PREVENTION AND CONFLICT
PREVENTION AND CONFLICT
This report is a condensed version of the Declaration. It omits references to, and copies of, most exhibits to the Declaration but is otherwise unchanged. After more than eighteen months of being held “off the record” by the U.S. government, the Declaration and this report is Mohamed Bashmilah’s opportunity to tell his own story. Here, he puts back on the record the truth about the extensive human rights violations he and his family have suffered as a result of his enforced disappearance.
On September 6, 2006, President George W. Bush acknowledged that the United States operates a program of secret detention in the “War on Terror.” In the same statement, President Bush indicated that fourteen of the individuals held in the program had been transferred to Guantánamo Bay and that “…there are now no terrorists in the CIA program.” President Bush did not disclose the fate and whereabouts of the other individuals known or believed to have been secretly detained at some point by the U.S. government, and he left open the possibility that the CIA program would be used again.
A number of the individuals known or suspected to have been held secretly by the United States are still missing. The fate and whereabouts of a smaller number is known as a result of the efforts of human rights organizations.
Since 2006, the International Human Rights Clinic at New York University School of Law has represented two such individuals—Yemeni nationals Mohammed Abdullah Saleh al-Asad and Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah. Their stories exemplify the nature and breadth of the U.S. system of detention in the “War on Terror,” as well as the treatment that individuals targeted in the “War on Terror” suffer.
December 2007.