it," he said, "but this war has made me afraid of the dark."

About Anand Gopal

Anand Gopal has reported in Afghanistan for the Christian Science Monitor and the Wall Street Journal. His dispatches can be read at anandgopal.com. He is working on a book about the war in Afghanistan.

Death in Detention: Russia's Prison Scandal

by Amy Knight

Nataliya Magnitskaya, the mother of Sergei Magnitsky, holding a portrait of him and letters he sent to her from jail, Moscow, November 30, 2009 (Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP Images)

The horrors of Soviet prisons and labor camps were described vividly in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, Yevgenia Ginzburg’s Into the Whirlwind, and later, by the Soviet dissident and former political prisoner Anatoly Marchenko, in his 1969 memoir, My Testimony. To judge from a disturbing new report about the tragic death of 37-year-old lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in a Moscow prison in late November, Russia’s current penal system is almost as bad as it used to be.

As was the case under Stalin and his successors, the treatment of prisoners reflects the deeper problems of a politicized law enforcement system that routinely disregards human rights. Now, the Magnitsky case seems to have persuaded Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to begin to address these problems—though his powerful Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin, has a vested interest in preserving the status quo.

Documents Show Officials Covered Up Deaths in Immigrant Deaths

Image via Wikipedia

By NINA BERNSTEIN

Published: January 9, 2010

Silence has long shrouded the men and women who die in the nation’s immigration jails. For years, they went uncounted and unnamed in the public record. Even in 2008, when The New York Times obtained and published a federal government list of such deaths, few facts were available about who these people were and how they died.

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Nery Romero, who died in immigration detention in 2007.

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Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

The family of Nery Romero in Elmont, N.Y., in 2007, after he was found hanging in his detention cell.

Boubacar Bah, who suffered fatal head injuries in an immigration jail the same year.

But behind the scenes, it is now clear, the deaths had already generated thousands of pages of government documents, including scathing investigative reports that were kept under wraps, and a trail of confidential memos and BlackBerry messages that show officials working to stymie outside inquiry.

The documents, obtained over recent months by The Times and the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act, concern most of the 107 deaths in detention counted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement since October 2003, after the agency was created within the Department of Homeland Security.

The Obama administration has vowed to overhaul immigration detention, a haphazard network of privately run jails, federal centers and county cells where the government holds noncitizens while it tries to deport them.

But as the administration moves to increase oversight within the agency, the documents show how officials — some still in key positions — used their role as overseers to cover up evidence of mistreatment, deflect scrutiny by the news media or prepare exculpatory public statements after gathering facts that pointed to substandard care or abuse.

As one man lay dying of head injuries suffered in a New Jersey immigration jail in 2007, for example, a spokesman for the federal agency told The Times that he could learn nothing about the case from government authorities. In fact, the records show, the spokesman had alerted those officials to the reporter’s inquiry, and they conferred at length about sending the man back to Africa to avoid embarrassing publicity.

In another case that year, investigators from the agency’s Office of Professional Responsibility concluded that unbearable, untreated pain had been a significant factor in the suicide of a 22-year-old detainee at the Bergen County Jail in New Jersey, and that the medical unit was so poorly run that other detainees were at risk.

The investigation found that jail medical personnel had falsified a medication log to show that the detainee, a Salvadoran named Nery Romero, had been given Motrin. The fake entry was easy to detect: When the drug was supposedly administered, Mr. Romero was already dead.

Yet those findings were never disclosed to the public or to Mr. Romero’s relatives on Long Island, who had accused the jail of abruptly depriving him of his prescription painkiller for a broken leg. And an agency supervisor wrote that because other jails were “finicky” about accepting detainees with known medical problems like Mr. Romero’s, such people would continue to be placed at the Bergen jail as “a last resort.”

In a recent interview, Benjamin Feldman, a spokesman for the jail, which housed 1,503 immigration detainees last year, would not say whether any changes had been made since the death.

In February 2007, in the case of the dying African man, the immigration agency’s spokesman for the Northeast, Michael Gilhooly, rebuffed a Times reporter’s questions about the detainee, who had suffered a skull fracture at the privately run Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey. Mr. Gilhooly said that without a full name and alien registration number for the man, he could not check on the case.

But, records show, he had already filed a report warning top managers at the federal agency about the reporter’s interest and sharing information about the injured man, a Guinean tailor named Boubacar Bah. Mr. Bah, 52, had been left in an isolation cell without treatment for more than 13 hours before an ambulance was called.

While he lay in the hospital in a coma after emergency brain surgery, 10 agency managers in Washington and Newark conferred by telephone and e-mail about how to avoid the cost of his care and the likelihood of “increased scrutiny and/or media exposure,” according to a memo summarizing the discussion.

One option they explored was sending the dying man to Guinea, despite an e-mail message from the supervising deportation officer, who wrote, “I don’t condone removal in his present state as he has a catheter” and was unconscious. Another idea was renewing Mr. Bah’s canceled work permit in hopes of tapping into Medicaid or disability benefits.

Eventually, faced with paying $10,000 a month for nursing home care, officials settled on a third course: “humanitarian release” to cousins in New York who had protested that they had no way to care for him. But days before the planned release, Mr. Bah died.

Among the participants in the conferences was Nina Dozoretz, a longtime manager in the agency’s Division of Immigration Health Services who had won an award for cutting detainee health care costs. Later she was vice president of the Nakamoto Group, a company hired by the Bush administration to monitor detention. The Obama administration recently rehired her to lead its overhaul of detainee health care.

Asked about the conference call on Mr. Bah, Ms. Dozoretz said: “How many years ago was that? I don’t recall all the specifics if indeed there was a call.” She added, “I advise you to contact our public affairs office.” Mr. Gilhooly, the spokesman who had said he had no information on the case, would not comment.

On the day after Mr. Bah’s death in May 2007, Scott Weber, director of the Newark field office of the immigration enforcement agency, recommended in a memo that the agency take the unusual step of paying to send the body to Guinea for burial, to prevent his widow from showing up in the United States for a funeral and drawing news coverage.

Mr. Weber wrote that he believed the agency had handled Mr. Bah’s case appropriately. “However,” he added, “I also don’t want to stir up any media interest where none is warranted.” Helping to bury Mr. Bah overseas, he wrote, “will go a long way to putting this matter to rest.”

In the agency’s confidential files was a jail video showing Mr. Bah face down in the medical unit, hands cuffed behind his back, just before medical personnel sent him to a disciplinary cell. The tape shows him crying out repeatedly in his native Fulani, “Help, they are killing me!”

Almost a year after his death, the agency quietly closed the case without action. But Mr. Bah’s name had shown up on the first list of detention fatalities, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, and on May 5, 2008, his death was the subject of a front-page article in The Times.

Brian P. Hale, a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in an interview that the newly disclosed records represented the past, and that the agency’s new leaders were committed to transparency and greater oversight, including prompt public disclosure and investigation of every death, and more attention to detainee care in a better-managed system.

But the most recent documents show that the culture of secrecy has endured. And the past cover-ups underscore what some of the agency’s own employees say is a central flaw in the proposed overhaul: a reliance on the agency to oversee itself.

“Because ICE investigates itself there is no transparency and there is no reform or improvement,” Chris Crane, a vice president in the union that represents employees of the agency’s detention and removal operations, told a Congressional subcommittee on Dec. 10.

The agency has kept a database of detention fatalities at least since December 2005, when a National Public Radio investigation spurred a Congressional inquiry. In 2006, the agency issued standard procedures for all such deaths to be reported in detail to headquarters.

But internal documents suggest that officials were intensely concerned with controlling public information. In April 2007, Marc Raimondi, then an agency spokesman, warned top managers that a Washington Post reporter had asked about a list of 19 deaths that the civil liberties union had compiled, and about a dying man whose penile cancer had spread after going undiagnosed in detention, despite numerous medical requests for a biopsy.

“These are quite horrible medical stories,” Mr. Raimondi wrote, “and I think we’ll need to have a pretty strong response to keep this from becoming a very damaging national story that takes on long legs.”

That response was an all-out defense of detainee medical care over several months, including statistics that appeared to show that mortality rates in detention were declining, and were low compared with death rates in prisons.

Experts in detention health care called the comparison misleading; it also came to light that the agency was undercounting the number of detention deaths, as well as discharging some detainees shortly before they died. In August, litigation by the civil liberties union prompted the Obama administration to disclose that more than one in 10 immigrant detention deaths had been overlooked and omitted from a list submitted to Congress last year.

Two of those deaths had occurred in Arizona, in 2004 and 2007, at the Eloy Detention Center, run by the Corrections Corporation of America. Eloy had nine known fatalities — more than any other immigration jail under contract to the federal government. But Immigration and Customs Enforcement was still secretive. When a reporter for The Arizona Republic asked about the circumstances of those deaths, an agency spokesman told him the records were unavailable.

According to records The Times obtained in December, one Eloy detainee who died, in October 2008, was Emmanuel Owusu. An ailing 62-year-old barber who had arrived from Ghana on a student visa in 1972, he had been a legal permanent resident for 33 years, mostly in Chicago. Immigration authorities detained him in 2006, based on a 1979 conviction for misdemeanor battery and retail theft.

“I am confused as to how subject came into our custody???” the Phoenix field office director, Katrina S. Kane, wrote to subordinates. “Convicted in 1979? That’s a long time ago.”

In response, a report on his death was revised to refer to Mr. Owusu’s “lengthy criminal history ranging from 1977 to 1998.” It did not note that except for the battery conviction, that history consisted mostly of shoplifting offenses.

A diabetic with high blood pressure, he had been detained for two years at Eloy while he battled deportation. He died of a heart ailment weeks after his last appeal was dismissed.

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Sikh Inmates Caught in Maze of Vague Rules

Editor's Note: Many California state prisons are unaware that they can create regulations to accommodate the religious wishes of their Sikh prisoners, under a 2006 policy created by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

This story was done with a 2009 Irvine Foundation California Politics and Policy Fellowship administered by New America Media. It ran in India-West this week.

Image by roel1943 via Flickr

California state prisons continue to operate under a patchwork mosaic of policy for accommodating Sikh religion-mandated turbans and beards, despite three-year-old regulations specifically crafted to meet the community’s religious requirements.

Many state prison facilities are unaware that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation created regulations in 2006 governing Sikh religious attire, designed to bring the state in line with federal laws.

Officials contacted by India-West at San Quentin State Prison, California State Prison, Solano, and the CDCR itself were unaware of the new policy.

The new regulations are adjustments to California Penal Code Section 3000 regarding grooming in prison, and now permit acceptable “hair holding devices” in state facilities.

An old regulation, stating that hair not exceed three inches, has been struck out, along with regulations applying to beard length.

However, the regulations stipulate that each prison facility must form a religious review committee, which would then determine requests for religious accommodation on a case-by-case basis.

“Prisoners have a right to wear religious garb as their religion allows it,” Michael Risher, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union in San Francisco, told India-West. “But quite often, people are told they cannot practice their religion in prison.”

Sikhs are required by their religion to wear five articles of faith, including a turban, also known as a dastaar; a small sword known as a kirpan; unshorn hair, kesh; a wooden comb, kanga; a steel bracelet, kara; and a pair of shorts, known as kaccha.

For orthodox Sikhs, appearing in public without a turban is tantamount to a strip search, Neha Singh, western region director of the Sikh Coalition, told India-West. “It is very humiliating.”

Congress in 2000 enacted the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, which prohibits any prison facility receiving federal funding from placing restrictions on prisoners’ rights to practice their religion while incarcerated, in accordance with the provisions of the U.S. constitution’s first amendment. The first amendment prohibits Congress from impeding the free exercise of religion.

All state prisons and many local jails in California receive varying amounts of federal money.
State prisons in New York, Kentucky and Vermont, as well as federal prisons, allow turbans, unshorn hair and beards.

The CDCR began examining its own policies on Sikh religious accommodation in 2005, after Harpal Singh Ahluwalia — incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison for allegedly contracting to kill his wife — and Sikh prisoners at the California State Prison, Solano, began complaining of unfair treatment.

Regulations at the time mandated that prisoners keep their hair no longer than three inches; facial hair and turbans were not permitted. Muslims, however, were allowed to wear kufis, a sort of skull cap, and Jewish prisoners were allowed to wear yarmulkes.

The Sikh Coalition, a national civil rights organization, was contacted by Ahluwalia and others, and began investigating the claims of unfair treatment and the inability to practice the Sikh religion while incarcerated.

Requests for vegetarian meals — many Sikhs eat no meat — also went unheeded at both facilities. In 2004, 72-year-old Khem Singh — a former priest incarcerated at Corcoran State Prison for allegedly molesting a young girl during Sunday prayers — reportedly died of starvation after refusing to eat non-vegetarian meals.

Amardeep Singh, former executive director of the Sikh Coalition, met with officials of the CDCR in December 2005 in a meeting arranged by Rep. Jackie Speier, who was then a state senator, and worked out proposed new regulations that were adopted the following summer, after a public hearing on March 30, 2006.

But the CDCR’s stipulation that each facility decides its own means for accommodating religious requests means “in effect, there’s no policy at all,” Singh, who now serves as the Sikh Coalition’s director of programs and advocacy, told India-West.

Dean Borg, the former chief of adult operations at the CDCR who crafted the new policies, did not return calls for comment.

And the regulations remain largely unknown throughout the state prison system.
A public information officer at California State Prison, Solano, said, “I am not aware of any specifics implemented statewide,” when asked how requests for religious accommodation were adjudicated. A similar response was received from a PIO at San Quentin State Prison.
Terry Thornton, a public information officer with the CDCR, also told India-West she was unaware of statewide regulations regarding religious accommodation.

Thornton asked this publication to supply her with the text of the new policies, and commented after the paper complied with her request.

“The overall standard is that inmates may possess and wear religious items so long as they don't pose an undue security risk,” she said.

“CDCR's property matrix allows inmates to possess religious items in their cells as approved by each religious review committee. This includes yarmulkes, kufi caps and prayer rugs, etc.”

“There is nothing in our regulations or policies that preclude a Sikh inmate from possessing and wearing a turban, but I do not believe there are any prisons that allow inmates to wear a turban either,” said Thornton.

Asked why the CDCR had allowed each state prison facility to determine its own guidelines for religious requests, rather than setting statewide regulations, Thornton said: “It is important to note that every prison in the state is different, houses different kinds of offenders, and has different missions.”

“Each committee needs to have the ability to review requests consistent with each institution's mission, operations, activities, space, custody level and other issues,” she said.

Sikhs have long struggled with the wearing of turbans and kirpans in public places. The Transportation Security Agency only recently amended its rules to allow Sikhs to keep their turbans on during routine airport security checks. Earlier this year, Sikh students were granted permission to wear turbans at MCAT and other professional examinations.

The U.S. Army has just begun accommodating Sikh religious wear on a case-by-case basis, allowing a Sikh doctor and dentist to serve on active duty with a turban and long hair, including a beard. And Sikhs are now allowed to serve as officers with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, while keeping both turbans and beards.

But dastaars and kesh remain out of the landscape of most of the nation’s state prison systems, because of possible safety issues.

Sgt. Michael Jones, of the San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Department, provided testimony last year in the case of Gurparkash Singh Khalsa, who has been without his turban since he entered San Joaquin County Jail in April 2007.

Khalsa is accused of killing his daughter’s ex-boyfriend Ajmer Hothi, who was 23 at the time of his death.

“It’s a concealment issue,” Jones told India-West. “There are all kinds of things a defendant can pick up and hide in his turban to be used as a weapon later,” he said.

Ballpoint pens can be used for stabbing, as can paper clips, said Jones, pointing out that both can fit very easily into the tightly-wound folds of a turban.

“All kinds of potential dangers are lying about. So we make no exceptions to the rule about headwear for defendants. No one is allowed to wear headwear of any type,” he said.

Singh countered Jones’ statements about concealment.

“Prisoners fit contraband into clothing all the time. Does a turban give more access than regular clothes would?” he queried.

“Even if the answer is yes, this is a question of religious practice. Can the interest of prison safety be met with a quick search?”

“The solution can’t always just be ‘remove the turban.’ This is a core religious requirement,” he said.
Khalsa’s attorney Daniel Horowitz — who filed and lost one of the first cases regarding religious headwear in California state prisons — told India-West: “Religious freedom always gives way to security concerns.” A long-winding piece of cloth could be used in a number of different ways, including committing suicide, he said.

Khalsa has reportedly worked out a compromise with his jailers, said Horowitz, adding that prison guards allow him to use a towel over his head for prayers and public appearances. But such a compromise is not sufficient to accommodate Khalsa’s religious requirements, he said.
Risher of the ACLU said the 2006 amendments to the California penal code were “a step in the right direction.”

“But they are so focused on precise rules that they don’t provide guidance to CDCR staff about how to accommodate prisoners’ religious requirements in general,” Risher said, adding, “As a result, staff may continue to have an inadequate understanding that prisoners have a right to, for example, wear religious headgear, simply because that topic is not specifically covered by the regulation.”

“It might be more useful to ensure that those charged with enforcing the rules are fully informed of the requirements of RLUIPA so that they can follow those requirements as novel situations arise,” he explained.

“Any sort of accommodation to a religious practice is weakest when you’re incarcerated,” Peter Scheer, executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition, told India-West. “During incarceration, all fundamental rights are effectively ceded. By design, rights are curtailed in the extreme,” he said.

The question is whether your right to practice your religion requires the government to accommodate you, added Scheer, explaining that costs, disruption to the environment, and prevailing laws are factors that can be taken into account when states decide how to determine religious requests.

“It’s never been resolved at a sufficiently high level. Cases are not going to federal court, and they’re avoiding publication, so that there is no precedence,” he said.

“People in prison are very vulnerable to retaliation. They tend to think twice about asking for their rights,” asserted Harsimran Kaur, legal director of the Sikh Coalition.

“We need to advocate and protect the rights of the most vulnerable members of our community,” she told India-West, adding, “It’s a difficult issue to get the community to rally around, because there’s a belief that if they’re in prison, they’re guilty, so why should we care?”

California does not capture data on the religious preferences of its prison population, so there are no numbers about how many Sikhs are incarcerated in its prisons. Anecdotally, the Sikh Coalition believes there are fewer than one dozen Sikhs in California state prisons.

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Obama administration to buy Illinois prison for Guantanamo detainees

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CONGRESS MUST VOTE ON PLAN
Critics are calling facility 'Gitmo North'

By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 16, 2009; A03

CHICAGO -- President Obama, determined to change U.S. detention policy and shut the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, pointed Tuesday to a small town in Illinois as a big part of the answer.

A state prison in rural Thomson will be purchased and refitted to house dozens of terrorism suspects now held at Guantanamo Bay, the administration announced. But Obama immediately drew criticism that revealed just how controversial the issue remains.

Republicans in Illinois and in Washington called the president's move risky and reminded the administration that a congressional vote is required before detainees not facing trial can be held indefinitely on U.S. soil. GOP members of the House will "seek every remedy at our disposal to stop this dangerous plan," vowed Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio). A vote is weeks or months away, Democrats said.

Civil liberties groups, while embracing the goal of closing Guantanamo Bay, said the administration would be wrong to move prisoners to the heartland without charging them with a crime.

"If Thomson will be used to facilitate their lawful prosecution, then this is truly a positive step," said Joanne Mariner, counterterrorism director at Human Rights Watch. If not, "President Obama will simply have moved Guantanamo to Illinois."

White House officials did not say how many inmates are likely to be transferred to the Thomson Correctional Center. Some detainees will be held for trial by military commissions on the prison grounds, while others could be held without charges.

"We are trying to get to zero here with the detainees," one administration official said, referring to the prison in Cuba. "If we have to detain any without trial, we will only do so as a last resort."

The official said individual cases will be subject to oversight by Congress and the federal courts.

One piece in the puzzle

The Thomson decision alone will not get Obama to his goal of shutting Guantanamo Bay, which became a symbol of what critics said was the Bush administration's willingness to flout international conventions.

But the plan is another piece of a puzzle that includes the prospective departure of 116 detainees recommended for release by an interagency team led by Justice Department prosecutors. The administration also announced last month that several suspects will be tried in New York federal court and others by the military.

Prisoners scheduled for transfer overseas will go directly from Guantanamo Bay, a White House official said, while detainees scheduled for trial in U.S. district courts will be held in nearby facilities.

To try to convince skeptics that terrorism suspects can be held safely in a farming town of fewer than 600 residents about 150 miles west of Chicago, U.S. officials pledged to create "the most secure facility in the nation."

Prisoners will not be permitted visits by family or friends, officials said. They will be guarded by military personnel. They will not mix with federal inmates who will share the prison. They will not be released in the United States.

The Pentagon said 1,000 to 1,500 personnel would move to the Thomson area to operate the military side of the prison once it is upgraded. About two-thirds would be members of the uniformed military, and the others would be civilians.

Improvements to the 1,600-bed prison, built eight years ago for $145 million and now housing fewer than 200 minimum-security inmates, are likely to take six months or more. Congress will be asked to approve the funding.

In addition to extra security, the prison is expected to need a courthouse for trials, an improved medical facility and a kitchen staff trained to prepare religiously appropriate meals.

'It's a wonderful thing'

Democrats pushed the prison's selection after Gov. Pat Quinn (D) relayed the suggestion to Obama in a White House meeting. They argued that a federal purchase of the 146-acre facility would produce as many as 3,000 jobs in a region with a 10.5 percent unemployment rate.

"It's a wonderful thing," said Thomson real estate agent Jeannine Mills. "At first, I was very apprehensive, but now I feel it will be very secure and, all in all, a good thing. We certainly need the economic boost."

Republicans have focused on security. Rep. Mark Steven Kirk (R-Ill.) and several colleagues warned Obama in a letter last month that "our state and the Chicago metropolitan area will become ground zero for Jihadist terrorist plots, recruitment and radicalization."

"The administration," said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), "has failed to explain how transferring terrorists to Gitmo North will make Americans safer than keeping these terrorists off of our shores in the secure facility in Cuba."

Democrats on Capitol Hill voiced confidence that, once it is clear that sturdy security measures will be in place, Congress will reverse the bipartisan vote that barred prisoners from being held without trial on U.S. soil.

In a letter to Quinn announcing the decision, leaders of Obama's national security team said closing Guantanamo Bay "should not be a political or partisan issue." They said the project is backed by "the nation's highest military and civilian leaders who prosecuted the war against al Qaeda under the previous administration and continue to do so today."

Staff writers Kari Lydersen in Chicago and Perry Bacon Jr. and Peter Finn in Washington contributed to this report.

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Brazil: Curb Police Violence in Rio, São Paulo

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Extrajudicial Killings Undermine Public Security

December 8, 2009

(Rio de Janeiro) - Police officers in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo routinely resort to lethal force, often committing extrajudicial executions and exacerbating violence in both states, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.

The 122-page report, "Lethal Force: Police Violence and Public Security in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo," examined 51 cases in which police appeared to have executed alleged criminal suspects and then reported the victims had died in shootouts while resisting arrest.

Rio and São Paulo police together kill more than 1,000 people every year in such alleged confrontations. While some of these "resistance" killings by police are legitimate acts of self-defense, many others are extrajudicial executions, the report found.

"Extrajudicial killing of criminal suspects is not the answer to violent crime," said José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch. "The residents of Rio and São Paulo need more effective policing, not more violence from the police."

Unlawful police killings undercut legitimate efforts in both states to curb criminal violence, much of which is carried out by heavily armed gangs. In Rio, these gangs are largely responsible for one of the highest homicide rates in the hemisphere. In São Paulo, despite a drop in homicides over the past decade, gang violence also poses a major threat.

Human Rights Watch obtained credible evidence in 51 "resistance" cases that contradicted police officers' claims that victims died in a shootout. For example, in 33 cases, forensic evidence was at odds with the official version of what took place - including 17 cases in which autopsy reports show that police shot their victims at point blank range. The 51 cases do not represent the totality of potential extrajudicial killings, but are indicative of a much broader problem, the report concluded.

The report also draws upon extensive interviews with more than 40 criminal justice officials, including top prosecutors who view extrajudicial executions by the police as a major problem in both states.

Official government statistics support the prosecutors' assessment that the problem is widespread:

• The Rio and São Paulo police have killed more than 11,000 people since 2003;

• The number of police killings in Rio state reached a record high of 1,330 in 2007 and in 2008, the number was third highest at 1,137;

• The number of police killings in São Paulo state, while less than in Rio, is also comparatively high: over the past five years, for example, there were more police killings in São Paulo state (2,176) than in all of South Africa (1,623), a country with a much higher homicide rate than São Paulo.

The high number of police killings is all the more dramatic when viewed alongside the comparatively low numbers of non-fatal injuries of civilians by police and of police fatalities.

• The São Paulo Shock Police Command killed 305 people from 2004 through 2008 yet left only 20 injured. In all of these alleged "shootouts," the police suffered one death;

• In Rio, police in 10 military policing zones were responsible for 825 "resistance" killings in 2008 while suffering a total of 12 police fatalities;

• Rio police arrested 23 people for every person they killed in 2008, and São Paulo police arrested 348 for every kill. By contrast, police in the United States arrested over 37,000 for every person they killed in alleged confrontations that year.

"Police officers are permitted to use lethal force as a last resort to protect themselves or others," Vivanco said. "But the notion that these police killings are committed in self-defense, or justified by high crime rates, does not hold up under scrutiny."

In addition to the many "resistance" killings each year by police on duty, officers kill hundreds more while off-duty, often when they are acting as members of militias in Rio and death squads in São Paulo.

Police officers responsible for unlawful killings in Rio and São Paulo are rarely brought to justice. The principal cause of this chronic failure to hold police to account for murder, the report found, is that the criminal justice systems in both states currently rely almost entirely on police investigators to resolve these cases.

Human Rights Watch found that police officers frequently take steps to cover up the true nature of "resistance" killings. And police investigators often fail to take necessary steps to determine what has taken place, helping to ensure that criminal responsibility cannot be established and that those responsible remain unaccountable.

"So long as they are left to police themselves these executions will continue unchecked, and legitimate efforts to curb violence in both states will suffer," Vivanco said.

The report provides recommendations to Rio and São Paulo authorities for curbing police violence and improving law enforcement. The central recommendation is the creation of specialized units within state prosecutors' offices to investigate "resistance" killings and ensure that officers responsible for extrajudicial executions are brought to justice.

The report also details measures that state and federal authorities should take to maximize the effectiveness of these special units. These include:

• Requiring police officers to notify prosecutors of "resistance" killings immediately after they take place;

• Establishing and strictly enforcing a crime scene protocol that deters police officers from engaging in false "rescues" and other cover-up techniques;

• Investigating potential police cover-up techniques, including false "rescues," and prosecuting officers who engage in them.

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US: Remote Detainee Lockups Hinder Justice

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Transfers of Detained Immigrants Interfere with Lawyer Access and Right to Challenge Deportation

December 2, 2009

(Washington, DC) - The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency's increasing practice of transferring immigrants facing deportation to detention centers far away from their homes severely curtails their ability to challenge their deportation, Human Rights Watch says in a report released today. The agency made 1.4 million detainee transfers in the decade from 1999 through 2008, the report says.

The 88-page report, "Locked Up Far Away: The Transfer of Immigrants to Remote Detention Centers in the United States," presents new data analyzed for Human Rights Watch by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) of Syracuse University. The data show that 53 percent of the 1.4 million transfers have taken place since 2006, and most occur between state and local jails that contract with the agency, known as ICE, to provide detention bed space. The report's findings are based on the new data and interviews with officials, immigration lawyers, detainees, and their family members.

"ICE is increasingly subjecting detainees to a chaotic game of musical chairs," said Alison Parker, deputy US director for Human Rights Watch and author of the report. "And it's a game with dire consequences since it may keep them from finding an attorney or presenting evidence in their defense."

Many immigrants are first arrested and detained in major cities like Los Angeles or Philadelphia, places where immigrants have lived for decades and where their family members, employers, and attorneys also live. Days or months later, with no notice, many of these immigrants are loaded onto planes for transport to detention centers in remote corners of states such as Texas, California, and Louisiana (the three states most likely to receive transfers), the report found.

The detained immigrants have the right, under both US and international human rights law, to be represented in deportation hearings by an attorney of their choice and to present evidence in their defense. But once they are transferred, immigrants are often so far away from their lawyers, evidence, and witnesses that their ability to defend themselves in deportation proceedings is severely curtailed, the report found.

"Immigrant detainees should not be treated like so many boxes of goods - shipped to the most convenient place for ICE to store them," Parker said. "We are especially concerned that the transferred detainees may find that their chances of successfully fighting deportation or gaining asylum from persecution have just evaporated."

The federal Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit (which covers Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas) has jurisdiction over the largest number of the transferred detainees. Those transfers are of particular concern, Human Rights Watch said, because that court is widely known for decisions that are hostile to non-citizens and because the states within its jurisdiction collectively have the lowest ratio of immigration attorneys to immigration detainees in the country.

Human Rights Watch acknowledged that some detainee transfers are inevitable, but said that ICE and Congress should use reasonable and rights-protective checks on detainee transfers as the best state criminal justice systems do. The report recommends concrete steps to help create such a system.

Although ICE has recently announced plans to revamp its detention system, which may provide an opening for reforms, the agency previously has rejected recommendations to place enforceable constraints on its transfer power.

Human Rights Watch's report is being released on the same day (December 2) as the Constitution Project's "Recommendations for Reforming our Immigration Detention System and Promoting Access to Counsel in Immigration Proceedings," finding that immigration detention is overused and immigrant detainees experience problems in accessing counsel and providing recommendations for reform. Also on December 2, the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse will release detailed facility level data on detainee transfers.

***

Testimony from detainees, family members, and attorneys about transfers:

"The transfers are devastating, absolutely devastating. [Detainees] are loaded onto a plane in the middle of the night. They have no idea where they are, no idea what [US] state they are in. I cannot overemphasize the psychological trauma to these people. What it does to their family members cannot be fully captured either. I have taken calls from seriously hysterical family members - incredibly traumatized people - sobbing on the phone, crying out, ‘I don't know where my son or husband is!'" - Rebecca Schreve, immigration attorney, El Paso, Texas, January 29, 2009.

"In New York when I was detained, I was about to get an attorney through one of the churches, but that went away once they sent me here to New Mexico.... All my evidence and stuff that I need is right there in New York. I've been trying to get all my case information from New York ... writing to ICE to get my records. But they won't give me my records; they haven't given me nothing. I'm just representing myself with no evidence to present." - Kevin H. (pseudonym), Otero County Processing Center, Chaparral, New Mexico, February 11, 2009.

"I have never represented someone who has not been in more than three detention facilities. Could be El Paso, Texas, a facility in Arizona, or they send people to Hawaii .... I have been practicing immigration law for more than a decade. Never once have I been notified of [my client's] transfer. Never." - Holly Cooper, immigration attorney and clinical professor of law, University of California Davis School of Law, Davis, California, January 27, 2009.

"Ever since they sent him there [to New Mexico], it's been a nightmare. My mother has blood pressure problems, and her pressure goes up and down like crazy now because of worrying about him and stuff. [His wife] has been terrified. She cries every night. And his baby asks for him, asks for "Papa." He kisses his photo. He starts crying as soon as he hears his father's voice on the phone even though he is only one.... Last week [my brother] called to say he can't do it anymore. He's going to sign the paper agreeing to his deportation." - Georgina V. (pseudonym), sister of detainee, Brooklyn, New York, January 23, 2008.

A detainee who was transferred 1,400 miles away to a detention facility in Texas after a few weeks in a detention center in southern California said that the difference for him was "like the difference between heaven and earth. At least in California I had a better chance. I could hire a[n] attorney to represent me. Now, here, I have no chance other than what the grace of God gives me." - Michael M. (pseudonym), Pearsall Detention Center, Pearsall, Texas, April 25, 2008.

A legal permanent resident originally from the Dominican Republic, who had been living in Philadelphia but was transferred to Texas said, "I had to call to try to get the police records myself. It took a lot of time. The judge got mad that I kept asking for more time. But eventually they arrived. I tried to put on the case myself. I lost." - Miguel A. (pseudonym), Port Isabel Service Processing Center, Los Fresnos, Texas, April 23, 2008.

Lithuania investigates possible CIA ‘black site' - washingtonpost.com

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Townspeople tell of secretive Americans at mysterious building

By Craig Whitlock
Thursday, November 19, 2009

ANTAVILIAI, LITHUANIA -- Residents of this village were mystified five years ago when tight-lipped American construction workers suddenly appeared at a mothballed riding stable here and built a large, two-story building without windows, ringed by a metal fence and security cameras.

Today, a Lithuanian parliamentary committee is investigating whether the CIA operated a secret prison for terrorism suspects on the plot of land at the edge of a thick forest for more than a year, from 2004 until late 2005.

Lithuanian land registry documents reviewed by The Washington Post show the property was bought in March 2004 by Elite LLC, an unincorporated U.S. firm registered in the District.

Records in Lithuania and Washington do not reveal the names of individual officers for Elite but identify its sole shareholder as Star Finance Group and Holdings Inc., a Panamanian corporation. There is no record of Elite owning other property in Lithuania.

The company, which has since had its registration revoked by D.C. authorities, in turn sold the property to the Lithuanian government in 2007, two years after the existence of the CIA's overseas network of secret prisons known as black sites -- including some in Eastern Europe -- was first revealed by The Washington Post.

At the time, The Post withheld the names of Eastern European countries involved in the covert program at the request of White House officials, who argued that disclosure could subject those countries to retaliation from al-Qaeda.

The Lithuanian government has not publicly confirmed whether the property was one of the CIA's black sites.

The site in Antaviliai, about 15 miles outside the capital, Vilnius, is now used by Lithuania's State Security Department as a training center. Department officials have declined to comment on the circumstances under which it acquired the property or whether it was used by the CIA. A CIA spokesman also declined to comment.

Domas Grigaliunas, a former counterintelligence officer with the Lithuanian military, said it was widely known among the Lithuanian secret services that U.S. intelligence partners had built the site, although its original purpose was kept highly classified.

"It just popped up out of nowhere," he said in an interview. "Everybody knew this was handed to us by the Americans."

Grigaliunas said he was asked in 2004 by the deputy director of Lithuanian military intelligence to develop plans to help a "foreign partner" that was interested in bringing individuals to Lithuania and concealing their whereabouts as part of a covert operation.

He said he made some recommendations but was never told the identity of the foreign partner or whether the operation was carried out. Since then, however, he said he has become convinced that the program involved the CIA's detention centers for terrorism suspects.

"I have no documents to prove it, and I never worked in any prisons, but I believe they existed here," he said in an interview.

Villagers who live in a crumbling apartment complex about 100 yards from the site recalled how English-speaking construction workers descended on a small, shuttered horse-riding academy there in 2004. They said the workers refused to answer questions about what they were doing but brought shipping containers filled with building materials. The workers also excavated large amounts of soil; with all the digging, residents said they assumed that part of the new facility was underground.

"If you got close, they would tell us, in English, to go away," said a retired man who lives nearby and spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing fears of retribution. "We were really wondering what they were up to. We even wondered if it was a Mafia drug operation or something."

Members of the Lithuanian Parliament's National Security and Defense Committee visited the site recently as part of their investigation into whether the CIA detained terrorism suspects on Lithuanian territory.

The probe was authorized last month by the Parliament after ABC News reported in August that two CIA-chartered flights had brought al-Qaeda prisoners from Afghanistan to Vilnius in 2004 and 2005.

Lithuanian government officials denied the ABC News report at the time and said there was no documentation that the flights ever landed in their country. But the Parliament decided to take another look after Lithuania's newly elected president, Dalia Grybauskaite, said in October that she had "indirect suspicions" that reports of the CIA prison were accurate and urged a more comprehensive investigation.

Arvydas Anusauskas, chairman of the National Security and Defense Committee, declined to comment on its findings. In response to written questions submitted by The Post, he said the committee would interview "all the persons who might have known or could have known the information in question."

"The committee has all rights and tools to ultimately clarify the situation and to either confirm or deny any allegations of the transportation of detainees by the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States and their detention on the territory of the Republic of Lithuania," he said.

Lithuanian officials have also been pressed to investigate by the Council of Europe, an official human rights watchdog, which has conducted its own probe of CIA operations on the continent. Council officials said they had received confidential records confirming that CIA-chartered planes had flown from Afghanistan to Vilnius in 2004 and 2005.

Thomas Hammarberg, the council's commissioner for human rights, said in a telephone interview that flight logs had been doctored to indicate that the planes had touched down in neighboring countries, including Finland and Poland.

Hammarberg visited Vilnius last month and said he personally urged Lithuanian officials to take the issue more seriously. "I told them it is quite likely that further information might leak from the United States, so they should hurry up and do their own investigation now," he said.

Staff writers Joby Warrick and Ellen Nakashima and researcher Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.

Illinois Democrats Back Plan to House Guantánamo Prisoners - NYTimes.com

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By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — Top Illinois Democrats on Sunday wholeheartedly embraced the idea of sending terrorism suspects from Guantánamo Bay to a maximum-security prison about 150 miles west of Chicago, raising the possibility of a major breakthrough in the Obama administration’s efforts to close the military detention facility in Cuba.

But while Gov. Patrick J. Quinn and Senator Richard J. Durbin endorsed housing the detainees at the Thomson Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in a rural area, other local leaders were drumming up opposition to the idea, which could still face considerable opposition in Congress.

For the White House, which confirmed the administration’s interest, it could be the best chance so far to cut through the legal and political knots that have stopped it from closing down the prison camp in Cuba. For supporters in Illinois, it is an attractive economic opportunity. And just as opponents have done elsewhere, some in Illinois cast this plan as an unacceptable risk.

Mr. Quinn and Mr. Durbin, in news conferences to promote the plan, said that turning over the state prison, which is unoccupied, to the federal penal system, and using it for maximum-security inmates including as many as 100 captives from the campaign against terrorism, would create several thousand jobs.

But leading Republicans in the state — including Representatives Donald Manzullo, whose district includes Thomson, and Mark Steven Kirk, who is running for the United States Senate seat once held by Mr. Obama — signed a letter to the president on Sunday strongly opposing any such move.

“As home to America’s tallest building, we should not invite Al Qaeda to make Illinois its No. 1 target,” the letter said, referring to the Willis Tower in Chicago, formerly the Sears Tower. “The United States spent more than $50 million to build the Guantánamo Bay detention facility to keep terrorists away from U.S. soil. Al Qaeda terrorists should stay where they cannot endanger American citizens.”

The sharp local debate echoed vehement arguments heard all weekend, after the administration announced that it would try the man accused as the operational leader of the Sept. 11 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and several co-conspirators, in a federal court in New York, while putting others accused of terrorism before military commissions for an attack on the U.S.S. Cole. That, too, was presented as a step along the path to closing Guantánamo.

News of the possible deal in Illinois was first reported over the weekend by The Chicago Tribune. On Sunday, a White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity because no decision had been made, said that Thomson had emerged as “a leading option” for becoming the new facility the administration needs, and confirmed that government officials would tour the prison site on Monday.

Days after his inauguration, Mr. Obama declared that within a year he would close the Guantánamo prison, a signature component of the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policy. In a speech at the National Archives in May, Mr. Obama proposed bringing those detainees deemed too dangerous to release to a facility inside the United States — including some who could not be tried for lack of evidence but were called committed Al Qaeda terrorists and might be held as “combatants.”

Lawmakers of both parties have expressed deep unease all along. Congress enacted a law this year forbidding the administration from bringing Guantánamo detainees into the United States except for the purpose of prosecution. But leading Democratic lawmakers said at the time that they were open to rescinding the restriction once the administration came up with a plan for how to handle the detainees.

As a home-state ally of Mr. Obama, Mr. Quinn provided the kind of enthusiasm no other governor has offered. He called the proposal “good for our state, good for economy and good for our public safety.” By some estimates, it would provide 3,200 jobs and cut the local unemployment rate in half.

But the governor acknowledged the hurdles ahead, saying, “This is not a done deal.” The ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, said on the CBS program “Face the Nation” on Sunday that the detainees should not be moved to prisons on United States soil from the base in Cuba, which is also known as Gitmo.

“What problem is the president going to solve by moving these trials to New York or by moving Gitmo prisoners to Michigan, to Illinois, to Colorado?” Mr. Hoekstra said. “Why move them into the United States while we are still under the threat from radical jihadists?”

Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, said in three appearances on television talk shows that by treating these prisoners in the civilian system, the administration was mishandling the fight against terrorism.

“It would seem to me what the Obama administration is telling us loud and clear is that both in substance and reality, the war on terror, from their point of view, is over,” Mr. Giuliani said on Fox News Sunday. “We’re no longer going to treat these people as if this was an act of war.”

For months, an interagency administration task force has been examining ways to handle the Guantánamo population, including looking at state and federal prisons around the country that might be used. Thomson, a maximum-security state prison that was built in 2001 at a cost to Illinois taxpayers of about $120 million, only to sit almost unused, is one of them.

Its chances got a lift last month when the president of the Village of Thomson, Jerry Hebeler, contacted Mr. Quinn’s office to suggest a federal takeover of the prison, according to a letter Mr. Quinn sent to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. last week. Mr. Quinn agreed and personally raised the issue in a meeting with Mr. Obama two weeks ago.

The Thomson prison is contained by a 146-acre reservation near the Mississippi River and has eight 200-cell compartments designed for strict control of inmates. It is surrounded by an electrified fence capable of carrying 7,000 volts, has 312 surveillance cameras with motion detection capability, and armed inner and outer perimeter towers.

If a decision is made to proceed, the official said, the Federal Bureau of Prisons would buy the prison from Illinois and convert it into a maximum-security federal penitentiary. The bureau would house ordinary federal inmates in part of the facility and lease another part to the Defense Department to hold former Guantánamo detainees. The two populations would not have contact, the official said.

The federal government would also retrofit the facility to take it beyond the security specifications of the federal “Supermax” facility in Florence, Colo., from which no prisoner has ever escaped, including by adding extra external perimeter fencing, the official said. It would be operated with the most restrictive security conditions, “including individual confinement and isolation capabilities,” the official said.

Susan Saulny contributed reporting.