The Disappeared

The CIA quietly moved scores of detainees out of its own "black site" prisons in recent years and turned them over to foreign governments, refusing to provide the International Red Cross any information about their treatment or whereabouts, according to a report made public this week.

Although President Bush made a brief public allusion to the transfers in September 2006, the U.S. government has never offered any accounting of precisely how many detainees were moved and what became of them. The issue became a major bone of contention between the Red Cross and the CIA, according to little-noticed language in the Feb. 14, 2007, Red Cross report to CIA acting general counsel John Rizzo that was publicly posted on a magazine Web site this week.

There is substantial reason to believe that these "ghost detainees" included some high-profile suspects, including Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a Libyan-born jihadist captured in Afghanistan whose claims about ties between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were prominently used by top Bush administration officials to justify the war in Iraq, according to human-rights activists who have closely followed the issue. Following the U.S. invasion, al-Libi recanted those claims, saying he fabricated his story about Iraq-Qaeda ties in order to get his interrogators to stop their abusive treatment of him. After his recantation became known in 2004, U.S. government officials dropped all public references to him and he was never heard from again—even though he was once hailed as the U.S. military's first big "catch" after the 9/11 attacks.

When Red Cross officials later pressed for information about what happened to such "ghost" detainees, U.S. government officials insisted they were returned to their country of origin under assurances they would be given "humane" treatment, the report states. But the Red Cross was never given access to the detainees—nor told anything about what happened to them after they were sent back Nor were U.S. State Department officials given details of the transfers or details about the nature of the "assurances" of humane treatment provided by foreign intelligence services to the CIA, according to a former top Bush administration official who was aware of the transfers but who asked not to be publicly identified because the issue remains highly classified. "This issue has been hiding in plain sight—but nobody has connected the dots," said the former official.

The Red Cross remains "gravely concerned" that a "significant number" of these prisoners may have been subjected to abusive treatment—and that the organization "has not received any clarification of the fate of these persons," the report states. The long-secret 41-page Red Cross report received national attention last month after journalist Mark Danner obtained a copy and wrote about it in considerable detail for The New York Review of Books. (The report was posted in its entirety this week on The New York Review of Books' Web site.)

The report includes graphic and at times gruesome accounts by high-value detainees at Guantánamo Bay—including Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others—describing how they were suffocated during waterboarding, locked in coffinlike boxes, had collars wrapped around their necks and then were smashed into the walls of their cells. The detainees also described to Red Cross interviewers how they had cold water poured over their bodies, were placed in frigid interrogation rooms, were forced to stand naked in painful stress positions for hours on end and were denied toilet access, resulting in the detainees' having to defecate and urinate on themselves, according to the report.