Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Report Says U.S. Secretly Held 2 Prisoners (AP)

Report Says U.S. Secretly Held 2 Prisoners
By MICHELLE FAUL, Associated Press Writer  2 hours, 10 minutes ago
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - Two Yemeni men say they were held in solitary 
confinement in secret, underground U.S. detention facilities in an 
unknown country and interrogated by masked men for more than 18 months 
without being charged or allowed any contact with the outside world, 
Amnesty International charged Wednesday.
Amnesty and human rights lawyers argued that the report added to 
long-standing claims that the United States has held "secret detainees" 
in its war on terror.
"We fear that what we have heard from these two men is just one small 
part of the much broader picture of U.S. secret detentions around the 
world," Sharon Critoph, a researcher at Amnesty International who 
interviewed the men in Yemen, told The Associated Press by telephone.
Navy Lt. Commander Flex Plexico, noting that it was difficult to 
respond to a report he hasn't seen said, "We have said many times that 
the Department of Defense does not engage in the practice of 
renditions" — the transfer of terror suspects to third countries 
without court approval.
Plexico, a spokesman for the department, said it was important to note 
that training manuals of al Qaida terrorist network "emphasize the 
tactic of making false abuse allegations."
U.S. officials have denied allegations of secret detention facilities, 
saying they hold terror suspects only at the U.S. Naval base in 
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In June, U.S. officials denied a suggestion from the U.N.'s special 
expert on torture, Manfred Nowak, that some undeclared holding areas 
could include American ships cruising international waters. Others have 
suggested "high-value" detainees could be held secretly in Diego 
Garcia, a British-held island in the Indian Ocean that the United 
States rents as a strategic military base.
Lawyers who represent detainees at Guantanamo have long believed that 
the CIA or other U.S. government agencies have used clandestine jails 
for terror suspects.
"The fact that there are underground CIA facilities somewhere where 
people are being tortured has been known for a while," Michael Ratner 
of the U.S. Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City told the 
AP in a telephone interview.
In the report released in Washington, Amnesty said it interviewed Salah 
Nasser Salim Ali and Muhammad Faraj Ahmed Bashmilah in a jail in Yemen 
in late June. The group also spoke to a Yemeni government official who 
said the men were being held in that country only because it was a 
condition of their release from U.S. custody.
Ali told the rights group that he was originally detained in Indonesia 
in August 2003 and then flown several days later to Jordan; Bashmilah 
said he was detained in Jordan in October 2003 while on a trip to visit 
his mother.
Both men claimed they were tortured by Jordanian intelligence agents 
for four days and then flown to what they believe were underground 
jails in an unknown location.
Once there, they were held in solitary confinement for more than 18 
months, interrogated daily by U.S. guards and blared Western music all 
day and night. No charges were ever filed against them, they said.
The men said their first jail was underground, surrounded by high walls 
and that it took more than 4 hours to fly there from Jordan. After six 
to eight months they were transferred to a modern prison run by U.S. 
officials a three-hour plane journey away that also appeared to be 
underground.

officials
Sulla base di cosa affermano che sono "US officials"? :)
Cioe' tutti li con mostrine US ma le maschere solo quando li
interrogavano? :)
*LOL*
-Stefano