Arab TV Scrutinizes U.S. Terror War Detention Centers

NCM Report, News Analysis, Jalal Ghazi,

A new Iraqi television channel based in Baghdad aired an extremely moving news report about Iraqi prisoners held in U.S.-administered detention centers. The channel, Al Sharkyah, focuses much of its news coverage on problems facing Iraqis under the occupation.

The report, which aired late last month shortly before the transfer of sovereignty to the new Iraqi government, covered a news conference held by an Iraqi organization known as the Union of War Prisoners and Detainees. The conference was attended by legal, political, and media professionals, with the objective of gearing media attention to the ongoing suffering of the Iraqi war prisoners and their families.

The conference was titled: "Supporting the War Prisoners and Detainees Held in the Prisons of the Occupation Forces."

It was opened with Koran recitations, and then attendees —including the families of prisoners — told their stories. The most moving story was that of a woman who learned about the death of her husband through one of the photographs of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib that were broadcast over and over throughout the world, including the U.S. media. In the picture, the body of the woman’s dead husband, his face full of bruises, appeared with female U.S. soldier leaning over him and laughing while holding her thumb up.

While a man at the conference held up an enlarged copy of that picture, the Iraqi wife pointed at it and said: "This is the picture we saw on television; I called on my daughter, Hajer. ’Is this your father?’ We were shocked when we saw this picture. We looked for him everywhere for seven months but we could not find him; we asked everyone, the police and human right organizations about him. Then, all of a sudden we saw him dead on television."

The tragic story of this Iraqi woman left many families wondering whether their missing loved ones could possibly be in U.S. detention centers.

The Washington D.C.-based Human Rights First organization has released a report revealing that the within the framework of the "War on Terrorism", the United States has detained a number of people in about twenty detention centers around the world, according to the Dubai-based Al Arabiyah television.

Half of the detention centers are in secret locations.

A spokeswoman for the organization estimates that thousands of people are being detained and says that the United States government refused to allow the Red Cross to visit these secret locations.

The Human Rights First report mentions seven suspected secret detention centers in undisclosed locations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the island of Diego Garcia, on board U.S. Naval ships; and one suspected important center under CIA supervision in Jordan, according to Al Arabiyah.

The spokeswoman said, "We do have credible sources who had reported to us that there is a CIA managed detention center in Jordan to interrogate detainees. We do not know the number of detainees exactly, but through our conversations with (U.S.) officials we learned that some detainees are being moved from one location to another and that some of these detainees are in Jordan."

This news coincided with information also reported by Al Arabiyah about a prisoner belonging to the the Ansar Al Islam organization who was detained by the Pentagon for seven months in secret locations without notifying the Red Cross and without disclosing the reasons behind his arrest during that time.

In a different report, a reporter with the Al Arabiyah television channel aired a week earlier a scene of journalists confronting Rumsfeld with stormy questions about the detention of the same man to which he responded: "I’m not an expert on that --- what I can say is that I think that it is understood that detainees do not have to be registered with the Red Cross within 15 minutes. I do not know the length of time according to the law, and it may be less than seven months."

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