The U.S. prisons, prison ships and proxy prison sites - Guantánamo, Bagram, Diego Garcia, Camp Lemonier, Morocco, Egypt, Jordan and, yes, Abu Ghraib

monday, 19 may, democracy now...

Amy Goodman of Democracy Now interviewing Clive Stafford Smith, a British attorney who represents more than fifty of the prisoners at Guantanamo, legal director of the UK charity Reprieve and author of Eight O’Clock Ferry to the Windward Side: Seeking Justice in Guantanamo Bay. He is testifying on Tuesday before the House Committee on Foreign Relations about Guantanamo Bay.

[A]ccording to the most recent official figures, the United States is currently holding 27,000 secret prisoners around the world. So that means that 99 percent of these folk are not in Guantanamo Bay. Now they’re in other prisons elsewhere. And as you mentioned, Bagram has 680. But there’s a huge number of people being held in Iraq, and one of the intriguing aspects of this that doesn’t get much reporting is that the US is bringing people into Iraq from elsewhere to hold them there, simply because that keeps rather annoying people like you, Amy—I mean the media—and also annoying people like me, lawyers, away from the prisoners so they can’t get any sort of legal rights.

And when you look around the world, there’s a huge camp, Camp Lemonier in Djibouti, where a lot of people are being held. Diego Garcia, contrary to the past analysis of the British government, in the Indian Ocean has been used, in my belief, to hold people. And we’ve identified thirty-two prison ships, sort of prison hulks you used to read about in Victorian England, which have been converted to hold prisoners, and we’ve got pictures of them in Lisbon Harbor, for example. And these are holding prisoners around the world, as well. And there’s a bunch of proxy prisons—Morocco, Egypt and Jordan—where this stuff is going on. And this is a huge concern, because the world focus is on Guantanamo Bay, which really is a diversionary tactic in the whole war of terror or war on terror, whatever you’d like to call it. And actually, most of these people who have been severed from their legal rights are in these other secret prisons around the world.

it's becoming increasingly apparent that guantánamo is a diversionary tactic... i speculated the other day that the announcement of the new prison to be built at bagram in afghanistan is a signal that guantánamo will indeed be closed... this will precipitate a victory chant from human rights activists who will fail to note that all of these other sites are still out there, just much less visible and a whole lot easier to shield from prying eyes...

AMY GOODMAN: Very quickly, Clive, did you say that you—that the US is taking prisoners to Iraq?

CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: Oh, yes, they are. I mean, the US is taking an estimated forty to sixty, on average, prisoners a day around the world. And it doesn’t take a lot of arithmetic to tell you how many people that is each month. And people are being taken to Iraq to be held in Abu Ghraib, even today, and also in other camps in Iraq.

mark my words... we will see guantánamo closed about the time the new facility at bagram opens...

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