The Disappeared

Last month Lambert pointed to this asking: where are they?

More than 7,000 prisoners have been captured in America’s war on terror. [Agreeing with our original estimate, interestingly.] Just 700 ended up in Guantanamo Bay. Between extraordinary rendition to foreign jails and disappearance into the CIA’s “black sites”, what happened to the rest?

Let’s examine the arithmetic of this systematic disappearance. In the first years after the attacks of 11 September, thousands of Taliban or suspected terrorist suspects were captured. Just in Afghanistan, the US admitted processing more than 6,000 prisoners. Pakistan has said it handed over around 500 captives to the US; Iran said it sent 1,000 across the border to Afghanistan. Of all these, some were released and just over 700 ended up in Guantanamo, Cuba. But the simple act of subtraction shows that thousands are missing. More than five years after 9/11, where are they all? We know that many were rendered to foreign jails, both by the CIA and directly by the US military. But how many precisely? The answer is still classified. No audit of the fate of all these souls has ever been published.

Since the story in Le Monde, The European Council has documented 800 flights and the routes they've taken. This is not something you'll hear about in the main$tream.

It's hard to find much about the details of the flights, but from the size of the ice visible above water, this seems to be a pretty large iceberg.

As Chris Floyd pointed out in the comments,

Trumpeting his successes in the Terror War, Bush claimed that ‘more than 3,000 suspected terrorists’ had been arrested worldwide – ‘and many others have met a different fate.’ His face then took on the characteristic leer, the strange, sickly half-smile it acquires whenever he speaks of killing people: ‘Let’s put it this way. They are no longer a problem.’

What other construction can be put on these words? Many “suspected terrorists” have “met a different fate” from incarceration; they are “no longer a problem.” They have, in short, been killed. And note that Bush himself acknowledges that these are just “suspected” terrorists – people who have been arbitrarily declared “enemy combatants” by Bush, or by the many lower-level officials to whom he has delegated a literal license to kill.

Oh by the way, how did the representatives of the American people react to this open declaration that the President of the United States was operating a death squad? Why, they applauded, of course.

There are many potential ways the Company could be dealing with this problem . One of the simplest was popular in Argentina.

An Argentinian former naval officer who threw prisoners, drugged and naked, to their death from planes was convicted of crimes against humanity and jailed for a total of 640 years by a Spanish court yesterday for his part in the "dirty war" against dissidents conducted by the Argentinian military regime in the 1970s.

Captain Adolfo Scilingo killed 30 leftwing prisoners, who were thrown out at 4,000 metres (13,000ft) above the Atlantic, on two flights...

The number who were killed or disappeared between 1976 and 1983 is put at between 13,000 and 30,000.