A Yemeni intelligence officer was kidnapped by Egyptian authorities in Cairo in 2002 and sent to U.S. jails in Afghanistan and Cuba entirely outside the rule of law, a human rights group said on Tuesday.
Human Rights Watch called the case of Abd al-Salam Ali al-Hila a “reverse rendition,” a twist on the U.S. government practice of “rendering” certain prisoners to third nations for interrogation and, in the view of rights activists, torture.
Al-Hila was the latest of about 10 known cases of men seized by other countries not on a battlefield and handed over to the United States for indefinite detention as an “enemy combatant” without legal process, Human Rights Watch military affairs researcher John Sifton said.
The New York-based group said the Yemeni man, a colonel in the intelligence service and businessman, was apprehended in September 2002 by Egyptian intelligence agents while on a business trip in Cairo.
Al-Hila was spirited off within 10 days to Baku, Azerbaijan, then to Bagram air base in Afghanistan, and finally to the prison for foreign terrorism suspects at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, sometime in mid-2004, Human Rights Watch said.
The group said it based its account on information from al-Hila’s brother and authorities in Yemen and Egypt. Al-Hila apparently was still imprisoned at Guantanamo, it said.
The Pentagon would neither confirm nor deny that al-Hila was being held at Guantanamo. “We don’t talk about specific detainee cases,” said Maj. Michael Shavers, a Pentagon spokesman.
'People disappearing'
“One thing that we’re trying to point to here is the way in which these reverse renditions occur entirely outside the rule of law,” Sifton said. There had been no extradition process, no criminal suspicion based on probable cause, and no ability to challenge the detention, he said.
“These renditions result in people disappearing,” Sifton added.
Nothing is known about the conditions in which al-Hila was held or the type of interrogations to which he was subjected in Afghanistan and Guantanamo, Sifton said.
Human Rights Watch said al-Hila, a father of three, managed a pharmaceutical firm in Yemen and served as a representative of an Egyptian construction company in Sana’a.
He also was the Yemeni intelligence officer in charge of transferring scores of Arabs who had fought the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s from Yemen to other countries to seek asylum, the group said. His knowledge of Islamists’ exodus routes out of Yemen may have made him an attractive source of information for the CIA, Human Rights Watch said.
Sifton said he does not know if al-Hila posed a security threat to the United States. “Is this man dangerous? Perhaps. But the point is he should be given an opportunity to challenge his detention,” Sifton said.
Al-Hila’s fate was unknown for more than a year and a half until a letter he wrote was smuggled out of Afghanistan and disclosed by Yemeni authorities in April 2004, Human Rights Watch said. His letter, written in January of that year, stated he had been detained by the CIA in Afghanistan after being kidnapped in Cairo by Egyptian intelligence.
Human Rights Watch quoted the letter as stating that “my only crime is that the Americans wanted information from me, but couldn’t find any.”
Al-Hila’s family received a letter from Kabul via the International Committee of the Red Cross dated May 2004, then received another dated in July 2004 from Guantanamo, the group said.
