Ethiopia secret prisons under scrutiny (by human rights groups)

NAIROBI, Kenya - Ethiopia was under pressure Thursday to release details on detainees from 19 countries held at secret prisons in the country where U.S. agents have carried out interrogations in the hunt for al-Qaida in the Horn of Africa.

Canada, Eritrea and Sweden were lobbying for information about their citizens. Human rights groups say hundreds of prisoners, including women and children, have been transferred secretly and illegally to the prisons in Ethiopia. An investigation by The Associated Press found that CIA and FBI agents have been interrogating the detainees.

Officials from Ethiopia were not immediately available for comment, but in the past have refused to acknowledge the existence of the prisons.

Ethiopia has a long history of human rights abuses. In recent years, it has also been a key U.S. ally in the fight against al-Qaida, which has been trying to sink roots among Muslims in the Horn of Africa.

Canadian citizen Bashir Makhtal is among the detainees, Canadian authorities said.

"We know that he is in Ethiopia," Canadian Foreign Affairs spokesman Rejean Beaulieu said. "We've been making, and continue to make, representations both here in Ottawa and in Ethiopia to get access to him," Beaulieu said.

Some detainees were swept up by Ethiopian troops who drove a radical Islamist government out of neighboring Somalia late last year, according to Kenyan officials and police. Others have been deported from Kenya, where many Somalis have fled the continuing violence in their homeland, they said.

The CIA began an aggressive program in 2002 to interrogate suspected terrorists at an unknown number of secret locations from Southeast Asia to Europe. Prisoners were frequently picked up in one country and transferred to a prison in another, where they were held incommunicado by a cooperative intelligence service. But President Bush announced in September that all the detainees had been moved to military custody at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

U.S. government officials contacted by AP have acknowledged questioning prisoners in Ethiopia. But they said American agents were following the law and were fully justified in their actions because they are investigating past attacks and current threats of terrorism.

The detainees include at least one U.S. citizen and some from Canada, Sweden and France, according to a list compiled by a Kenyan Muslim rights group and flight manifests obtained by AP. They also include citizens from Eritrea, Saudi Arabia, Tanzania, Rwanda, Tunisia and Morocco.

Eritrea is asking Kenyan authorities for details on three of its citizens, handed over to Somalia on Jan. 20. Human rights groups say they are in Ethiopia.

"At this juncture, the Government of Eritrea again calls on the Kenyan authorities to get the three Eritrean citizens released at the earliest and repatriate them to their country," according to a statement by Eritrea's Information Ministry. "Furthermore, it reminds the Kenyan authorities that the responsibility for the lives of the Eritrean citizens rests on them."

Kenyan government spokesman Alfred Mutua said the government had no comment to make until it received an official communication from the Eritrean government.

Swedish Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Nina Ersman said they had managed to gain access to its nationals still being detained, including two Swedish citizens and one who holds a permanent residence permit.

"We have visited them, but not in recent days," she told the AP. She said she did not know the dates of the visit.

Jonathan Hafetz, a lawyer at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law who has been assisting the family of a detained U.S. citizen, 24-year-old Amir Mohamed Meshal, said Thursday he had still not spoken to him.

The State Department said late Wednesday that a U.S. Embassy official made a third visit to Meshal on Wednesday.

In a message passed from the official to his parents, Amir Meshal asked his family to be "patient."

Associated Press writers Karl Ritter in Stockholm, Sweden, and Rebecca Santana in Tinton Falls, New Jersey, contributed to this report.

“They are kept without charge or access to lawyers and families.

I like the way they link “questioning” by the US to “They are kept without charge or access to lawyers”

Another left wing hit job.

The MSM can’t die soon enough for me.

Honestly I don’t see what the problem is here. Women and ‘children’ are just as capable of planning and carrying out terrorist attacks as any men that might be involved. And denying access to lawyers and families is a wise security measure: these individuals, clearly sympathetic to the suspects in prison, could be used to get messages out to terrorist cells. I would hope that the CIA already has the families of these individuals under surveillance.

It doesn’t matter where the prison is at. It matters that it’s keeping dangerous individuals locked away so they can’t harm innocent American citizens. Laugh if you want, but the child’s terrorist family could certainly find uses for one even that young. There are already reports of children being used as human shields, why not a baby with a diaper full of C4? That baby is lucky that it’s with its mother and both are locked away from any conveniently Iranian supplied explosives.

I suspect that most of the ‘children’ in question are in fact teenagers, and what better confused, angsty group to accept the path of martyrdom? These kids don’t have positive things to put their time into.

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