Human rights groups have asked the US to reveal the whereabouts of 39 people who have allegedly been held in secret CIA-run prisons.
A report compiled by six human rights groups listed the names of people who remain unaccounted for after having passed through US custody.
The groups urged the US to stop using secret prisons for terror suspects.
The US last year admitted the existence of such prisons in its “war on terror” but said they were no longer in use.
President George W Bush said last September that all secret prison sites were “empty”.
The groups says they compiled their report, entitled Off the Record, from government and media sources and from interviews with former prisoners.
“It’s time for the US government to come clean,” said Clive Stafford Smith, Legal Director of Reprieve, one of the groups involved in the appeal.
“These 39 people have been missing for years, and the evidence shows they were in US custody at some point. Where are they and what has been done to them?
...Human Rights Watch and Cageprisoners are the other two organisations seeking information on the 39 “ghost detainees”.
The groups fears the missing people may have been moved to countries where they might be at risk of torture.
They say children as young as seven are among those detained. [PAF's emphasis]
“The duty of governments to protect people from acts of terrorism is not in question,” said Claudio Cordone of Amnesty International.
“But seizing men, women and even children, and placing people in secret locations deprived of the most basic safeguards for any detainees most definitely is.”
In September 2006, Mr Bush said 14 detainees had been held at secret CIA prisons that used interrogation methods that were “tough” but “lawful and necessary”.
He said the prisoners had since been transferred to the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the CIA was not holding any more terror suspects.
A secret gulag with ghost prisoners is scary enough, but children???
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