Reading this was much easier than reading a post by Miss Kelly. Just reading it and her blog overall, it seems to me that she's overly conservative (basically a right-wing Republican) and possibly anti-Muslim... Wondering if that was just me or maybe I have some sort of bias... the link is http://misskelly.typepad.com/miss_kelly_/2008/08/more-conspiracy.html .

You are right not to trust the government. Odds are far better than even that the government is twisting the facts, and railroading a faulty case through in order to get a political "victory" in the War on Terror.

As I said in Suchitra's Aug 13 thread:

"There are too many politicians and violent right-wingers frothing at the mouth for a War on Terror in which they can profit from weapons sales, use terrorism as an excuse to go after their political enemies, lock up innocent people and throw away the key, and get rid of citizen's privacy protections."

"The USA has made all those mistakes, and they are very hard to reverse once the government starts going down that road."

It's really easy to give away our rights and freedoms. Its really, really hard to get them back again.

It is established fact that the CIA has used secret prisons to hold prisoners, even moving them around -- See the Sept 2006 Aafia Siddiqui article below -- to keep them from the oversight of the International Red Cross:

CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons
Debate Is Growing Within Agency About Legality and Morality of Overseas System Set Up After 9/11

Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 2, 2005

"The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.

The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.

The hidden global internment network is a central element in the CIA's unconventional war on terrorism. It depends on the cooperation of foreign intelligence services, and on keeping even basic information about the system secret from the public, foreign officials and nearly all members of Congress charged with overseeing the CIA's covert actions."

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/01/AR2005110101644.html
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List of “Ghost Prisoners” Possibly in CIA Custody
List of Detainees Published by Human Rights Watch

"The following is a list of persons believed to be in U.S. custody as "ghost detainees" -- detainees who are not given any legal rights or access to counsel, and who are likely not reported to or seen by the International Committee of the Red Cross. The list is compiled from media reports, public statements by government officials, and from other information obtained by Human Rights Watch. Human Rights Watch does not consider this list to be complete: there are likely other "ghost detainees" held by the United States.

Under international law, enforced disappearances occur when persons are deprived of their liberty, and the detaining authority refuses to disclose their fate or whereabouts, or refuses to acknowledge their detention, which places the detainees outside the protection of the law. International treaties ratified by the United States prohibit incommunicado detention of persons in secret locations."

www.hrw.org/english/docs/2005/11/30/usdom12109.htm

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Fate of Some CIA Detainees Unknown
By Farah Stockman
THE BOSTON GLOBE

"President Bush’s announcement this month that the CIA has emptied out its secret prisons has raised new questions about what has happened to dozens of Al Qaeda suspects who were believed to have been in US custody.

One of them is Aafia Siddiqui ’95, an MIT-educated Pakistani scientist and Roxbury mother of three who disappeared with her children in 2003. A newly declassified government document says Siddiqui married a top Al Qaeda operative who is among the 14 suspects moved by President Bush from a secret prison to Guantanamo Bay for trials.

But the document gave no further information on Siddiqui’s whereabouts.

Siddiqui’s mother said she believes her daughter was being held by the US military, and she traveled to the United States to search for information after reading Pakistani newspapers articles that said Siddiqui had been arrested in Pakistan and sent abroad in a private plane, said Elaine Whitfield Sharp, a Marblehead lawyer and the family spokeswoman.

"Nobody knows where she is, but one has to wonder if she is one of these secret detainees," said Sharp.

Bush’s announcement of the transfer of prisoners to Guantanamo Bay was the first official confirmation that the CIA had secretly arrested suspected terrorists and held them in undisclosed places overseas.

A senior administration official briefing reporters on the condition of anonymity last week said that fewer than 100 detainees had been held in the CIA program and that all of them have been "turned over to the Department of Defense to be held as unlawful enemy combatants [at Guantanamo Bay], returned to their country of origin, or entered into a legal process to be held accountable for their crimes."

But human rights groups say the fate of dozens of detainees who were in CIA custody is still unknown."

www-tech.mit.edu/V126/N40/40ciawire.html

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The evidence here is clear; the Unites States, under Bush/Cheney, "disappeared" people. Wonder if this has a historical precedent.