Big Deal, America Has a Few More Terrorists in Secret CIA Prisons

A week after President Bush revealed the existence of the CIA's secret prison system and announced that "there are now no terrorists in the CIA program," a new report says that terror suspects are still being held by the agency in secret locatons.

The Sunday Times of London reported that the British charity Reprieve, which provides legal support for death row prisoners, alleges that "dozens" of terror suspects have just "disappeared."

Reprieve believes many detainees are being held in a form of joint custody, where countries such as Afghanistan provide jail facilities and guards and the CIA supplies the interrogators. It says there are several hundred detainees still at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, none of whom has been named by the Pentagon.

Among the"disappeared" is Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, who is said to have managed one of Osama Bin Laden's training camps in Afghanistan. He was captured in 2002, questioned by the CIA and transferred under America's programme of "extraordinary rendition" to a jail in Egypt. By 2003 he was back in CIA custody and was spotted by several prisoners at Bagram. Since then he has vanished. Aafia Siddiqui, 34, a Pakistani educated at the University of Houston, disappeared in Karachi in 2003. American officials said she was under interrogation but, according to Reprieve, her family knows nothing of her fate.

The Independent reports that there were eight secret prisons used by the United States: "Among the locations were Afghanistan, Qatar, Thailand, the Indian island base of Diego Garcia (leased by the US from Britain) as well as Poland and Romania." The Independent also questions whether all the secret camps have been shut down, and whether all the secret detainees are now at the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

First, has the CIA really shut down the "black sites"? Last December, the Human Rights Watch organisation published a list of 26 people it believed were in this system of camps; 13 of them were among those now being moved to Guantanamo. But the other 13 it says it cannot account for.

Then there is the case of Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, one of the first high-level suspects placed in CIA custody and reputedly the source of the claims – advanced by Colin Powell at the UN in 2003 in justification of the Iraq invasion – that Saddam Hussein had links with Al Qaeda. That suggestion was again debunked last Friday by a damning Senate Intelligence Committee report. Al-Libi's claim, understood to have been extracted while he was being tortured by Egyptian interrogators, almost certainly added to the doubts about the value of information gained in such circumstances.

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There's more in the top link, but who cares? Look, does any real American care if our Government kidnaps and holds people without legal charge or trial in secret prisons? Does anyone not in the pay of Al Qaeda care if the secret agents of our government tortures these people? Why shouldn't CIA officers be allowed to torture and kill these people? Our President has made the decision to kidnap, imprison, torture and kill... America is at war and we shouldn't question our elected President!

Really... would you rather lie in bed at night worrying about your out-of-control Government someday making a mistake and kidnapping, torturing, imprisoning and even killing you... or would you rather lie in bed thinking about how dreamy Toby is and how he's going to make a great addition to the "hit" "band" Supernova? We certainly know which is more comforting, don't we? Just go back to sleep, citizen.