And now, the disappeared

First, Rumsfeld confesses that it was indeed he who ordered the secret detention of an Iraqi terrorism suspect held for more than seven months near Baghdad without notifying the Red Cross.
Reuters’ Charles Aldinger reports today that:

Rumsfeld told reporters CIA Director George Tenet asked him last November “to take custody of an Iraqi national who was believed to be a high-ranking member of Ansar al-Islam”…
“And we did so. We were asked to not immediately register the individual (with the International Committee of the Red Cross). And we did that,” Rumsfeld said at a Pentagon briefing hours after U.S. President George W. Bush again voiced support for the beleaguered Pentagon chief.

I don’t know why, but it just burns me up, the way that in the aftermath of every additional horrifying revelation about the misdeeds of Rumsfeld’s Pentagon, Bush always goes to these extraordinary lengths to tell us that Bombs-Away Don is just a “fabulous Defense Secretary.”
It’s so tasteless. It’s so hideous. It’s so inane. (End of rant.)
Aldinger added to his Reuters account that,

Rumsfeld said the man’s case was unique, but he was vague when reporters asked whether the United States was holding other “ghost” prisoners without Red Cross knowledge in Iraq.

Gee, I wonder why he was “vague”?
Maybe because he knew that the organization Human Rights First (that used to be called Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights) was coming out–also today–with an important new report titled Ending Secret detention that sketches out the scope of the US military’s globe-circling network of detention facilities?
A press release from HRF tells us that,

The report lists more than two dozen facilities that have been reported by Human Rights First sources and the media; at least half of these operate in total secrecy…
“The abuses at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib cannot be addressed in isolation,” said Deborah Pearlstein, the Director of Human Rights First’s U.S. Law and Security Program. “The United States government is holding prisoners in a secret system of off-shore prisons beyond the reach of adequate supervision, accountability, or law.”

The report concludes that,

the secrecy surrounding this network of detention facilities, as it has been constructed and operated by the United States, makes “inappropriate detention and abuse not only likely, but inevitable.”

HRF calls on the US government to meet all its international and domestic-law obligations in regard to such detainees, and spells out that these include the following:

• Affording the ICRC unfettered access to all detainees held in the course of armed conflict
• Providing every individual in custody some recognized legal status
• Disclosing the names of all individuals detained to their families and friends

The HRF website has a link to the whole text of the report. It should make interesting–but very depressing–reading.
certainly, it makes you wonder, with some urgency, just how many more “disappeared” or “ghost” detainees are being shuttled to the various spots around the system that the report lists. According to the HRF report these places include “suspected” US-controlled detention facilities in Jordan and Pakistan, on the British-controlled island of Diego Garcia, and aboard two US navy ships, the USS Bataan and USS Peleliu.