Outsourcing Gitmo: The Ethiopian Camps

By Scott Horton

The Associated Press's Anthony Mitchell has an extensive report today on United States involvements in extraordinary new detention facilities established at three locations in Ethiopia which have been constructed to house detainees taken in sweeps in East Africa. At least one of the detainees is a U.S. citizen.

The AP features a detailed account of one detainee, a Swahili-Arabic translator picked up in Kenya.

“It was a nightmare from start to finish,” Kamilya Mohammedi Tuweni, a 42-year-old mother of three who has a passport from the United Arab Emirates, told AP in her first comments after her release in Addis Ababa on March 24 from what she said was 2½ months in detention without charge.

She is the only released prisoner who has spoken publicly. She was freed a month after being interviewed, fingerprinted and photographed by a U.S. agent, she said . . .

She said she was arrested Jan. 10. Tuweni said she was beaten in Kenya, then forced to sleep on a stone floor while held in Somalia in a single room with 22 other women and children for 10 days before being flown to Ethiopia on a military plane.

Finally, she said, she was taken blindfolded from prison to a private villa in the Ethiopian capital. There, she said, she was interrogated with other women by a male U.S. intelligence agent. He assured her that she would not be harmed but urged her to cooperate, she said.

Amidst suggestions that the entire program was orchestrated by the United States, using local governments as proxies, the report also notes strong pushback from FBI personnel involved, obviously concerned about the illegality and immorality of what was being done.

An FBI memo read to AP by a U.S. official in Washington, who insisted on anonymity, quoted an agent who interrogated Meshal as saying the agent was “disgusted” by Meshal's deportation to Somalia by Kenya. The unidentified agent said he was told by U.S. consular staff that the deportation was illegal.

“My personal opinion was that he may have been a jihadi a-hole, but the precedent of ’deporting’ U.S. citizens to dangerous situations when there is no reason to do so was a bad one,” the official quoted the memo as saying.

This account reminded me of FBI memoranda from Guantánamo early in the process of establishing highly coercive techniques there. FBI agents recorded their shock at what was being done and took the time to record much of it for posterity. It shows that there are still FBI agents committed to upholding the law.

However, the official line is predictable. “No such kind of secret prisons exist in Ethiopia,” said Bereket Simon, special adviser to Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. Indeed, if he admitted them, they would no longer be secret. And, thanks to the Associated Press and the work of several human rights organizations, they no longer are.