Forced Disappearances Treaty

The United Nations has just adopted the  International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance and Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the International Federation for Human Rights and the International Commission of Jurists are all hailing the document in a joint announcement. They are also urging all nations to ratify the document.

So, will the Bush administration sign it and submit it for ratification? I certainly hope so. I'm not too optimistic about the prospects, however, as this:

In June 2004, U.S Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld admitted that, acting upon a request by George Tenet, then-director of the CIA, he ordered an Iraqi national held in Camp Cropper, a high security detention center in Iraq, to be kept off the prison’s rolls and not presented to the International Committee of the Red Cross. The prisoner, referred to as “Triple X,” was reportedly a senior member of Ansar al-Islam, an organization apparently at the origin of several attacks in Iraq and linked to Al-Qaeda. Rumsfeld also admitted that there have been other cases in which detainees have been held secretly.⁸

Earlier, a U.S. Army investigation into the abuses of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq sharply criticized this practice of keeping “ghost detainees.” According to the report of Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba:

The various detention facilities operated by the 800th MP Brigade have routinely held persons brought to them by Other Government Agencies (OGAs) [i.e. the CIA] without accounting for them, knowing their identities, or even the reason for their detention. The Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center (JIDC) at Abu Ghraib called these detainees “ghost detainees.” On at least one occasion, the 320th MP Battalion at Abu Ghraib held a handful of “ghost detainees” (6-8) for OGAs that they moved around within the facility to hide them from a visiting International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) survey team. This maneuver was deceptive, contrary to Army Doctrine, and in violation of international law.⁹

An Army report into intelligence activities at Abu Ghraib spoke of eight “ghost” detainees there who were kept off the prison's roster at the CIA's request. In one of those cases, in November 2003, a detainee brought to the prison by C.I.A. employees but never formally registered with military guards died at the site, and his body was removed after being wrapped in plastic and packed in ice.¹⁰

In later Congressional testimony, Gen. Paul Kern, the senior officer who oversaw the Army inquiry, told the Senate Armed Services Committee, “The number [of ghost detainees] is in the dozens, to perhaps up to 100.” Another Army investigator, Maj. Gen. George Fay, put the figure at “two dozen or so.” Both officers said they could not give a precise number because no records were kept and because the CIA refused to provide information to the investigators.¹¹

seems like a violation of Article 2 of the convention:

Article 2

For the purposes of this Convention, enforced disappearance is   considered to be the arrest, detention, abduction or any other form of deprivation of liberty committed by agents of the State or by persons or groups of persons acting with the authorization, support or acquiescence of the State, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or by concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person, which place such a person outside the protection of the law.

By the way, if you think that the ghost detainees make us safer, consider that today Spain convicted Eddin Barakat Yarkas, leader of an al Qaeda cell in Spain, to 15 years for "conspiracy to commit terrorist murder" in connection with the 9/11 attacks. That's one person more than the Bush administration has convicted in connection with such a serious charge related to the attacks.