Gone But Not Forgotten - Pinochet Lives On in Some

Torture, secret prisons and disappearances - we'll always remember Augusto Pinochet for that. The more things change...

Today we've got - why, we've got torture, secret prisons and disappearances and the CIA is involved this time too. The Guardian reports on how the old is new again:

"When the Bush administration brought 14 of its most highly valued terrorism suspects to Guantánamo Bay from secret prisons in various countries in September, the US president himself acknowledged for the first time the existence of a network of CIA prisons. This was intended to close a chapter that had become embarrassing to Washington. The US practice of illegal kidnapping known as "extraordinary rendition", and the secret detention and torture that was part of it, had - after more than four years - finally become a scandal condemned by many European politicians, UN officials and international lawyers, as well as US-based human-rights groups.

"But, as a new report from the British monitoring group Cageprisoners reveals, the men held in Guantánamo Bay are only the tip of the iceberg: thousands more are hidden elsewhere, outside the law. The "war on terror" is taking a terrible toll on Muslim families and societies through a vast programme of secret detention and torture.

"Since January 2002, when the first Muslim men were flown from Afghanistan to Guantánamo, an estimated 14,000 men have been held. They have been hidden in prisons, army barracks, holes in the ground, private houses, hotels and schools. Those responsible for them have been in overlapping chains of command, including the US department of defence, the CIA and the national intelligence services of many countries, such as Britain.

"The Cageprisoners report is a meticulous record of information cross-correlated from the testimony of numerous released prisoners in many countries and of lawyers such as Clive Stafford Smith and his team at Reprieve, who represent some of the men in Guantánamo and have been able to talk to them. But Stafford Smith's own statement that as many as three-quarters of the men in Guantánamo have never seen a lawyer, and that the Guantánamo men represent only 4% of all those imprisoned in the war on terror, is a chilling reminder of just how little outsiders have been able to penetrate this dark, illegal world.