PM's Daughter Reveals 54 Nations That Aided U.S. Detention Program

Email this page Print this page

Singh also named 136 people in the report, who were detained and transferred by the CIA and its associated intelligence outfits. In the report she describes how and where the people were detained, transferred, and interrogated. The list includes many Pakistanis and also has the name of Aafia Siddiqui. It is the largest list compiled till now. It discloses as to how detainees were moved around the world without due process, frequently to countries which ran secret prisons and torture cells.

The countries that were chosen in the extensive CIA drive against terrorism include Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Algeria and Libya which have poor legal systems and judicial oversight. It also comprised of western countries such as Canada, Sweden, Australia, Denmark, Belgium, Finland, Germany, Italy and Spain, a few of which are advocates of human rights and civil liberties.However, India did not feature among the countries named in the report, nor did the list of 136 detainees include any Indians. There were none even detained in India. A majority of them were detained in Pakistan in raids and many of them were noted to be Pakistanis.

Amrit is the youngest of PM Manmohan Singh's three daughters and is married to Barton Beebe, a professor of law at New York University. Previously she was a staff attorney at the American Civil Liberty Union's Immigrants' Rights Project before she joined the National Security and Counter terrorism program at the Open Society Justice Initiative in 2012. Few of her human rights work is recorded in a book ‘Administration of Torture: A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu Ghraib and Beyond’, that she has co-authored.

Singh has been a relentless critic of U.S. human rights violations. She wrote in her conclusion "The time has come for the United States and its partner governments to admit to the truth of their involvement in secret detention and extraordinary rendition, repudiate these practices, and conduct effective investigations directed at holding officials accountable," as reported by TNN.