Dear Senators Whitehouse, Leahy and Feingold,

I am writing to you because the three of you have consistently supported basic human rights, the rule of law and common decency as our country has struggled to overcome the abuses that were institutionalized during the Bush Administration. The information released in the last two weeks goes a long way toward describing the practice of torture and the contorted legal reasoning that was produced in an effort to provide authorization for these abuses.

As a result of these disclosures, the issue of torture has now become a hot topic for debate in the Congress and the media. The growing realization of what has been done in the name of our country is serving to increase the pressure on Congress and the Obama Administration to hold accountable those responsible for these crimes.

Missing so far, however, from the disclosures is information on one topic that I think would serve as the final straw to unite public opinion behind the need for an independent prosecutor to finish the investigation and bring charges against those who put these programs into place. There is credible evidence that the United States government, almost certainly in the form of the CIA, has custody of four children of suspected terrorists. These children have been missing for over six years.

Here is evidence from the Telegraph in Britain that the CIA holds Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s two sons:

Two young sons of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of the September 11 attacks, are being used by the CIA to force their father to talk.

Yousef al-Khalid, nine, and his brother, Abed al-Khalid, seven, were taken into custody in Pakistan last September when intelligence officers raided a flat in Karachi where their father had been hiding.

/snip/

Last night CIA interrogators confirmed that the boys were staying at a secret address where they were being encouraged to talk about their father’s activities.

"We are handling them with kid gloves. After all, they are only little children," said one official, "but we need to know as much about their father’s recent activities as possible. We have child psychologists on hand at all times and they are given the best of care."

As you can see from this passage, CIA personnel openly admitted to the Telegraph that they held Mohammed’s sons and that the children were being questioned. Given the role psychologists played in developing the torture practices described by the Senate Armed Services Committee report this week, the allusion to child psychologists being present during questioning of these children is especially chilling.

Even more disturbing is this admission from John Yoo in December, 2005:

Doug Cassel: If the president deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?
John Yoo: No treaty.
Doug Cassel: Also no law by Congress — that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo…
John Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that.

Did John Yoo or another government lawyer write a memo that authorized torture of Mohammed’s children? Was this torture carried out? Why have there been no further mentions of the fate of these children in the press? Where are they now? What is their health status?

Sadly, it is not just the children of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed who are missing. Aafia Siddiqui and her three children disappeared in the spring of 2003, most likely after she was identified by Mohammed after his waterboard torture began:

Because of the secretive nature of the interrogation, we may never know what, if anything, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed said about Siddiqui. About a month after his capture in the spring of 2003, however, she disappeared. The last her mother remembers, Siddiqui was piling herself and her kids, then seven, five, and six months old, into a taxi headed to the train station, the first step of what she said was her planned trip to visit an uncle in Islamabad. Her mother said goodbye to her daughter and grandchildren — and hasn’t seen them since.

Siddiqui and the oldest son have since resurfaced under very suspicious circumstances, but the other two children are still missing:

The 12-year-old son of an American-educated Pakistani woman whom U.S. authorities have linked to al-Qaeda has been handed over to Pakistani authorities in Afghanistan and is soon to be reunited with family in Pakistan, Afghan and Pakistani officials said Monday.

The boy was detained in Afghanistan along with his mother, Aafia Siddiqui, in July, and his fate since then has been one of the many unanswered questions about his mother’s case. Siddiqui is now in New York facing federal charges.

/snip/

Siddiqui’s whereabouts for the past five years have also been the subject of discord.

Family members say she and her three children disappeared five years ago when she was on her way to the airport in Karachi, where she planned to board a plane to visit an uncle in Islamabad. Siddiqui’s sister, Fauzia Siddiqui, denies that her sister had any links to al-Qaeda.

British journalist and activist Yvonne Ridley has said that Siddiqui matched the description of a female prisoner held for five years in the U.S- run prison at Bagram air base in Afghanistan. Siddiqui’s family has said she was tortured by Americans there.

As the three of you know, the process of disclosing what has been done by the United States in this very dark chapter of our history is the first step toward rejoining the community of countries who hold human rights in the highest regard. I submit to you that we cannot complete this process while the fates of these four children remain unknown. I urge you to take up the cause of full disclosure of the detention and treatment of these children. Please use the authority of your positions to insist on a full accounting of what is known about these children. Please request disclosure of any and all documents discussing the abduction and/or interrogation of children of suspected terrorists.

Whatever the crimes of the parent, a civilized nation would never use children as an interrogation tool. Continued silence on the status of these children only will lead the world to assume the worst about their fates and the role the US played in those fates.