Disappear

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappear#United_States.27_.22war_on_terror.22

Forced disappearances have occurred due to US activities concerning the so-called "War on terror", causing at least a hundred Ghost detainees to be detained in various black sites. Amnesty International declared in 2005 that "Guantanamo has become the gulag our times, entrenching the notion that people can be detained without any recourse to the law. If Guantanamo evokes images of Soviet repression, "ghost detainees" - or the incommunicado detention of unregistered detainees - bring back the practice of "disappearances" so popular with Latin American dictators in the past." [2]

http://hrw.org/english/docs/2006/01/06/usint12374.htm

Not for the first time, world justice is being tugged in two opposite directions. The latest developments in international law mean that the duty to prosecute those involved in forced disappearances - arbitrary arrest, frequently followed by torture and murder - is clearer than ever. After two decades of discussion a key new draft treaty agreed in September, is likely to be adopted by the UN General Assembly this year. At the same time, the world's most powerful government apparently believes it is authorised to disappear people if and when it wishes. Washington argues, in effect, that this is helping to make the world safer, and those who are concerned about disappearances are giving comfort to the perpetrators of terror.

On this occasion the US attitude is about more than a generalised mistrust of world justice. Depressingly, twenty-first century America has good reason to fear a convention that seeks to prevent and outlaw enforced disappearance and to hold responsible those who permit or encourage it.

The furore in recent months over secret Central Intelligence Agency flights to and from Guantanamo Bay and Afghanistan has shone a spotlight on the possible existence of secret interrogation centres on the European continent. The allegations have caused a storm of indignation, and European governments are seeking answers from Washington, not always with much success.

But even before the latest dramas, the US administration made little secret that it apparently feels entitled to make people vanish. A Human Rights Watch report published in October 2004, The United States' Disappeared: The CIA's Long-Term Ghost Detainees, catalogued those whom the Americans have simply removed from circulation.

Some of the names in that report were taken from a White House publication, George W. Bush: Record of Achievement, Waging and Winning the War on Terror. Many of the detainees may be unsavoury characters, with strong alleged links to Al Qaeda. If the allegations against them are accurate, they deserve to be prosecuted and punished.

But the new convention makes clearer than ever that there are no circumstances under which detainees can simply be hidden - from the Red Cross, from their families and from any form of oversight by the outside world. Hiding prisoners is a recipe for torture and more. It does not make the world safer.