The Guardian reports that the US has been holding suspected terrorists without trial in ships off the coasts of foreign countries – a floating Guantanamo Bay, in other words. The UK human rights group Reprieve has accused the US government of illegally detaining prisoners and possibly torturing them aboard the ships using CIA and foreign interrogators. Torture "black sites" are therefore not just on land in countries like Romania, Thailand, Poland and Afghanistan, but also on foreign seas.
Does John McCain know of this practice? Does Obama? Will the US Congress look into it? Somebody ought to ask. More important, will the revelation have any effect on the immoral, lawless and lame duck Bush-Cheney administration? (via Sepia Mutiny)
The United States is operating "floating prisons" to house those arrested in its war on terror, according to human rights lawyers, who claim there has been an attempt to conceal the numbers and whereabouts of detainees.
Details of ships where detainees have been held and sites allegedly being used in countries across the world have been compiled as the debate over detention without trial intensifies on both sides of the Atlantic. The US government was yesterday urged to list the names and whereabouts of all those detained.
Information about the operation of prison ships has emerged through a number of sources, including statements from the US military, the Council of Europe and related parliamentary bodies, and the testimonies of prisoners.
The analysis, due to be published this year by the human rights organisation Reprieve, also claims there have been more than 200 new cases of rendition since 2006, when President George Bush declared that the practice had stopped.
It is the use of ships to detain prisoners, however, that is raising fresh concern and demands for inquiries in Britain and the US.
According to research carried out by Reprieve, the US may have used as many as 17 ships as "floating prisons" since 2001. Detainees are interrogated aboard the vessels and then rendered to other, often undisclosed, locations, it is claimed.
The full report here.
Accidental Blogger 
One response to “Rendition at Sea”
Perhaps the current US administration has paraphrased Churchill’s lines about fighting on the beaches, in the skies etc. to be ” We will torture in the skies, we will torture on the seas, we will torture in distant lands… and when torture is outlawed everywhere on earth, we will render the detainees to outer space for torturing them.”
I really hope that a new administration will move away from such horrendous policies and towards reaffirming the human rights based on which the US was founded.
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