"If Americans only knew," I keep telling myself.

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) -- Two Yemeni men say they were held in solitary confinement in secret, underground U.S. detention facilities in an unknown country and interrogated by masked men for more than 18 months without being charged or allowed any contact with the outside world, Amnesty International said Wednesday.

The report appeared to confirm long-standing allegations that the United States has held "secret detainees" in its war on terror, according to Amnesty and human rights lawyers.

"We fear that what we have heard from these two men is just one small part of the much broader picture of U.S. secret detentions around the world," said Sharon Critoph, a researcher at Amnesty International who interviewed the men in Yemen.

In its report, Amnesty urged the United States to provide details about these and other prisoners.

"The U.S. authorities must disclose the identities of all people who are being held in secret, where they're being held, and open these places up to international scrutiny," Critoph said.

U.S. officials have previously denied allegations of secret detention facilities, saying they hold terror suspects only at the U.S. Naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In June, U.S. officials denied a suggestion from the U.N.'s special expert on torture, Manfred Nowak, that some undeclared holding areas could include American ships cruising international waters. Others have suggested "high-value" detainees could be held secretly in Diego Garcia, a British-held island in the Indian Ocean that the United States rents as a strategic military base.

Lawyers who represent detainees at Guantanamo have long believed that the CIA or other U.S. government agencies have used clandestine jails for terror suspects.

"The fact that there are underground CIA facilities somewhere where people are being tortured has been known for a while," said Michael Ratner of the U.S. Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City.

Amnesty interviewed Salah Nasser Salim Ali and Muhammad Faraj Ahmed Bashmilah in a jail in Yemen in late June. The group also spoke to a Yemeni government official who said the men were being held in that country only because it was a condition of their release from U.S. custody.

Salah told the rights group that he was originally detained in Indonesia in August 2003 and then flown several days later to Jordan; Muhammad said he was detained in Jordan in October 2003 while on a trip to visit his mother.

Both men claimed they were tortured by Jordanian intelligence agents for four days and then flown to what they believe were underground jails in an unknown location.

But then you get that creepy feeling in your guy that American's do know. Just like the people living near the death camps in Nazi Germany knew... Just like the Serbians knew... Just like we all knew about what was happening in Rwanda.

But we don't want to know. What we want... Is to feel safe. What we want, is to believe the things our President tells us. We want to believe that we are the champions of Freedom around the globe. We want to believe that we are the guys in the white hats. We want to believe that wherever we go we will be met with flowers and candy. We want to believe that we are fighting on the side of right.

But it has been a long, long time since America has been purely on the side of right, that is unless you consider what is best for American Business and Political interest to be RIGHT.

I live in a region where for years, America propped up tin pan dictators and regularly overthrew constitutional governments, when it was in the best interest of American big business. Nothing we do today in the War on Terror is going to surprise me.

Our proud black ops warriors have been involved in torture and dirty tricks for years.

Secret Wars of the CIA (PDF FILE)

What is sad is that in the past, Americans could claim ignorance of some of these tactics and their results. Today we are more likely to turn a blind eye, despite being aware, because we have been fed four years of FEAR by our current administration. Mind Numbing, Nationalist Fear... A fear that almost any amount of evil is insignificant when compared with the possible consequences of one terrorist escaping.

Those of us on the left who question this policy, and the fallacy that created it, are often labeled terrorist supporters, traitors and worse. Our patriotism is called into question, and we are labeled. Well the greatest form of Patriotism is dissent, belief in the constitution, and the ideals of our Founding Fathers, and few would suggest that our Founding Fathers would have supported the kind of blatant disregard for our constitution as practiced under this administration, nor can I believe that they would support torture or the overthrow of sovereign governments as a preemptive measure...

How Far we have come... And yet looking back over the last 50 years, we really haven't come that far at all, have we.

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