She pointed to Article 9 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which outlaws arbitrary arrest or detention and says an arrested person has the right to be told why he or she is being held and brought before a judge.
Gabor Rona, international legal director of advocacy group Human Rights First, said: "If people are simply being spirited off the streets ... and secretly being transferred into detention from one state to another, and have no opportunity to contest the legality of that in a court, then that is very obviously in violation of international law and most domestic law regimes."
Here are some of the cases the human rights lawyers point out:
In one case at the center of controversy in Europe, a German man says he was seized in Macedonia at the end of 2003 and flown by U.S. agents to Afghanistan, where he was interrogated for five months before the CIA realized it had the wrong man. [el Masri, TalkLeft background here and here.]
In another, Italian and German prosecutors are investigating the abduction of a radical cleric in Milan and his alleged transfer by CIA agents to Egypt, where he later said he was tortured.[Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, known as Abu Omar, TalkLeft background here.]
As Ms. Sattherwaite says:
"It's kind of absurd to say that we don't know that they're at a risk of torture, or that we believe that X or Y government would not torture this individual, when we know through our own State Department reports that myriad people have been tortured in the same facilities, same locations."
How does Condi Rice (or Stephen Hadley) justify what happened to Benyam Mohammed, who was flown by Ghost Air from Pakistan to Morocco? Excerpts from his diary:
They cut off my clothes with some kind of doctor's scalpel. I was naked. I tried to put on a brave face. But maybe I was going to be raped. Maybe they'd electrocute me. Maybe castrate me.
They took the scalpel to my right chest. It was only a small cut. Maybe an inch. At first I just screamed ... I was just shocked, I wasn't expecting ... Then they cut my left chest. This time I didn't want to scream because I knew it was coming.
One of them took my penis in his hand and began to make cuts. He did it once, and they stood still for maybe a minute, watching my reaction. I was in agony. They must have done this 20 to 30 times, in maybe two hours. There was blood all over. "I told you I was going to teach you who's the man," [one] eventually said.
They cut all over my private parts. One of them said it would be better just to cut it off, as I would only breed terrorists. I asked for a doctor.
Afterwards, they gave him an Alka-Seltzer for the pain.
According to Human Rights Watch, the U.S. is holding 26 detainees in foreign prisons, incommunicado, without legal rights or access to counsel. Here is a list of some of them.
The New York Times has more on Condi's version.
