Nonprofit group claims Navy uses ships as prisons

NORFOLK

A British human rights organization is accusing the U.S. Navy of using locally based amphibious ships as floating prisons for foreign detainees as recently as last year, a charge the Navy denied.

Reprieve, a nonprofit organization based in London, said as many as 17 U.S. Navy ships may have been used to detain prisoners captured in combat since 2001. The organization named three ships: the amphibious assault ships Bataan and Peleliu and the dock landing ship Ashland. The Bataan and Ashland are based in Hampton Roads.

The allegations were reported Monday in the British newspaper The Guardian.

The Navy said its ships are not used as prisons. "We do not operate detention facilities on Navy ships," said Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, a Department of Defense spokesman.

Charges of long-term detention of foreigners aboard Navy vessels are "inaccurate and simply not supported by the facts," he said. Department of Defense detention facilities are in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, he said. The detention center at the Navy's Guantanamo base holds approximately 270 prisoners seized in combat.

The Navy acknowledges two instances where prisoners were held briefly aboard ships. John Walker Lindh, an American who fought with the Taliban in Afghanistan, was taken aboard the Bataan and Peleliu until a suitable detention center could be found. In late 2005, a cruiser held pirates captured off the Horn of Africa until Kenya agreed to prosecute them.

The military has come under criticism for its handling of detainees almost since the beginning of the war in Afghanistan - from admissions that prisoners had been secretly transported to other countries for interrogation to photographs of naked prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq.

In a two-page statement, Reprieve said prisoners aboard Navy ships have been "interrogated under torturous conditions before being rendered to other, often undisclosed locations." The group cited the U.S. military, administration officials, the Council of Europe, governmental agencies and prisoner testimony as its sources.

An unnamed prisoner held in Guantanamo described to an investigator conditions aboard the Bataan: "There were about 50 other people on the ship. They were all closed off in the bottom of the ship... The people detained on the ship were beaten even more severely than in Guantanamo."

Reprieve UK spokeswoman Clara Gutteridge said the organization is still investigating the issue and declined further comment.

Clive Stafford Smith, the group's director, said, "The U.S. administration chooses ships to try to keep their misconduct as far as possible from the prying eyes of the media and lawyers."

Gabor Rona, of Human Rights First in New York, said even a short incarceration deprives detainees of their right to be visited by the International Red Cross and ability to challenge their detention.

Donald J. Guter, a retired rear admiral and former judge advocate general of the Navy, said that after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the military seriously studied the issue of where to hold detainees.

Ships were quickly found to be impractical, he said. A carrier's brig is designed to hold only about 20 prisoners temporarily, he said. The military needed a secure place for hundreds of detainees. Converting a ship's space to large numbers of foreign detainees would compromise its operations, he said. "I'm pretty skeptical."

Louis Hansen, (757) 446-2322, louis.hansen@pilotonline.com