By Cora Currier, ProPublica, Feb. 13, 2013

In one of President Barack Obama first acts in the White House, he ordered the closure of the CIA's so-called "black-site" prisons, where terror suspects had been held and, sometimes, tortured.  The CIA says it is "out of the detention business," as John Brennan, Obama's pick to head the agency, recently put it.

But the CIA's prisons left some unfinished business.  In 2009, ProPublica's Dafna Linzer listed more than thirty people who had been held in CIA prisons and were still missing.

Some of those prisoners have since resurfaced, but at least twenty are still unaccounted for.

Last week the Open Society Foundations' Justice Initiative released a report pulling together the most current information available on the fates of the prisoners. A few emerged from foreign prisons after the turmoil of the Arab Spring. One has died. (The report relied exclusively on media accounts and information previously gathered by human rights groups. The Open Society Foundations also donate to ProPublica.)

The report counts 136 prisoners who were either held in a CIA black site or subject to so-called extraordinary rendition, in which detainees were secretly shipped to other countries for interrogation.

Many of the prisoners were tortured, either under the CIA's "enhanced interrogation techniques" program or by other countries after their transfer. The report also lists 54 countries that assisted in some way with detention and rendition. The U.S. has not disclosed the countries it worked with, and few have acknowledged their participation.

The CIA declined our request to comment.

Here are the fates of a few of the prisoners we listed as missing back in 2009:

• Ayoub al-Libi, also known as Mustafa Jawda al-Mahdi, is a Libyan who was allegedly interrogated and detained by US personnel in Pakistan and Afghanistan in 2004. The next year he was returned to Libya, where he was sentenced to death as member of LIFG, an Islamist anti-Gaddafi group (designated a terrorist organization by the U.S.) He was released when uprisings began against Gaddafi in February 2011. Human Rights Watch interviewed him in 2012.

Continue reading »

American journalist James Foley is missing in Syria after being kidnapped six weeks ago, his family announced Wednesday. According to witnesses, the 39-year-old freelancer was taken by unidentified gunmen on Thanksgiving Day in Idlib, the same turbulent northwest Syrian province where NBC foreign chief foreign affairs correspondent Richard Engel was kidnapped last month. Engel and his team were freed on December 18th. Foley's condition is unknown.

"We want Jim to come safely home, or at least we need to speak with him to know he's OK," Foley's father, John Foley, said in a press release. The family has set up a website, freejamesfoley.org, and Facebook page to publicize his situation. This isn't the first time Foley, who has contributed to the AFP, news website GlobalPost and U.S. TV stations, has encountered trouble while reporting abroad. In 2011 he spent 44 days in captivity after being captured by pro-Qaddafi fighters in Libya.

Via:

Foley had set off toward the border in a car about an hour before his capture. A witness, a Syrian, later recounted over the phone to a journalist in Turkey that an unmarked car intercepted Foley. The witness said men holding kalashnikovs shot into the air and forced Jim out of the car.

The witness said he noticed nothing that would indicate whether the aggressors were rebel fighters, individuals looking for a ransom, members of a pro-government militia, or a religious-based group with other motivations.

Hopefully, Foley's experience in such situations will be useful to him, and he will be released and reunited in good health with his family very soon.

By Peter Sleeth, Special to ProPublica, and Hal Bernton, The Seattle Times

A strange thing happened when Christopher DeLara filed for disability benefits after his tour in Iraq: The U.S. Army said it had no records showing he had ever been overseas.

DeLara had searing memories of his combat experiences. A friend bled to death before his eyes. He saw an insurgent shoot his commander in the head. And, most hauntingly, he recalled firing at an Iraqi boy who had attacked his convoy.

The Army said it could find no field records documenting any of these incidents.

DeLara appealed, fighting for five years before a judge accepted the testimony of an officer in his unit. By then he had divorced, was briefly homeless and had sought solace in drugs and alcohol.

DeLara's case is part of a much larger problem that has plagued the U.S. military since the 1990 Gulf War: a failure to create and maintain the types of field records that have documented American conflicts since the Revolutionary War.

A joint investigation by ProPublica and The Seattle Times has found that the recordkeeping breakdown was especially acute in the early years of the Iraq war, when insurgents deployed improvised bombs with devastating effects on U.S. soldiers. The military has also lost or destroyed records from Afghanistan, according to officials and previously undisclosed documents.

The loss of field records — after-action write-ups, intelligence reports and other day-to-day accounts from the war zones — has far-reaching implications. It has complicated efforts by soldiers like DeLara to claim benefits. And it makes it harder for military strategists to learn the lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan, two of the nation's most protracted wars.

Military officers and historians say field records provide the granular details that, when woven together, tell larger stories hidden from participants in the day-to-day confusion of combat.

The Army says it has taken steps to improve handling of records — including better training and more emphasis from top commanders. But officials familiar with the problem said the missing material may never be retrieved.

Continue reading »

A 7.4-magnitude earthquake shook a mountainous region of Guatemala near the Mexico border Wednesday morning. At least 48 have been reported dead, with a hundred missing and hundreds more injured. The powerful quake impacted all but one region of the country and was felt as far as 600 miles away in Mexico City. It is the strongest earthquake to have hit Guatemala since 1976. President Otto Pérez Molina flew to see the damage in the most affected region. “One thing is to hear about what happened and another thing entirely is to see it,” he told the Associated Press. “As a Guatemalan I feel sad … to see mothers crying for their lost children.”