Four decades ago, "disappear" was always an intransitive verb. Keys disappeared. Jobs disappeared. But, grammatically speaking, you did not disappear something. Beginning in the 1970s, that changed. In Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, El Salvador and elsewhere in Latin America, military dictatorships and death squads associated with them disappeared people in large numbers. The generals in Buenos Aires and Santiago dropped some of them in the ocean. In Guatemala, the destination for many was a mass grave.

In Spanish, the cognate is desaparecer, and the people who vanished soon came to be called los desaparecidos. In El Salvador and elsewhere, groups like "Las madres de los desaparecidos" (mothers of the disappeared) formed to demand that the governments tell them what happened to their sons and daughters. Long-standing systematic CIA links to death squads in Central America made the U.S., at the very least, an accomplice in these acts of terror.

The CIA has disappeared people far more recently.

Dafna Linzer pointed out at ProPublica Wednesday that, according to Human Rights Watch, 35 suspects known to have been held in secret prisons as far back as 2001 are still unaccounted for.

The Cheney-Bush administration admitted in 2006 that it had secretly held prisoners incommunicado for years at "black sites." In the words of then-CIA Director Michael Hayden, the prisoners totaled somewhat fewer than 100. In September that year, 14 high-level captives from this group were transferred to military custody at the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay. Others were sent to Egypt, Jordan and Pakistan. At the time, however, six human rights groups said 39 other captives were still believed to be held by the CIA.

More than two-and-a-half years later, 35 of these captives remain "disappeared," ghost detainees. Thus, a third of those the CIA once held, if Hayden's 100 figure can be believed, have vanished as surely as the Argentinians who were pushed out of helicopters into the Atlantic in the 1980s.

Last week, as Linzer reported when the Office of Legal Counsel memos were released, al Qaeda suspect Hassan Ghul's name was apparently accidentally included. The last time that name had been publicly spoken by a government official was in 2004 when George Bush mentioned Ghul's arrest to the media.

Linzer wrote:

According to the [OLC] memo, Ghul was one of 28 CIA detainees at the time who had been subjected to the agency’s "enhanced interrogation techniques." Specifically, the memo says he was subjected to "facial hold," "facial slap," "stress positions," "sleep deprivation," a technique called "walling," in which a detainee’s shoulders are repeatedly smashed against a wall, and the "attention grasp [8]," in which the detainee is placed in a choke-hold and slapped.

After Dana Priest in the Washington Post exposed the secret prisons in 2005, most of the prisoners were gradually transferred to third countries. But the 35 on the Human Rights Watch list have vanished. "CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano told ProPublica: "The agency has not, as a rule, commented on these kinds of lists, which are typically flawed."

ProPublica reported:

"Making the Justice Department memos on the CIA's secret prison program public was an important first step, but the Obama administration needs to reveal the fate and whereabouts of every person who was held in CIA custody," said Joanne Mariner, director of the Terrorism and Counterterrorism Program at Human Rights Watch. "If these men are now rotting in some Egyptian dungeon, the administration can't pretend that it's closed the door on the CIA program." The Red Cross has had access to and documented ... the experiences of only the 14 people who were publicly moved out of the CIA program and into the prison at Guantanamo Bay.

As Steve Hynd says:

[The administration] cannot say it has closed the door on the Bush administration's criminal conduct in concealing these prisoners' ident[it]ies and whereabouts in contravention of international laws. Yet another charge to be added to illegal detention, torture and illegal kidnapping for the purposes of detention and torture.

If the Human Rights Watch list is "flawed," there is a simple way for the CIA to clear this matter up. Perhaps the agency needs a little nudging from the guy they greeted so warmly on Monday.

h/t to Magnifico