On 6 September 2006, US President George W Bush announced the transfer of 14 men from secret Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) custody to military detention at the US Naval Base in Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. This was the first time that the US program of clandestine interrogation and detention, long an open secret, had been publicly acknowledged. Although the President noted that no-one was then being held by the CIA, he emphasized that the secret detention program would "continue to be crucial". Indeed, the transfer of a 15^th so-called "high value" detainee, ‘Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, from CIA custody to Guantánamo in April 2007 demonstrated the continuing operation of the CIA’s program. In June 2007, President Bush issued an executive order effectively re-authorizing the CIA’s use of secret detention and interrogation.^¹That order remains in force.

In September 2007 CIA Director General Michael Hayden defended the program, including on the grounds that “fewer than 100 people” had been subjected to it.“These programs are targeted and selective,” he added. “They were designed for only the most dangerous terrorists and those believed to have the most valuable information, such as knowledge of planned attacks.” He and other US officials have used similar reasoning to defend the CIA’s use of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. In testimony to the US Senate Intelligence Committee on 5 February 2008, for example, General Hayden tried to justify the torture technique of “waterboarding”, simulated drowning, against three detainees in 2002 and 2003 as a means to obtain information from detainees at a time of perceived threat to public safety, and because the intelligence community “had limited knowledge about al-Qa’ida and its workings.”^²Such justifications fly in the face of the absolute prohibition of torture and other ill-treatment under international law.

The same goes for secret detention. No matter how carefully targeted the program is, the bottom line is that secret detention, in and of itself, violates international human rights and humanitarian law, as contained in treaties binding on the USA. Torture and enforced disappearance, which frequently accompany the use of secret incommunicado detention, are both crimes under international law. The illegality of the CIA’s secret program has been accompanied by a complete absence of accountability for such crimes.

The CIA has operated its secret detention program in covert prisons outside the USA, known as “black sites”. The locations of these sites are unknown, their operations are classified at the highest level of secrecy, they are not open to any scrutiny or inspection, the identity of those detained is not disclosed to family members, lawyers, or humanitarian organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), and detainees are isolated from each other and from the outside world. According to a November 2005 report in the Washington Post, there had been “black sites” in at least eight countries at various times since 2002,^³ although CIA facilities in Thailand and Guantánamo, along with one of several sites in Afghanistan, had since closed. The facilities tended to be used in rotation, with some detainees transferred from site to site together, although several sites were in operation at any given time. The Washington Post also noted that “black sites” had been located in unspecified Eastern European countries.

In June 2007, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe's Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights released the second report of its inquiry, led by Swiss Senator Dick Marty, into secret detention and renditions in Europe. The report concluded that there is “now enough evidence to state that secret detention facilities run by the CIA did exist in Europe from 2003 to 2005, in particular in Poland and Romania.” The report also found that the governments of these countries were aware of, and may have authorized, CIA-run secret detention centres on their territories.

The detailed investigations carried out by the Council of Europe, together with the statements of the handful of men who have emerged from the secret prisons – released as anonymously as they were apprehended – have helped to construct a detailed picture of the regime and the conditions of confinement, demonstrating conclusively that the USA has carried out a range of human rights violations through the use of the secret detention program.

Khaled Abdu Ahmed Saleh al-Maqtari is one of those most recently released. He was held in CIA “black sites” in Afghanistan and in an unknown country until days before President Bush’s 6 September 2006 announcement, when the CIA network of secret jails appears to have been at least temporarily cleared. Khaled al-Maqtari has been held both at the notorious hard site at Abu Ghraib^⁴– where he has described a regime of beatings, sleep deprivation, suspension upside down in stressful positions, intimidation by dogs, induced hypothermia and other forms of torture – and in CIA “black sites” in Afghanistan and an unidentified third country, where he spent nearly three years in complete isolation, the victim of an enforced disappearance.

Khaled Abdu Ahmed Saleh al-Maqtari, Yemen, October 2007. © Amnesty International

haled al-Maqtari’s name was first given to Amnesty International by another ex-detainee in late 2005, nearly a year before his transfer out of CIA custody. Attempts to locate him then failed, and the organization was unable to confirm his whereabouts until after he had been transferred to Yemen in September 2006. His case intersects with those of others who have been released from CIA custody, and with those of detainees still held in Guantánamo and in third countries. It illustrates the global reach of the secret detention network and the degree of coordination between the US military and intelligence agencies, and between the US and other governments, as well as the secret detention program’s apparent propensity to apply the given criteria for inclusion in the program in a less carefully targeted manner than CIA Director Hayden has suggested.

Iraq: Arrest in Fallujah, detention in Abu Ghraib

When I was in Abu Ghraib they kept me naked for nine days, and this was not a respectful way to pray, so I prayed with my head only

Khaled al-Maqtari is now 31 years old, but appears older, a stocky, solemn looking man, with short black hair and beard. He was born in Tabuk in Saudi Arabia, but has lived most of his life in Hodeidah, a small city on the Red Sea coast of Yemen. He was returned to Yemen after 32 months of CIA detention in September of 2006, and held by the Yemeni authorities in Sana’a and Hodeidah until May 2007, when he was unconditionally released. At no stage during this 40-month period was his detention ever reviewed by a judicial authority, and he was never charged with any criminal offence.

Khaled al-Maqtari said that he left Yemen for Iraq in early 2003, travelling overland and arriving in spring. He stayed first in a valley near Ramadi and then in Mosul before arriving in Fallujah in October of 2003, seven months after the US-led invasion of Iraq. In Fallujah, he says, he sometimes worked at an internet café, in a two-story shopping market called al-Ghufran near the centre of town.

He had been in Fallujah for about three months when US forces with armoured vehicles and tanks raided the al-Ghufran market and arrested many people, described by Khaled al-Maqtari as shop workers and shoppers. Khaled Al-Maqtari himself was apprehended at about 1.30pm, and like the others, was cuffed and hooded. The plastic handcuffs were pulled so tight, he said, that they dug furrows into his wrists.^⁵ He could hear and feel dozens of other detainees jostling around him, until they were all loaded onto a column of US trucks with helicopters overhead protecting them, and taken to a military camp outside of Fallujah.

Mishahdah, Iraq: Soldiers from the US Army's 4th Infantry Division round up detainees during a July 2003 operation aimed at pro-Saddam Hussein insurgents. All of the men in the village were reportedly detained during the operation. © AP/PA Photo/John Moore

t the camp, soldiers pulled him from the truck and dragged him to an interrogation room by his plastic cuffs, so that he was forced to crawl or try to run, all the while, he said, being kicked and beaten. “And I learned that this was how I would always be moved, both in this place and later in Abu Ghraib”. When the hood was removed, an interrogator demanded to know where he was from. Although he said he was an Iraqi, the interpreter recognised by his accent that he was foreign and guessed that he was a Yemeni. This news angered the interrogator, an “American” man with grey hair and civilian clothing, who started shouting at Khaled al-Maqtari, who was only able to catch the phrase “what the hell is this” amidst the torrent of unfamiliar English words.

An hour or two later, Khaled al-Maqtari was again hooded, and taken to another cell, where he was periodically visited by a US soldier with a powerful voice. “He was just shouting at me like a beast, I don’t think he was saying words, just shouting.” Khaled Al-Maqtari was kept standing in the room, still hooded, cuffed and disoriented, and every few minutes – or if al-Maqtari tried to sit down – the soldier would creep into the room and scream or laugh maniacally into Khaled al-Maqtari’s ear.^⁶

January 2004: during a raid in Fallujah, a soldier with the 346th Tactical Psychological Operations Company carries a confiscated computer from a shop

©US Army, Staff Sgt. Charles B Johnson

ater in the evening, Khaled al-Maqtari was taken to a helicopter with at least two other detainees. He suspects that they were Yemenis or other non-Iraqis, as he had overheard that the Iraqi prisoners were being processed separately. From the degree of commotion, shouting and other noise he heard at the camp, he estimated that up to 100 people had been detained.

According to the US Army, the 13 January 2004 operation in Fallujah was known as “Operation Market Sweep” and was aimed at arms dealers operating out of a notorious city centre market. In the course of the raid, “the soldiers confiscated more than 100 rifles, two heavy machine guns, 6,500 round of ammunition, 18 rockets, 244 grenades, 150 mortars and various explosive devices, including 17 pre-manufactured improvised explosive devices. During the operation more than 60 people were captured.”^⁷

Khaled al-Maqtari and the others in the helicopter were transferred to the Abu Ghraib Detention Facility. A US military official at the information offices of the Multi-National Forces in Iraq told Amnesty International that individuals detained in the field, and determined to be “an imperative risk to the security and safety of Iraq”, should have been brought to a Coalition Theater Internment Facility, like Abu Ghraib, be assigned an Internment Serial Number (ISN) and entered into a database. Khaled al-Maqtari was apparently never assigned an ISN^⁸, which suggests that he was turned directly over to Military Intelligence (MI) on suspicion of being a foreign fighter.

[P]ersons deprived of their liberty supervised by the military intelligence were subjected to a variety of ill-treatments ranging from insults and humiliation to both physical and psychological coercion that in some cases might amount to torture in order to force them to cooperate with their interrogators. In certain cases, such as in Abu Ghraib military intelligence section, methods of physical and psychological coercion used by the interrogators appeared to be part of the standard operating procedures by military intelligence personnel to obtain confessions and extract information. Several military intelligence officers confirmed to the ICRC that it was part of the military intelligence process to hold a person deprived of his liberty naked in a completely dark and empty cell for a prolonged period to use inhumane and degrading treatment, including physical and psychological coercion, against persons deprived of their liberty to secure their cooperation…. These methods of physical and psychological coercion were used by the military intelligence in a systematic way to gain confessions and extract information or other forms of cooperation from persons who had been arrested in connection with suspected security offences or deemed to have an ‘intelligence value’.

ICRC report on US violations of the Geneva Conventions in Iraq

At Abu Ghraib, he was immediately brought to a small room, where there were at least three “Americans” and an interpreter, all dressed in fatigue trousers and shirts without uniform insignia. One of the first questions they asked him was whether he was a Sunni or a Shia. “I had to think,” he told Amnesty International, “I didn’t know which answer would make them hit me harder, so finally I just said that I am a Muslim.” His clothes were cut off “from his feet to his neck” with scissors, and he was again hooded and shackled in chains.

Khaled al-Maqtari said that his interrogators did not identify themselves to him, other than to say that they were “Americans”. He was likely to have been interrogated at Abu Ghraib by members of the US Army’s 205^th Military Intelligence Brigade, which was then operating there, or by the CACI contractors working with them, rather than by CIA officials and contractors on site.^⁹A former military interrogator has told Amnesty International that it would be normal procedure for a suspected foreign fighter detained by the Army to be first turned over to MI before being assessed for possible transfer to CIA custody.^¹⁰

The men dragged him to a larger room, measuring about three by four metres, which he calls “the torture room”. There was always water on the floor, he said, “just enough to make it slippery and too uncomfortable to sit or lie down on, and to make it worse when I fell down on it.”^¹¹Once inside, he said, he was beaten again by the three men, who hit him with fists and sticks, “taking turns, as though it was a children’s game. There was a CD machine, playing some kind of terrorising music to create a frightening atmosphere, and it was very loud.” He was still hooded, and said he could not judge where the wall was, so kept smashing into it, especially after they swung him in circles to increase his disorientation.

After a while, according to Khaled al-Maqtari, his assailants sat down to rest while making him stand on a chair in front of a powerful air conditioner, holding up a full case of bottled water. They removed his hood and periodically poured cold water over his head, so that the air conditioning blasted against his wet skin and naked body, and made him shiver so hard that he could barely remain standing. When his arms began to shake so that he could not support the heavy box, he was beaten with a stick to keep him standing, but he eventually could not even stand to stop the beating and collapsed. They continued to beat him with a stick, he said, and every time he was about to pass out they would put some kind of smelling salts under his nose, so he would not lose consciousness, or they would put a mentholated ointment^¹²in his eyes, which was so painful that he was afraid he would lose his vision. Sometimes when he was about to pass out an interpreter would come in and shout “wake up” in Arabic and then the “Americans” would resume the beating.

Khaled al-Maqtari thought they had finished with him, but instead, he said, a chain was hung from the ceiling of the room, and he was suspended upside down by his feet, with his arms still cuffed behind his back, while a pulley was used to lower him up and down over the water crate. As they lowered him down over the box, his torso was distorted, causing both pain and fear. “All of my muscles were tensed up to stop me from collapsing down, and I was terrified if I let go it would have broken my back.” When they pulled him up again, he explained, he had to tense up different muscles, and this too caused incredible pressure on his back and legs. His interrogators, he said, kept moving him up and down slightly “so that I could experience all the different kinds of pain”, and when he was lowered onto the box they beat him with sticks and put the CD player alongside his head at full volume.

Khaled al-Maqtari’s description of his suspension from the ceiling at Abu Ghraib

While he was on the box, Khaled al-Maqtari said, one of the interrogators used him as a footstool, sitting in a chair nearby and resting his feet on Khaled al-Maqtari’s head or back, and once putting a cigarette out on his shoulder. This interrogator kept shouting at him: “you know where I’m from? I’m from New York, the place you Arab […]^¹³ tried to destroy”. Khaled al-Maqtari describes the New Yorker as being “not fat” and of medium height, with a triangular face, dark hair and eyes, aged between 40 and 45, and wearing a pair of military-style trousers with multiple pockets. “He beat me and trampled on my face when I was suspended….. Once he brought with him a woman translator, and I am sure she was either American or British. She spoke broken Arabic. Her hair was dark with some red in it and was tied like how all the female interrogators tied their hair.”

After what seemed like several hours, Khaled al-Maqtari said, he was brought to a room divided by wooden partitions into “small boxes”, with a door at one end, where it was just about possible to lie down in a hunched position.^¹⁴ On this occasion, and throughout his stay in Abu Ghraib, he was brought there between sessions, but found it impossible to rest because guards sometimes kicked the door, or threw water and food at him. “It was some kind of dried thing, not real food, and not cooked or hydrated, so it was very hard to eat. They did just enough to keep us alive for the next interrogation.”

At dawn of his second day at Abu Ghraib, Khaled al-Maqtari was taken out of the box, still naked and shackled. When he asked to go to the toilet, he said, they dragged him there by his feet, banging his head against the wall on both sides of the narrow corridor, before returning him to the “torture room”. An Iraqi interpreter was there, along with three men in fatigues and the interrogator from New York, who began to question him about houses he had stayed in while in Mosul and Fallujah. He was in enormous pain, and unable to concentrate, and says the interrogator offered to sign a paper promising not to torture him anymore if he just answered the questions. Khaled al-Maqtari said he told his captors that such a paper would have no meaning, because they could tear it up any time.

All that day and the next, still naked and shackled, he was taken in and out of the “torture room”, never being allowed to sleep for more than a few minutes at a time in the box room. He describes being repeatedly drenched and put in front of the air conditioner, until he could not speak at all because his teeth were chattering so hard and uncontrollably, and he collapsed. The interrogators brought him hot tea, and said they would bring him clothes if he answered their questions. Khaled al-Maqtari began to tell them which houses he had been staying in, and they brought him a long striped shirt. “It covered me, but not very well.” Once he had put it on, they took him to a helicopter and brought him back to Fallujah.

He rode in the helicopter with his hands cuffed and secured above his head; the skin around his wrists had already worn raw. In Fallujah, he said, they put him into a white minivan, which was dented and dirty to make it look like a civilian vehicle, but with a hidden camera on the outside. He was shackled to the floor, between two seats. He was the only detainee in the van, and there was an Iraqi driver and two translators, both armed with automatic weapons. The grey-haired interrogator from the base was there, in a kefiyah. “I think he was a high-ranking one, as all the others seemed to fear him.” There was also an “American” woman, wearing a hijab, and both she and the grey-haired interrogator had laptop computers. “They were all trying to appear like normal Iraqis,” Khaled al-Maqtari said, “and there were curtains on the windows, so people could not see them too well.” The laptop received images from the camera outside, so that Khaled al-Maqtari could see where they were driving without being able to see outside the vehicle directly, and without anyone being able to see him. When they passed the house, Khaled al-Maqtari pointed it out, and they marked it on the screen. “We will take care of it,” they told him.

He was returned to Abu Ghraib, where the promise not to torture him further was ignored. At about dusk they came and told him that the house he had shown them had been raided and that one US soldier had been killed. Khaled al-Maqtari says they started beating him again, shouting that he was an accomplice in the death of an American, and accusing him of plotting with those inside the house. He tried to argue with them, asking “how can I be getting information to them when I am in here with you?”

Once again he was stripped, beaten, drenched with cold water, and blasted with the air conditioner. He was then taken to an outdoor area covered in gravel, and told to cross it. He had to crawl because of the cuffs and chains, and the stones dug into his hands and knees. When he got to the middle of the area, he said, they brought the dogs, three of them, from three different directions. It was cold and dark, and Khaled al-Maqtari was still naked, wet and shivering. “The dogs came and put their noses right against me and made terrible noises. I had no defence, not even any clothes. Later I thought that they were very well trained because they only made the noises and showed me their teeth, but it was very, very frightening because I never knew that they were not going to bite me. I still have dreams about this.”

According to Khaled al-Maqtari, the interrogators kept telling him to admit to involvement in anti-US operations, but he told them he had nothing to confess. “Then they took me back and beat me and tortured me to the maximum I could bear, until even they started to be convinced that I could not tell them more about operations, so they asked about houses in Mosul. They threatened me during the interrogation that they would bring the Mossad and the Jews to rape me, and sometimes they threatened to hand me to the Shia.^¹⁵When I was still shivering from the water, they brought strong lamps like football lights and shined them right in my face until finally I fainted.” He was taken back to one of the boxes, and his guards told him: “This time we will let you sleep for one whole hour, if you show us the houses in Mosul.” Khaled al-Maqtari said he was so desperate for even that one hour of sleep that he agreed to try, but felt it was only a few minutes before they came to take him to Mosul by helicopter.

In Mosul he was put into the same kind of vehicle as in Fallujah, containing the same grey-haired man and the woman in hijab, as well as two other “Americans”, one of whom was acting as the driver, and was dressed like an Iraqi. In Mosul, Khaled al-Maqtari saw them actually mounting the camera on the van, and so figured out how the system worked. After he had found the house and they marked it on the screen, they asked him many questions about the house and the positions of the rooms inside.

The day after his return to Abu Ghraib, he was stripped and taken back to the interrogation room, where the torture resumed. This time, he said, they accused him of not having told them that there was a weapons stash in the house in Mosul. He tried to tell them that he had not been there for four months, so would not have known about it, but they began torturing him again, and asking him about a house in the al-Amriya, a district in western Baghdad, where he had spent a few hours on arrival in Iraq.

This time, the interrogators told him, he would go with “the Brits” to locate the house. That evening, a team that Amnesty International believes were likely to have come from United Kingdom Special Forces (UKSF), collected him from US custody. The interrogator was British but spoke good Arabic, Khaled al-Maqtari said, adding that he had green eyes, and wore a kefiyah and black clothes. This search operation was markedly less technical than his outings in the US surveillance van; Khaled al-Maqtari was put in the back seat of an unmarked black jeep and chained to the interrogator. The driver and another man, both westerners, both armed, rode in the front. Khaled al-Maqtari sensed that the driver was the officer in charge. They took him out of Abu Ghraib, past a guard at the gate, and out into the city. It was late at night and there were few people in the streets. He said he could not see well, did not know the district, and could not find the house. He was frightened that they would beat him, but when it was clear that he could not provide the information they sought, he was brought back to Abu Ghraib. On return, the driver shook his head “no” at the US interrogators; Khaled al-Maqtari felt that he was letting them know that their search mission had failed, and that he had not cooperated.

Khaled al-Maqtari said he was not abused by the UKSF team, although he is sure that they were aware that he had been tortured. He said he was brought to meet them directly from the “torture room”, and was still huddled in a wet blanket, with the marks of the beatings clearly visible on his body. They did not ask him any questions about his treatment.

Former Special Air Service (SAS) trooper Ben Griffin, who was stationed in Baghdad in early 2005, told Amnesty International that an SAS squadron had been working in a joint US-UK special forces group in Baghdad, carrying out surveillance and intelligence operations against insurgents and foreign Arab fighters, since the beginning of the occupation.^¹⁶ The group shared information, he said, and it would not have been out of the ordinary for an SAS team to take a prisoner directly from US custody on the kind of search mission Khaled al-Maqtari has described. The SAS squadron, he explained, also carried out its own arrest operations; there were a number of Arabic speakers in the squadron, so they were able to carry out assessment interrogations in the field, while other detainees were brought back to the SAS base for further questioning. The SAS did not have a holding facility, and if the detainee was felt to have further intelligence value, he would be turned over to US custody. As a rule, the SAS troopers did not participate in interrogations; Griffin said that these were carried out “behind closed doors”. However, they were aware of the methods likely to be employed against those who were sent to Abu Ghraib for further questioning.

Towards the end of his first week in custody, Khaled al-Maqtari said, a medic came and examined his wounds, and gave him antibiotics and pills for the pain. His ribs, back and legs were severely bruised, he was spitting blood, and he had deep gouges in his wrists from the cuffs. The Iraqi interpreter came with the medic, and Khaled al-Maqtari recalls that “he acted very gentle and concerned, saying things like ‘oh, I wonder how this could have happened to you?’ when this interpreter had been there almost the whole time and knew very well what had caused my injuries.” The medic asked Khaled al-Maqtari how he had come by his injuries, but he was too frightened to answer through the interpreter.

Nine days after his arrest, Khaled al-Maqtari recalls, “one of the interrogators came and said: ‘the Mossad and the CIA are waiting for you’, then they put me in a small room, in the dark, and I was without clothes, shaking and crying.” Alone in the dark, al-Maqtari began to hallucinate: “someone with an Iraqi accent came to me and asked me if I wanted water, and at first I thought it was a man, but she was a woman and she gave me a drink of water and said to read the Quran and disappeared. My dreams were nightmares. Always someone was shouting, I dreamed of bizarre things, like dogs, all through the little half hour when they allowed us to sleep. I still have these nightmares.”

Former contract interrogator Eric Fair, who was in Abu Ghraib in January of 2004, has reviewed Khaled al-Maqtari’s account of his treatment there. Although he did not corroborate all of the details provided by Khaled al-Maqtari – he has noted, for instance, that he never saw any detainee being suspended upside down by his feet – Eric Fair told Amnesty International: “I’ve pored over this report, hoping to find major inconsistencies and gross exaggerations. It is to this nation’s shame that I cannot. My time at Abu Ghraib and Fallujah offers no concrete evidence to refute many of the things Khaled has said.”

Although coalition forces were entitled to detain civilians suspected of criminal activities, including insurgency, such detainees would still be entitled to humane treatment and due process, including registration and visitation by the ICRC. At no time during his detention in Abu Ghraib was Khaled al-Maqtari registered, documented or charged with any crime.^¹⁷He did not see anyone from the ICRC, nor was he ever allowed to contact a lawyer or his family. “They did not say what the accusation was. They asked about the house, and the Iraqis, and if I know where there are others Yemenis, these types of questions. Also for example, who carries out suicide bombing, ‘for sure you must know them, you must be one of them’, these types of things… But they never said when they will release me. Hours before I would leave, perhaps half a day before it, they told me to expect the CIA. After six or four hours, the ninjas came for me.”

In a procedure which has also been described to Amnesty International by other detainees transported by the CIA, a three- or four-person removal team, dressed completely in black, with black gloves and facemasks, came to prepare Khaled al-Maqtari for his departure. They put him in a diaper, socks, short trousers, and a shirt without buttons, then covered his eyes and stuffed his ears with cotton, taped firmly into place, before hooding him and topping it off with noise-reducing headphones. “They do not talk, said Khaled al-Maqtari, “not even a word, the same as the ninjas in the secret prisons.”^¹⁸“It is clear”, he said, “that they have a lot of experience. They know what they are doing, and each of them had a specific role. I mean if I wanted to get dressed myself, I wouldn't be able to do it so fast.”

“Whenever they put on or take off the chains, they grab you harshly, so that we do not escape. They were very strong, everything was horrifying, they even closed the doors violently to terrify us. I was not able to see anything, everything was black. They did not want you to be comfortable; they wanted us to be in an atmosphere of terror all the way there”.

He was brought to the airstrip in the back of a jeep or truck, and felt that at least one other prisoner, possibly two, was transported with him. He thinks the other detainee transferred with him out of Iraq might have been a Saudi Arabian, whose name, or nickname was Khaled al-Sharif.^¹⁹In Abu Ghraib, they had shown Khaled al-Maqtari a photo showing al-Sharif in Iraq; later, in Afghanistan, they showed him another photos of al-Sharif, this time taken inside the detention facility there.

He described the plane that brought him to Afghanistan as small and fast and quiet; the engines were barely audible through his headphones. He felt little vibration from the engines either before or after boarding the plane, which he entered via a short set of about five stairs, and this and the proximity of other passengers lead him to think it was a small jet. “This one was a modern plane and very nice. Although I was covered, I felt that the floor was very soft and like carpet. I fell on to it as soon as I got in the plane.”

He said that he lay on the floor because he was in so much pain from the beatings. “I even think they feared that I was dead or something, because they brought equipment to measure the oxygen and the blood pressure.” No matter what position he sought, the pain was too excruciating to allow him to sleep for long, and if he moved, he said, someone would kick him. “At first I couldn't believe that I found a place to lie down, I so wanted to sleep, I just wanted to rest because I was in pain all over, but then I couldn't sleep because the pain was so strong. My hands were tied around my back, and if I tried to move my hands to ease the pain, they kicked me.”

At the time of Khaled al-Maqtari’s detention, US forces in Iraq were bound by the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War (Fourth Geneva Convention), article 49 of which prohibits the transfer of protected persons, including insurgents who are not part of the military, from the occupied territory.^²⁰Unlawful deportation or transfer or unlawful confinement, as well as torture and other inhuman treatment, in violation of the Geneva Conventions, are war crimes, and prosecutable as such under US and international law.^²¹ In addition, international human rights law applies, even in time of war.

The former head of the US Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel has written that soon after taking up the post in October 2003, he was told by the then White House Counsel, Alberto Gonzales, that the administration had need for legal advice on the question of whether the Fourth Geneva Convention “protects terrorists in Iraq”.^²² Former Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith asserts that “near the end of my first week on the job, the lawyers around the government reached a consensus: the convention protected all Iraqis, including those who were members of al Qaeda or any other terrorist group, but not al Qaeda terrorists from foreign countries who entered Iraq after the occupation began… I agreed.”^²³

A few months later, then Assistant Attorney General Goldsmith drafted a memorandum to Alberto Gonzales and circulated it to the head lawyers at the CIA, the Departments of State and Defense, and the National Security Council. This draft memorandum, dated 19 March 2004, “elaborates on interim guidance provided in October 2003 concerning the permissibility under [article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention] of relocating certain ‘protected persons’ detained in occupied territory to places outside that country.”^²⁴The memorandum concluded that the USA could, “consistent with article 49”, (1) remove from Iraq under local immigration law “protected persons” who were “illegal aliens”; and (2) “relocate ‘protected persons’ (whether illegal aliens or not) from Iraq to another country to facilitate interrogation, for a brief but not indefinite period”, as long as the individual concerned had not been “accused of offences” within the meaning of article 76 of the Convention.

What role such advice may have played in the transfer of Khaled al-Maqtari out of Iraq is impossible to judge, due to the secrecy surrounding the CIA’s rendition, detention and interrogation program, and the fact that most documents relating to it remain classified. For his part, Jack Goldsmith has written that he never finalized the March 2004 memorandum and “it never became operational, and it was never relied on to take anyone outside of Iraq”.^²⁵He further states that “I do not know whether the request for legal advice about relocating Iraqi prisoners outside Iraq for questioning was associated with a broader rendition program. But I do know that the draft opinion could not have been relied upon to abuse anyone, not only because it was never finalized, but more importantly because it stated that the suspect’s Geneva Convention protections must travel with him outside Iraq.”^²⁶

Whether the US authorities concluded that Khaled al-Maqtari’s nationality and their suspicion that he was involved with al-Qa’ida left him unprotected by the Geneva Conventions, or whether they considered that the advice articulated in the draft Office of Legal Counsel memorandum gave them a green light to remove him from Iraq to Afghanistan and into the CIA’s secret program, the upshot is that their conduct and his treatment violated international law. Moreover, while US authorities have never charged Khaled al-Maqtari with any crime, his account of his treatment at the hands of the US government points to crimes having been committed against him for which no one has been held to account. The US authorities have a case to answer.

From hard site to “black site”: CIA custody in Afghanistan

CIA operated Gulfstream V, widely known to be used for the transport of CIA detainees, including Khaled al-Maqtari. It was registered as N379P in February 2000 by Premier Executive Transport Services, a CIA front company; it was re-registered as N8068V at the beginning of 2004; and again re-registered as N44982 in December 2004 by Bayard Foreign Marketing, a phantom company registered in 2003.

Amnesty International has obtained flight records that corroborate Khaled al-Maqtari’s recollections, at least to the extent that a Gulfstream V jet, operated by a CIA front company and widely known to be used for the transport of CIA detainees^²⁷, left Baghdad International Airport on 21 January 2004, nine days after Khaled al-Maqtari’s arrest, heading for Khwaja Rawash airport in Kabul. Khaled Al-Maqtari says he was transferred by vehicle to a secret facility in Afghanistan, which he believes was Bagram Air Base, and he refers to it throughout his interviews as Bagram.^²⁸ Other detainees in Afghanistan later told him that he had arrived at about the same time as two other prisoners.^²⁹

His arrival at the new facility followed a pattern familiar to Amnesty International. He was brought to see a doctor or medic, who took blood and a urine sample, photographs were taken of his naked body, and wounds and marks were recorded on a diagram. The same process has been described to Amnesty International by other former black site detainees^³⁰. “I felt they were checking a lot, as they were scared that I might die if they hit me any more times.” He was then given a blue shirt and trousers and brought to see a man he was told was a psychologist.

All of the prison staff wore black clothes, he said, and the guards were gloved and masked, although the medical personnel did not cover their faces. He described the psychologist as “American”, white, short and fat, with glasses and thinning black hair combed back at the sides, aged between 40 and 45 years. The same psychologist also treated Khaled al-Maqtari in the second secret prison, and was present during some of his interrogations^³¹. “He said I was in a bad state because of my fear of dogs.” The doctor then told him that he “had it in his own hands to make this either a better or a worse place… If you cooperate with the investigators, they will give you a prayer mat and a Quran, otherwise you may be in a worse position than in the past.”

Khaled al-Maqtari was placed in a small cell, close to the bathroom, where he stayed for about two weeks before being moved to a larger cell in the same corridor. Inside both cells, there were cameras that he felt were following his movements, as even in the dark he could see the red light moving back and forth. He initially remained handcuffed and shackled, the cell was kept dark for the first four or five days, and sounds were played over a speaker inside the cell. “It was not really music,” Khaled al-Maqtari explained, “but noise to scare you, like from one of those scary movies. You feel your veins pumping and you become nervous. I was very nervous all the time I was in the room. Every time you think you are getting used to it, they would change it. I was scared, there were no dogs but there was noise there. Whenever you try to sleep, they bang on the door loudly and violently. There was music and shouting.

“There was a metal window in the cell, but there was no light from it. This window was within the building, not facing outside, and it was near the ground. I heard the guards walk past it, but mostly it was covered with cardboard. Ants and mice entered the room from there.”

The cell also contained what Khaled al-Maqtari described as a large grey plastic bucket to urinate in, similar to the portable plastic toilets used in Bagram before flush toilets were installed for the troops in 2003^³². “There was water in the bottom half of it, and you sit on it to urinate, then you cover it.” Moazzam Begg, who was held in Bagram throughout most of 2002, told Amnesty International that he was provided with similar facilities from July 2002, adding that the toilet was mobile and purpose built, with a conventional toilet seat and cover.^³³

Interrogation and cooperation

Two days after Khaled al-Maqtari arrived, guards came and took him to see a “tall and thin” interrogator, who gave him bread and tuna. “This was how they do it,” he said, “when they want to talk to you, they give you food.” Experts on the CIA program, quoted by the New Yorker magazine, explained that offering and withholding food, and varying portion sizes, is part of the “psychological arsenal” available to the interrogators. “It’s all calibrated to develop dependency.”^³⁴

Khaled al-Maqtari asked where he was, and the interrogator told him that “you are in a place that maybe you will be able to get out of, but there are others who will never be able to get out, so you need to choose which you will be.” Khaled al-Maqtari said he then asked “what did I do?”, and the interrogator replied: “you were in Iraq and you may know where some Arab fighters are and you have not told us, or you may know suicide bombers and those who carry out suicide bombings.”

Interrogations took place nearly every afternoon. The guards would come to the cell, and Khaled al-Maqtari had to stand well away from the door as they entered. His arms were then chained, he was masked and hooded, and taken to the interrogation room, where the hood, but not the chains, was removed.

All of the interrogators were from the US and used interpreters; the interpreters rotated, so that he never had the same ones for more than a week at a time. A former interrogator told Amnesty International that this “good practice”, aimed at ensuring that no interpreter develops a sympathetic relationship with a detainee. Khaled al-Maqtari met only male interpreters in Afghanistan. Interrogators also rotated, although less frequently. Khaled al-Maqtari said he was questioned by the tall, thin interrogator for about two weeks, followed by another with green or blue eyes, and the distinctive habit of wearing what Khaled al-Maqtari believed was a swimming cap during interviews. He was later interrogated by a woman who said her name was Sarah; she wore glasses and covered her hair. In the interrogation room, there was also a curtained off area, where someone else was always sitting. Khaled al-Maqtari was only ever able to see this person’s feet.

He asked the interrogator with the swimming cap when he would be released, and was told: “there are three kinds of answers – there are things we can tell you, things we can’t tell you and things that even we don’t know, that only the big officials can determine.”

The interrogators were nothing if not thorough. “They wanted every detail of my life, from the time I was born until I was arrested. They asked where I studied, where I travelled, who I spoke to. I mean in great and boring detail. Who are my brothers and sisters, what are their names and birth dates, who are their husbands and wives and children, who are my parents and uncles and friends. Who are all the people I have ever met. Of course they showed me many photos of people and many in Guantánamo Bay, I could see from the clothes, and asked ‘do you know this one and that one’. If I knew one of them, they would take some time talking about him, if he is important to them. If he is not, or if he is dead or killed, that would be it.”

“This was their method of interrogation: in the first place [Abu Ghraib] they tortured you so much that when you move to a new place and the treatment is better you start to feel that they are very kind. But in the first stage they asked about important questions, like where the houses of the fighters were. In the three months and some days I was in Bagram, they made me tell my whole life story fully many times. Later, in the secret detention, they asked the same questions over and over again, in many different ways to make sure that you are telling the truth.”

On several occasions, Khaled al-Maqtari said that he heard detainees screaming and crying. The detainee in the cell next to his, Adnan al-Libi, was once taken away for three days, and Khaled al-Maqtari thought he might have been transferred. “But from the interrogation room, I heard very loud music and I wondered how the Americans can stand such loud music. When Adnan was brought back to his cell, he was tired and barely able to move or talk, and he said: ‘I was in that place, suspended, and they were beating me and the loud music was playing and I was being interrogated.’” Muhammad Bashmilah, who was being held in the same facility at the same time, has said that he heard the screams of Adnan al-Libi being tortured in the interrogation room.^³⁵

Medical care

On arrival in Afghanistan, Khaled al-Maqtari says he was suffering from internal bleeding and extensive bruising, and was in constant pain. Although he saw a doctor, who photographed and recorded his injuries, it was several weeks before he was given any medical treatment, and he believed that provision of care was linked to his degree of cooperation during interrogation. “They started to give me treatment after a while,” he said, “when they knew I was telling the truth. They started to treat the bruises and wounds. They gave me an ointment and ‘Vicks’ for the breathing. Of course they gave us these things for the interrogation, I know this was for the sake of information. The proof for that is that when they got the information, they took the ‘Vicks’ and everything else from me.”

Being allowed brief time outdoors was likewise contingent on cooperation. After two weeks, “when they had the information”, he was taken out to a yard, and sat on a chair facing directly into a wall, inches away from his face. “It was a high wall, but there was fresh air… You are not allowed to turn your head a millimetre to the left or right, and you could stay for no more than 10 to 15 minutes, completely chained. Then they cover you and take you back. They didn’t ever remove my mask, until I was in front of the wall sitting down. The first time I saw some remains of snow and heard some car noises.^³⁶ I felt cold. There was also a lot of rain. I often heard the sounds of rain in Bagram. But later, in the secret jail, you would never hear, see or feel anything.”

Conditions of confinement

The guards brought food to the cells, but did not enter except to bring detainees out for interrogation or for a shower. They would often bang on the door or wall when they passed, and although this meant that the detainees could rarely sleep without interruption, the noise from further down the corridor gave them warning of approaching guards. According to Khaled al-Maqtari, Adnan al-Libi would alert them when the guards were approaching, saying: “the fox is here”.

A five-minute shower was allowed once a week, although Khaled al-Maqtari said that the water was scarce and cold: “There was a boiler but they never switched it on, except once, when they needed information… I was not able to wash because I was ill.”

Who was in the secret prison?

As soon as interrogations finished, Khaled al-Maqtari was returned to his cell, always hooded, so as not to see any of the other detainees or any details of the building he was in. The position of the interior window and the sounds made by passing guards from all sides of the room, led him to suspect that the cells were discrete box-like structures, rather than rooms, although they had rendered walls like ordinary prison cells. By listening to other detainees who would speak during any lapses in the music or sound effects, he worked out that there were two rows of 10 cells each. The lapses were never more than a few seconds, unless the generators stopped working, but Khaled al-Maqtari said that for detainees held in isolation, starved of communication, those brief interludes “were like a lifetime”.^³⁷

Khaled al-Maqtari stayed in cell 19 for about two weeks. During his first few days the music in his room was excruciatingly loud, but during a break he heard a voice calling in Arabic to a prisoner called Riba’i. “When I heard it I was so happy, because I was not imprisoned alone.” Then he heard the same voice calling out for “Mu’ath”, “Naseem”, “Marwan” and “Hazim”. “I later found out that the person calling was Adnan al-Libi, he had a strong voice. He kept saying ‘number 19, talk to us, number 19’ but I didn’t know that I was number 19 yet.”

“Adnan was always calling others. He was always trying to find out who was there, who was new. At first I was scared and didn't know that he was calling me. And I was not able to get close to the door at first, I was handcuffed to the window. Days later they undid my handcuffs which allowed me to go near the door. There I heard again ‘number 19, number 19’ and this time I told them who I was. They were saying ‘Allah Akbar’ [God is great] and Adnan told me there were now six Yemenis there – Riyadh al-Sharqawi, from Ta’iz, and Umayr bin Attash, the brother of Khallad, were also new. They were both arrested in Karachi and sent to Jordan by the Americans. Umayr was 13 months in Jordan and Riyadh was there for nearly two years and they were tortured horribly.”^³⁸

After about two weeks, Khaled al-Maqtari was moved to cell 13, which was next to Adnan al-Libi, and closer to the other prisoners, so he was able to ask questions during the infrequent breaks in the noise. Adnan al-Libi and the others told him more about the prisoners who had been held there before Khaled al-Maqtari’s arrival. Ibn al-Sheikh al Libi, they said, had been taken away a few weeks before; he had been there only a few months, having spent the summer in a “medieval prison” and the previous year in Egypt.^³⁹ Khaled al-Maqtari was also told that Abdulsalam al-Hela had been detained there earlier in 2003; he was later transferred to Guantánamo, where he remains today. Sheikh Saleh al Libi, who moved to cell 20 in April, said he had originally been detained in Mauritius and rendered through Morocco, and that he had previously been held in one cell outside, and one cell at the other end of the row. His given name and current whereabouts are unknown.^⁴⁰

At least three “high value” detainees had recently been detained at this site: Khallad [Tawfiq bin Attash], a Yemeni, and Ammar Baluchi [Ali Abdul Aziz Ali],a Pakistani raised in Kuwait, said they had been arrested in Pakistan together; Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a Yemeni, told the others that he had been in “a prison in Kabul” but was transferred out because the ICRC had learned he was there and had tried to see him. All three were said to have been transferred out in September 2003, and reappeared three years later, among the 14 “high value” detainees transferred to Guantánamo. Two of the other “high value” detainees, Mukhtar [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] and Hambali [Riduan bin Isomuddin], had reportedly been held there earlier in the year.^⁴¹

In cell 13, the light was left on constantly, and the names of what Khaled al-Maqtari surmised were two of the cell’s previous occupants were scratched on the wall: Badr al-Madni and Abu Nasser al-Qahtani. He said he added his own name and nickname (Firas) on the wall below.^⁴²

Through conversations with Adnan al-Libi and the other detainees, Khaled al-Maqtari began to mentally map the names, or at least the nicknames, and cell numbers of those on his corridor. He could converse with the detainees closest to him, but any other messages had to be passed down through other prisoners, and could become garbled in the process.

“I think Riba'i may have been Tunisian, but he was very far away^⁴³; Hazim is Libyan; Naseem is Tunisian; Adnan is Libyan of course; Marwan al-Adenni is a Yemeni from Aden, he is here now [meaning here in Yemen], and so is Shumilla [Muhammad Bashmilah]^⁴⁴. I am Yemeni of course, and so are Umayr bin Attash and Riyadh Haitham al-Sharqawi – they were calling him Riyadh. And Abu Malik al-Qasemi was another Yemeni. Also there was Abu Ahmed, who was called Abu Ahmed ‘the Malaysian. ’Abu Mu'ath al-Suri was very near me, and Abu Yasser al-Jaza’iri was near to Ahmed. There were many of them. Later came Majid Khan, from Pakistan, with Abu Abdullah al-Saudi. There were other ones who did not respond when Adnan was calling him out, and saying to him ‘we are your friends’.”

Majid Khan, a Pakistani who was one of the 14 detainees transferred from the CIA program to Guantánamo in September 2006, arrived in the facility in Afghanistan about six to eight weeks after Khaled al-Maqtari. Khan, who spoke little Arabic, told another detainee that he “had been here before, was transferred to another prison in Kabul and then was returned to this prison”. At the prison in Kabul, Majid Khan had said, there had been both Arab and Afghan prisoners, who were able to communicate more freely with one another, although their general conditions of detention were worse. Abu Abdullah al-Saudi, who said he had been arrested in Iraq the month before, and had apparently been a “ghost detainee” like Khaled al-Maqtari, arrived at the same time.

Detainees reportedly held in secret facility in Afghanistan from January – April 2004; listed by cell number and name known to other detainees [given name in brackets]

1. Ahmed the Malaysian: current whereabouts unknown

2. Riba’i [Hassan LNU]: transferred to CIA “black site” in 2004, reportedly transferred to Libya in 2006, whereabouts unconfirmed

3. Yasser al Jaza’iri: transferred to CIA “black site” in 2004, current whereabouts unknown

4. Riyadh al-Sharqawi [Al-Haj Abdu Ali Sharqawi]: transferred to Guantánamo in September 2004

5. Umayr bin Attash [Hassan Muhammad bin Attash]: arrived late January 2004, transferred to Guantánamo in September 2004

Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi [Ali Abdul-Hamid al-Fakhiri]: transferred out of this facility in early January 2004, apparently to CIA “black site”, reportedly transferred to Libya in 2005, current whereabouts unconfirmed

6. Shumilla [Muhammad Faraj Ahmed Bashmilah]: transferred to CIA “black site” in April 2004, returned to Yemen in May 2005, released from custody in March 2006

7. Naseem al Tunisi: current whereabouts unknown

8. Hazim al-Libi [Khaled al-Sharif]: transferred to CIA “black site” in 2004, reportedly transferred to Libya in 2006, whereabouts unconfirmed

9. Abu Malik al Qasemi [Sanaad Yislam al Kazimi]: transferred to Guantánamo in September 2004

10. Abu Abdullah al Saudi: arrested in Iraq in February or March 2004, transferred to Afghanistan facility in April 2004, current whereabouts unknown

11. Marwan al-Adenni [Salah Nasser Salim ‘Ali Qaru]: transferred to CIA “black site” in April 2004, returned to Yemen in May 2005, released from custody in March 2006

12. Mu’ath al-Suri, aka Abu Abdullah: current whereabouts unknown

13. Khaled al-Maqtari: transferred to CIA “black site” in April 2004, returned to Yemen in September 2006, released from custody in May 2007

14. a Somali man, name unknown

15. Adnan al Libi [Majid LNU]: transferred to CIA “black site” in 2004, current whereabouts unknown

16. Muhammad al Assad: transferred to CIA “black site” in April 2004, returned to Yemen in May 2005, released from custody in March 2006

17. Binyam Mohammed [based on his own statement, Khaled al-Maqtari said this was one of the cells occupied by someone who did not speak]: transferred to Guantánamo September 2004

18. Majid Khan: transferred to CIA “black sites”, transferred to Guantánamo September 2006

19. Laid Saidi [based on his own statement: Khaled al-Maqtari says that someone arrived in this cell a day or two before the April 2004 transfer]: Laid Saidi himself reports having been moved from one detention facility in Afghanistan to another in late April 2004

20. Sheikh Saleh al-Libi: current whereabouts unknown

One of the Yemenis held with Khaled al-Maqtari in Afghanistan, “Abu Malik al Qasemi”, appears to be the same person as a Yemeni now being held at Guantánamo, Sanaad Yislam al Kazimi. Al Kazimi reported that he was in the “Dark Prison” from September 2003 until May 2004, with other Yemenis including Muhammad Bashmilah and Salah ‘Ali Qaru, and that he was in the cell next to Binyam Mohammed, an Ethiopian who is also now being held in Guantánamo. Binyam Mohammed, who had been arrested in Pakistan and rendered by US agents to Morocco, has said that he was taken from Morocco to Afghanistan in January 2004, and was held in “the Dark Prison” for five months. His description of this facility is similar to Khaled al-Maqtari’s description of “Bagram”. Both had 20 cells in two rows of 10, numbered in the same way, with double metal doors and low interior windows. Binyam Mohammed also explicitly mentions the ghostly sounds and music that had so disturbed Khaled al-Maqtari: “They used horror sounds, like they were from the movies, 24 hours a day for maybe two weeks. There was hardly any way to sleep. It was like a perpetual nightmare.”^⁴⁵ Binyam Mohammed estimated that there were up to 20 people in the prison, and that these had previously included “the Yemeni businessman from Sana’a named Abdulsalam Hiera” (presumably Abdulsalam al-Hela).

A statement from al-Sharqawi, in which he confirms that he was transferred to Afghanistan from Jordan in January 2004, describes the prison as “a pitch dark place, with extremely loud scary sounds”. Other elements of his description are consistent with Khaled al-Maqtari’s, particularly his account of being allowed to sit on a chair in front of a high wall once a week, where he too noticed snow cover^⁴⁶. All of these details strongly suggest that Khaled al-Maqtari, al-Sharqawi and the other Yemenis were held in the same place, and that it could have been the “Dark Prison”, rather than Bagram.

Khaled al-Maqtari thought he was in Bagram primarily because the words “Welcome to Hotel Bagram” were inscribed on the wall of his cell, in English. He also said that other detainees who knew Afghanistan, including one who had been arrested in Khost and transferred by car, had told him that they “must be” in Bagram, because of the distance of the car journey. Other evidence is likewise equivocal: when Khaled al-Maqtari arrived in Kabul, he was transferred by vehicle from the airport to the prison, and he estimates that the trip took 30 to 45 minutes. He thought the vehicle travelled quickly, without stopping or starting, which led him to believe that they were not moving through traffic, but on a fairly deserted road. If the plane indeed landed in Kabul, 30-45 minutes at consistent speed would be about the time needed to reach Bagram. However, Muhammad Bashmilah, who was held in the same detention centre at the same time, recalls a journey of less than half an hour, more consistent with a site closer to Kabul.^⁴⁷

Both Khaled al-Maqtari and Salah ‘Ali Qaru have said that there was at least one disused Russian truck in the yard of the facility, and Muhammad Bashmilah reports that he was able to see a prison guard tower, both of which suggest a purpose-built prison or military base.^⁴⁸ Bagram is littered with Russian wrecks and guard towers, but so are other sites near Kabul. The “Dark Prison” is rumoured to have been located in a complex near Kabul airport, but the precise location is not known, nor is it clear whether or not it contained guard towers and abandoned military vehicles.

Given the extreme measures taken to insulate “black site” detainees from the outside world, their conclusions about the location of the detention site are bound to be speculative. To complicate matters further, there was at least one other CIA facility in operation at the same time. Abdulsalam al-Hela has described being held in at least four detention centres in Afghanistan, including Bagram airbase and the “dark prison” as well as facilities apparently run by Afghans^⁴⁹. Khalid el-Masri who was rendered to Afghanistan from Macedonia one day after Khaled al-Maqtari was transferred from Iraq, was taken to a detention centre close to the airport, where he saw Afghan guards in Afghan dress. His attorneys have concluded that he was held in a facility known as the “Salt Pit”, an abandoned brick factory complex at an isolated site north of Kabul, a short distance from the airport. Khalid el-Masri has said that he was held with Laid Saidi, an Algerian handed over to US custody after being expelled from Tanzania to Malawi in May 2003. Laid Saidi, who has since been released, was held in at least three different facilities in Afghanistan, including a place he described as “filthy, not even suitable for animals”, where he says he spoke to Khalid el-Masri^⁵⁰, and a “very dark prison” near Kabul airport, where “there was very loud Western music being played”.^⁵¹ Another CIA detainee who was moved into Afghanistan in January 2004 was also likely to have been held there: Muhammad al-Assad told Amnesty International that he had first been taken to a facility where the sounds of aircraft were regular, and which had Afghan or Pakistani guards in their native dress. His cell was old and had a window high up on one wall. After a few weeks there, he was driven to another facility about 20-40 minutes away. His descriptions of his new surroundings and of his eventual transfer make it clear that he had gone to the facility where Muhammad Bashmilah, Khaled al-Maqtari and the others were being held.

Whatever its precise location, this facility seemed to function as a transit and evaluation centre; some detainees had been brought there directly from arrest in Pakistan or Afghanistan, others had been held in other facilities in Afghanistan or abroad, and some had been “extraordinarily rendered” and were in the process of being transferred back from Jordanian or Egyptian custody. Of some 23 detainees thought to have been held there in late 2003 and early 2004, 14 were apparently transferred to other CIA “black sites” (four of whom were “high value” detainees who then transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006), at least three joined the regular detainee population at Guantánamo, and the fate of six others remains unknown.^⁵²

CIA ‘black site’: whereabouts unknown

In April 2004, probably around the 24^th, Khaled al-Maqtari and a number of his fellow detainees were moved out of the Afghanistan facility.^⁵³ He was given no warning of the impending move; two guards simply came to his room after lunch, at about 2pm, and brought him to the doctor for a medical check. The doctor’s examination room was on a raised platform inside the hangar or warehouse; Khaled al-Maqtari remembers that he went up three steps to a floor, then up one additional step to enter the examination room. Once inside, his blindfold and clothes were removed, and each mark or injury on his body was numbered and recorded on the same chart he had seen the doctor use before.

Khaled al-Maqtari counted nine separate body charts on the doctor’s desk, indicating to him that at least nine detainees were being prepared for removal.^⁵⁴ The medical check itself took about half an hour, and Khaled al-Maqtari was then brought to another room, where the transfer team was waiting. The three-man team, dressed entirely in black, quickly put him into a nappy, knee-length trousers and a shirt, blocked his ears and covered and taped his eyes, finishing off with sound-deadening headphones, handcuffs and shackles. He was then brought to another area where he was pushed down to the ground in a sitting position. Unable to see or to talk, he could still feel that other detainees were seated on either side of him, and over the next two to three hours, he could periodically hear the sounds of other detainees being brought in.

Late in the afternoon, Khaled al-Maqtari and the other detainees were put into a vehicle, lying down, with others lying next to him. The drive to the airport took about 30 minutes, and once there, they waited another hour in the car. His impression was that they were waiting for another carload of detainees to arrive.

At around sunset, he was loaded into a plane, apparently larger than the Gulfstream jet that had brought him to Afghanistan. Hooded and chained, he could not move as fast as the guards wanted, and so he was carried part of the way up the gangway. “There were two of them, one on each side, and sometimes one in front of me pulling me. If you are too weak to stand, they carry you.”

“From the loud noise and rough ride and the way we sat,” said Khaled al-Maqtari, “I felt it might have been a plane used for cargo.” The plane seemed to have bench seats along the side, rather than in rows. The journey lasted “about three hours”, although Khaled al-Maqtari acknowledges that this is only his best guess^⁵⁵: “I was very tired and couldn't count how long it took exactly. I don’t think I slept because if you try to sleep, the guards kick you, but maybe I did and the time is hard to judge when one is very ill.”

“After we landed, we were taken from the plane to a helicopter. The distance between them was maybe 200 metres, and the air was cool and fresh, definitely not hot. The helicopter journey was for one-and-a-half to two hours approximately. It was shorter than the plane trip, anyway. We were put into a vehicle, lying down as before. At first the road was asphalt, then it was bumpy, as if it was not paved. It took about 30 minutes to get there. The road was one level, neither going up nor going down.”

On arrival at their final destination, a CIA “black site” in which Khaled al-Maqtari was to spend the next 28 months, he and the other detainees were brought into a large building like a warehouse, where he was chained in a sitting position to a ring in what seemed like some kind of trailer or container “like being in the back of a truck”. He was there for several hours, and again felt that they were waiting for other detainees to arrive and be processed.

The size and location of this “black site” remains the subject of speculation. Amnesty International has reported extensively on the cases of three other Yemenis who were apparently held in the same site, and two of these men told Amnesty International in October 2005 that they believed this detention centre was in Europe. Khaled al-Maqtari himself firmly believes that the site was not in the Middle East or Afghanistan, citing the food, the distance they had travelled, and the orientation of the toilets (which were facing Mecca). The Council of Europe’s June 2007 report confirmed the existence of secret detention centres in Poland and Romania up until the end of 2005, when these sites were closed down, but Khaled al-Maqtari and several other detainees who arrived at this site in 2004 were held until mid-2006, and evidence suggests that some of the “high value” detainees may have been moved from Poland and/or Romania to this site prior to their transfer to Guantánamo in September 2006.

In the cells themselves, there were no windows and no natural light of any kind seeping in. When the lights were off, the room went completely black. The detainees were never able to hear any sounds of wind, rainfall, thunder or lightning, which made it difficult to get any sense of the climate in their location. Both heat and air conditioning were available in the cells, although they were more often used as reward and punishment than to maintain a constant temperature, so Khaled al-Maqtari was able to tell that there was significant variation between winter and summer. When he arrived, at the end of April 2004, he felt that the weather was cool and fresh. The winters were harsh and cold, and when he was briefly allowed outside during the summer months, towards the end of his stay, he described the direct sunlight as being warm enough to make him sweat, but not hot. Such a vague description would fit many locations in Europe and elsewhere, but would rule out locations in the desert or the tropics.

The duration of his transfer flights provides very general indications of where Khaled al-Maqtari might have been, but without knowing the size, speed and route of the aircraft, as well as the exact duration of the flights, no specific location can be pinpointed. The flight that returned Khaled al-Maqtari to Yemen in September 2006 was described as a non-stop journey of at least six hours in a “good plane”^⁵⁶. Given that cruise speeds for likely aircraft vary from about 250 to well over 500 knots, the final flight could have been anywhere from around 2,500 to more than 5,000 kilometres.^⁵⁷ However, the triangulation between this flight and the shorter plane and helicopter journeys from Afghanistan appears to rule out locations in Western Europe and the Middle East.^⁵⁸

The facility in which Khaled al-Maqtari was held from April 2004 until September 2006 was new or refurbished, and carefully designed and operated to ensure maximum security and secrecy, as well as disorientation, dependence and stress for the detainees.^⁵⁹ Well-staffed and resourced, and highly organized, the system in operation there would not have been maintained solely for the purpose of interrogating low-level suspects.

Intake procedures, for instance, consisted of being photographed naked from all angles, and having fingerprints and eye scans taken^⁶⁰, before being examined by the doctor, and having all marks and injuries recorded. Khaled al-Maqtari then spent the first days of his time in this facility in his cell, naked and chained so close to the wall that he could barely reach the toilet. There were two video cameras in the cell, with red lights that blinked whenever he moved, and a mesh-covered speaker in the wall. The interior of the double cell door was heavy metal, and appeared to be new, and the toilet was likewise new and made of stainless steel.

Khaled al-Maqtari remained in this cell for four months, then moved to a nearby cell for about a year and finally to a third cell, which was some distance away, possibly in an adjoining building, for the remainder of his 28-month incarceration. Security levels and procedures in the new prison were even tighter than before, and communication between prisoners was almost impossible. The guards, like those in the previous facility, were dressed entirely in black, with their faces and hands also covered, and communicated by hand gestures, or simply by pushing him in the direction they wanted him to go.

Majid Khan, seized at his brother’s home in Karachi in March 2003, has alleged that he was tortured during his more than three years in secret CIA custody. His lawyers, who finally had access to him in Guantánamo in late 2007, a year after his transfer to the base, have filed Declarations in US federal court detailing the alleged torture against Majid Khan and other detainees held in CIA custody. All such detail has been redacted (censored) from the public record on the grounds of national security. His lawyers have stated the following:

“Khan’s torture was decidedly not a mistake, an isolated occurrence, or even the work of ‘rogue’ CIA officials or government contractors operating outside their authority or chain of command. To the contrary, as detailed in the Dixon Declaration, Khan [redacted] prisoners who were similarly abducted, imprisoned and tortured by US personnel at CIA ‘black sites’ around the world. The collective experiences of these men, who were forcibly disappeared by the government and became ghost prisoners, reveal a sophisticated, refined program of torture operating with impunity outside the boundaries of any domestic or international law”.

The interrogators appeared to be preoccupied with maintaining the secrecy of the site. Khaled al-Maqtari was frequently asked how many cells he thought there were in the facility, and where he thought it was. Sometimes, he said “they bring a piece of paper and ask you to write down how many prisoners you think there are. I would say I didn’t know, but I did, I think there were 15 cells in my section.” The cells were divided into small blocks of three, each with a double steel entry door leading onto a small hallway, and a similar door from the block to the outside corridor.^⁶¹Khaled al-Maqtari also felt there was another section; he explained that on one occasion guards covered him with a blanket, and took him down stairs into a long corridor, where he heard detainees shouting. “You felt that those there are tortured even more.”

Otherwise, interrogation practice followed much the same pattern as in Afghanistan. Conditions were initially harsh, so that it was some days before Khaled al-Maqtari was given even basic clothing, and several months before he had any blankets. Very gradually, he said, “they improved the situation as they got information from us.” In the second year he was given access to books and writing materials, and started to be taken out for exercise and to view DVDs.^⁶²In the last two months, he was even able to use a white board in his cell to write requests for the air conditioning be turned down.

During the interrogations themselves, Khaled al-Maqtari did not suffer the kind of physical abuse he had been subjected to in Abu Ghraib, although he said he was regularly handled roughly and pushed around, particularly by the guards. The first few times he was questioned, he said, “I was not able to speak a single word. I was shaking whenever I was brought to them. I think they thought if we torture him any more he will go mad. But they kept me there for six hours, with the air very cold, until I got seizures. This happened until the doctor came to me. They put up the air conditioning sometimes, until all of my bones hurt me, but if they had put much more pressure on me I would have gone mad.”

Amnesty International has interviewed a number of former “black site” detainees, all of whom have described years spent in mind-numbing isolation, broken only by interrogation sessions which seemed to them to have very little to do with alleged terrorist activities. Those interviewed by the organization have all been released – presumably because they were not found to pose a threat to the USA, or to be the “dangerous terrorists” CIA Director Hayden has insisted the secret detention program was designed for. Their interrogations were therefore likely to have been fundamentally different from those carried out with detainees thought to be high-level al-Qa’ida operatives. During his interrogations in the “black site” Khaled al-Maqtari was once again invited to recount his life story in excruciating detail, and to answer questions about the lives of his friends, family and acquaintances. He said he was shown thousands of photographs, including many of prisoners in Guantánamo, and told to provide any information – first or second hand – he had about those he recognised. Sometimes he had trouble concentrating, describing himself as “mentally exhausted” and unable to talk, and said the interrogators would give him questions on a piece of paper, to think about and answer in his cell. Another detainee described the process as collecting pieces of a puzzle before knowing what the puzzle would turn out to be.

In February 2008 the CIA admitted to having “waterboarded” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and ‘Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. The latter was arrested in November 2002 in the United Arab Emirates, and was held in secret CIA custody until he was transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006. At his Combatant Status Review Tribunal hearing on 14 March 2007, 11 months before the CIA’s admitted to having “waterboarded” him, ‘Abd al-Nashiri testified that he had been tortured in CIA custody. Through a translator, he said: "From the time I was arrested five years ago, they have been torturing me. It happened during interviews. One time they tortured me one way and another time they tortured me in a different way." Clarification was then sought by the CSRT President, but in the publicly available transcript of the hearing, ‘Abd al-Nashiri’s relevant responses have been withheld:

President: Please describe the methods that were used.

Detainee: [Redacted]. What else do I want to say? [Redacted]. Many things happened. They were doing so many things. What else did they did? [Redacted]. They do so many things. So so many things. What else did they did? [Redacted]. After that another method of torture began [Redacted].

The years of interrogation endured by Khaled al-Maqtari and other detainees who were never charged by the US, could perhaps best be characterised as a broad information fishing exercise. Indeed, the current CIA Director has indicated that the methods used in the secret detention program, at least in the initial years, were at least in part motivated by the US government’s intelligence gap in relation to al-Qa’ida. In testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee on 5 February 2008, for example, General Hayden tried to justify the water torture he admitted had been used in 2002 and 2003 as a means to obtain information from detainees at a time of perceived threat to public safety, and on the grounds that the intelligence community “had limited knowledge about al-Qa’ida and its workings.”^⁶³

Whatever its motivation, prolonged secret incommunicado detention, which itself constitutes torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, is unlawful. It violates universal standards of human rights, facilitates other forms of torture, and amounts to enforced disappearance. It jeopardizes the prospect of fair trials, erodes the rule of law, and potentially breeds widely-felt resentment at such injustice, thereby undermining rather than nurturing long-term security.

Khaled al-Maqtari said that he repeatedly asked his interrogators why he was there, and what his crime was: “I said to them: ‘For justification you say human rights and democracy, but what right to do you have to torture someone when you have nothing against him. Has anyone seen me killing an American or doing anything like that?’ When they arrested me, I did not have any weapons. I told this many times to the psychologists, they used to listen to me, but the interrogators never even asked about my arrest.”

Khaled al-Maqtari was subjected to many of the techniques described by Professor Alfred McCoy, an authority on the history of CIA interrogation, as “no-touch torture”.^⁶⁴He endured prolonged solitary confinement, sensory deprivation and overload (eg, with lighting and loud music), and has described the use of stress positions, sleep deprivation, forced nudity, exposure to extremes of hot and cold, prolonged shackling, and withdrawal of medication. The abuses that have affected him most, he said, were the years of endless isolation, the complete absence of any control over or knowledge about his future, the constant monitoring by cameras, and his segregation from the outside world, particularly the lack of contact with or news about his family.

According to an expert body of health care professionals experienced in detention issues, between one third and 90 percent of those held in solitary confinement experience serious psychological and physiological effects, ranging from insomnia and confusion to hallucinations and psychosis.^⁶⁵ “When the element of psychological pressure is used on purpose as part of isolation regimes such practices become coercive and can amount to torture.”^⁶⁶ Physicians for Human Rights has noted that “systematic, repetitive infliction of psychological trauma establishes control over another person,” and that methods of psychological control, including (but not limited to) sleep deprivation, solitary confinement and severe humiliation, “are designed to instil terror, pain and helplessness and destroy a detainee’s sense of autonomy without use of physical violence.”^⁶⁷

The detention conditions described by former ‘black site’ detainees could be said to constitute a form of controlled sensory deprivation, in which various stimuli were added incrementally. Khaled al-Maqtari believed that his treatment improved as his interrogators became convinced that they had all the information they could get from him, and others have echoed that their treatment improved as they were closer and closer to release.

Sensory deprivation can cause irreparable psychological damage in less than a week.^⁶⁸Ironically, given that this is an interrogation tactic, one of the effects seen in sensory deprivation of little more than a single day was to sharply increase levels of suggestibility. Professor Ian Robbins, a clinical psychologist at St George’s Hospital in London who has studied the effects of sensory deprivation, has noted that “the evidence that is accumulated in those places [that use sensory deprivation] must be considered very unreliable because people will after a while start to take on board the views of their interrogators."^⁶⁹

During his 28 months in this “black site”, most of Khaled al-Maqtari’s limited contact with other human beings was with interrogators. These interrogators, with one exception, worked with interpreters – both men and women – who spoke “better Arabic” than in the previous facilities, and Khaled al-Maqtari believed that most of them were native speakers, although some of them told him that they had been brought up in the USA. He heard Lebanese, Syrian and Egyptian accents, and said that one who was familiar with Yemeni expressions and sayings tried to “cheer him up” sometimes by using them.

Communication between prisoners in the secret detention centre was strictly forbidden, and the tight and ever-present security made it almost impossible in practice. Even when Khaled al-Maqtari tried to write on his cell wall, he said, he was usually caught by the cameras, and he would then be subjected to extremely loud music as a punishment. He did eventually manage to leave his name on the walls of the second and third cells he stayed in, and saw in his first cell the names of Muqaatil al-Madni, from Pakistan, and Khalil al-Uzbeki scratched into the wall. Detainees also attempted to communicate by writing on articles of clothing, which were changed every week. On several occasions he was given clothing which contained the name of “Marwan al-Adenni”.^⁷⁰

Khaled al-Maqtari met several of the facility’s officials, including one who called himself the “Amir” [meaning leader or commander]. Khaled al-Maqtari described him as “a giant, bold American who was sent from Washington”. The “Amir” and/or his deputy would come in person to the cell if there was something important to explain, including instructions on procedure or any change of routine, or sometimes when Khaled al-Maqtari had been particularly ill. The “bold one” remained at the facility until early 2006, when a new “Amir” came to introduce himself to Khaled al-Maqtari. He believed that these “Amirs” were in charge of his area, but that there was another, more senior official in charge of the whole facility. Another senior official, a Lebanese-American who did not use an interpreter, arrived at the facility in about May 2006, Khaled al-Maqtari had first met him in Afghanistan, and believed that he was in charge of the other interrogators.

Other prisoners at the ‘black site’

In his third cell, where he stayed for most of his final year in secret detention, Khaled al-Maqtari believes that the prisoner beside him towards the end of his detention was Majid Khan, a Pakistani, with whom he had been held in Afghanistan. One day they delivered a book written in Urdu to Khaled al-Maqtari, then took it back and handed it in to the cell next door. “I used to hear Majid’s voice sometimes, too, because when I was calling for prayers I heard him say, al-salam alikum [peace be upon you]; he really could not speak much [Arabic], but he used to say salam, and I knew his voice.” The guards heard him trying to communicate, and took Khaled al-Maqtari’s books and writing materials away as a punishment. “They took me to the interrogation room, and said ‘you did something very serious, we took from you these things as a punishment. If you repeat it, other things will happen to you’.” A short time