Pinochet is gone, but his methods are still with us

Torture, secret prisons and disappearances: all feature prominently in the legacy of Augusto Pinochet. It is a matter of great regret that the former Chilean dictator - brought to power in a CIA-backed coup on September 11 1973 - avoided trial for gross abuses of human rights in his ravenous pursuit of power. But it is a matter of even greater regret that the same tools and the same sponsors are back in action today, with the same impunity, as part of the "war on terror" launched after September 11 2001.

When the Bush administration brought 14 of its most highly valued terrorism suspects to Guantánamo Bay from secret prisons in various countries in September, the US president himself acknowledged for the first time the existence of a network of CIA prisons. This was intended to close a chapter that had become embarrassing to Washington. The US practice of illegal kidnapping known as "extraordinary rendition", and the secret detention and torture that was part of it, had - after more than four years - finally become a scandal condemned by many European politicians, UN officials and international lawyers, as well as US-based human-rights groups.

But, as a new report from the British monitoring group Cageprisoners reveals, the men held in Guantánamo Bay are only the tip of the iceberg: thousands more are hidden elsewhere, outside the law. The "war on terror" is taking a terrible toll on Muslim families and societies through a vast programme of secret detention and torture.

Since January 2002, when the first Muslim men were flown from Afghanistan to Guantánamo, an estimated 14,000 men have been held. They have been hidden in prisons, army barracks, holes in the ground, private houses, hotels and schools. Those responsible for them have been in overlapping chains of command, including the US department of defence, the CIA and the national intelligence services of many countries, such as Britain.

The Cageprisoners report is a meticulous record of information cross-correlated from the testimony of numerous released prisoners in many countries and of lawyers such as Clive Stafford Smith and his team at Reprieve, who represent some of the men in Guantánamo and have been able to talk to them. But Stafford Smith's own statement that as many as three-quarters of the men in Guantánamo have never seen a lawyer, and that the Guantánamo men represent only 4% of all those imprisoned in the war on terror, is a chilling reminder of just how little outsiders have been able to penetrate this dark, illegal world.

None the less, we now have a mass of detail, much of it new, that has never been collated before. The foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, should publicly dissociate Britain from the wholesale violations of human-rights law and the Geneva conventions that have taken place in the last five years.

The countries listed as being used by the US include Thailand, Germany, Greece, Dubai, Jordan, Egypt and Syria, while some men have been held on US navy vessels. Different prisons and other detention centres are listed for each country, and in many cases the names of prisoners who were held there. But in some cases the prisoners giving the testimony had no idea where they had been held, and could only describe the temperature, the accents of the guards, and other clues. Muhammad al-Assad, for instance, was flown about three hours from Tanzania to somewhere very hot where the accents of the guards in Arabic seemed to be Somali or Ethiopian, as was the bread. He was interrogated by a white western man who spoke good Arabic.

Two women prisoners rendered from Pakistan are reported to have been held in Syria's Far'Falastin prison in Damascus. Canadians who were rendered there by the US, including Mahar Arar and Abdullah al-Maliki, have described this and other Syrian prisons and the appalling conditions, including torture, under which they were held. Syria and Yemen use only their own nationals in their prisons. But in Afghanistan, Indonesia, Jordan, Pakistan, Egypt, Malawi, Mauritania, Morocco, Bosnia and Dubai, CIA and other US or UK personnel are heavily involved in the prisons. One thread running through the report is the presence of British intelligence personnel in many of the interrogations. The experiences of prisoners such as Muhammad al-Assad, Muhammad Faraj Ahmed Bashmilah and Salah Nasir Salim Ali Qaru, who suffered extreme sensory deprivation during months in a "black site", are also described. All the guards covered their faces and said nothing, so there was no way to even guess their nationality.

Innocent men such as Mahar Arar, from Canada, and Khaled el-Masri, from Germany, were lucky to be released from this archipelago of secret prisons, but have had no apology or compensation, nor seen any hint of charges being brought against those responsible for their kidnapping and torture. But, like Pinochet's victims, they will not give up the fight for justice.

Few tears were shed at news of Pinochet's death, which came, aptly enough, on International Human Rights Day. But the near unanimous condemnation of his US-sponsored crimes loses its moral weight if not accompanied by an equally vociferous denunciation of the similar abuses being perpetrated today.