Proxy detention

Over the years of the War on Terror, the shape of secret prisons has changed.  The days have mostly passed when hundreds of men were scooped up from the four corners of the globe, shuttled to black sites in Europe or Afghanistan and, finally, warehoused in Guantánamo. The prison remains open, of course, but thanks to the presence of lawyers and the possibility of habeas corpus review, none have been sent there for years.  As a site for new detentions, Gitmo has clearly fallen out of fashion.

In lieu of Gitmo-style detention, a more insidious practice has found favour in intelligence circles: proxy detention.

In proxy detention, a client or ‘liaison’ state—such as Yemen or Ethiopia—seizes and imprisons a person, but does so at the behest and direction of a ‘controlling’ state—such as the US.  Many times, the deal is sealed with millions of dollars of counterterrorism assistance; the quid pro quo is that the host state will detain people fingered by the controlling state, and make them available for the controlling state’s security services to question.  The unsaid part of the deal is that proxy prisoners in many such countries tend to be abused.

Proxy detention offers obvious benefits over the Guantánamo model.  Lawyers often cannot access a secret prison in the host state, or do so at their peril; there is ‘plausible deniability’ for the US, who seeks to claim that a person has not been picked up at their behest, but by the local intelligence service; and, of course, it is used as an excuse to get around the usual rules of fair treatment and access to counsel that usually apply when the US arrests someone.

As with all secretive counterterrorism practices, the precise contours of US proxy detention policy will take time to come to light.  At a minimum, we know of the following situations where proxy detention has taken or is taking place:

• in the Horn of Africa in 2007, as hundreds of refugees fled across the Somali-Kenyan border in the wake of Ethiopia’s US-sponsored invasion

• in Yemen in 2009-2010, as US interest in counterterrorism efforts in the country increased many times over. After the Abdulmutallab attack in December 2009, Reprieve investigators have learned that Americans, Australians, Bangladeshis, Brazilians, French, Germans, Somalis, and others of other nationalities have been seized

• in the Horn of Africa in 2010, in the wake of the Uganda World Cup bombings