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by
Dana Priest
[American-Buddha Librarian's
Comment: Exactly how does the FBI going all around the country
intimidating witnesses with inconvenient knowledge of 9/11 jibe with the
CIA torturing people in secret prisons for information? WHAT IS
WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?]
Video is a Window Into a
Terror Suspect's Isolation, by Deborah Sontag
The Machine Vignette, from Rob Reiner's "Princess Pride"
Washington Post
Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 2, 2005; A01
The CIA has been
hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a
Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign
officials familiar with the arrangement.
The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA
nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight
countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in
Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in
Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats
from three continents.
The hidden global internment network is a central element in the CIA's
unconventional war on terrorism. It depends on the cooperation of foreign
intelligence services, and on keeping even basic information about the
system secret from the public, foreign officials and nearly all members of
Congress charged with overseeing the CIA's covert actions.
The existence and locations of the facilities -- referred to as "black
sites" in classified White House, CIA, Justice Department and
congressional documents -- are known to only a handful of officials in the
United States and, usually, only to the president and a few top
intelligence officers in each host country.
The CIA and the White House, citing national security concerns and the
value of the program, have dissuaded Congress from demanding that the
agency answer questions in open testimony about the conditions under which
captives are held. Virtually nothing is known about who is kept in the
facilities, what interrogation methods are employed with them, or how
decisions are made about whether they should be detained or for how long.
While the Defense Department has produced volumes of public reports and
testimony about its detention practices and rules after the abuse scandals
at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and at Guantanamo Bay, the CIA has not even
acknowledged the existence of its black sites. To do so, say officials
familiar with the program, could open the U.S. government to legal
challenges, particularly in foreign courts, and increase the risk of
political condemnation at home and abroad.
But the revelations of widespread prisoner abuse in Afghanistan and Iraq
by the U.S. military -- which operates under published rules and
transparent oversight of Congress -- have increased concern among
lawmakers, foreign governments and human rights groups about the opaque
CIA system. Those concerns escalated last month, when Vice President
Cheney and CIA Director Porter J. Goss asked Congress to exempt CIA
employees from legislation already endorsed by 90 senators that would bar
cruel and degrading treatment of any prisoner in U.S. custody.
Although the CIA will not acknowledge details of its system, intelligence
officials defend the agency's approach, arguing that the successful
defense of the country requires that the agency be empowered to hold and
interrogate suspected terrorists for as long as necessary and without
restrictions imposed by the U.S. legal system or even by the military
tribunals established for prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay.
The Washington Post is not publishing the names of the Eastern European
countries involved in the covert program, at the request of senior U.S.
officials. They argued that the disclosure might disrupt counterterrorism
efforts in those countries and elsewhere and could make them targets of
possible terrorist retaliation.
The secret detention system was conceived in the chaotic and anxious first
months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when the working assumption was
that a second strike was imminent.
Since then, the arrangement has been increasingly debated within the CIA,
where considerable concern lingers about the legality, morality and
practicality of holding even unrepentant terrorists in such isolation and
secrecy, perhaps for the duration of their lives. Mid-level and senior CIA
officers began arguing two years ago that the system was unsustainable and
diverted the agency from its unique espionage mission.
"We never sat down, as far as I know, and came up with a grand strategy,"
said one former senior intelligence officer who is familiar with the
program but not the location of the prisons. "Everything was very
reactive. That's how you get to a situation where you pick people up, send
them into a netherworld and don't say, 'What are we going to do with them
afterwards?' "
It is illegal for the government to hold prisoners in such isolation in
secret prisons in the United States, which is why the CIA placed them
overseas, according to several former and current intelligence officials
and other U.S. government officials. Legal experts and intelligence
officials said that the CIA's internment practices also would be
considered illegal under the laws of several host countries, where
detainees have rights to have a lawyer or to mount a defense against
allegations of wrongdoing.
Host countries have signed the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other
Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, as has the United
States. Yet CIA interrogators in the overseas sites are permitted to use
the CIA's approved "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques," some of which are
prohibited by the U.N. convention and by U.S. military law. They include
tactics such as "waterboarding," in which a prisoner is made to believe he
or she is drowning.
Some detainees apprehended by the CIA and transferred to foreign
intelligence agencies have alleged after their release that they were
tortured, although it is unclear whether CIA personnel played a role in
the alleged abuse. Given the secrecy surrounding CIA detentions, such
accusations have heightened concerns among foreign governments and human
rights groups about CIA detention and interrogation practices.
The contours of the CIA's detention program have emerged in bits and
pieces over the past two years. Parliaments in Canada, Italy, France,
Sweden and the Netherlands have opened inquiries into alleged CIA
operations that secretly captured their citizens or legal residents and
transferred them to the agency's prisons.
More than 100 suspected terrorists have been sent by the CIA into the
covert system, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials
and foreign sources. This figure, a rough estimate based on information
from sources who said their knowledge of the numbers was incomplete, does
not include prisoners picked up in Iraq.
The detainees break down roughly into two classes, the sources said.
About 30 are considered major terrorism suspects and have been held under
the highest level of secrecy at black sites financed by the CIA and
managed by agency personnel, including those in Eastern Europe and
elsewhere, according to current and former intelligence officers and two
other U.S. government officials. Two locations in this category -- in
Thailand and on the grounds of the military prison at Guantanamo Bay --
were closed in 2003 and 2004, respectively.
A second tier -- which these sources believe includes more than 70
detainees -- is a group considered less important, with less direct
involvement in terrorism and having limited intelligence value. These
prisoners, some of whom were originally taken to black sites, are
delivered to intelligence services in Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Afghanistan
and other countries, a process sometimes known as "rendition." While the
first-tier black sites are run by CIA officers, the jails in these
countries are operated by the host nations, with CIA financial assistance
and, sometimes, direction.
Morocco, Egypt and Jordan have said that they do not torture detainees,
although years of State Department human rights reports accuse all three
of chronic prisoner abuse.
The top 30 al Qaeda prisoners exist in complete isolation from the outside
world. Kept in dark, sometimes underground cells, they have no recognized
legal rights, and no one outside the CIA is allowed to talk with or even
see them, or to otherwise verify their well-being, said current and former
and U.S. and foreign government and intelligence officials.
Most of the facilities were built and are maintained with congressionally
appropriated funds, but the White House has refused to allow the CIA to
brief anyone except the House and Senate intelligence committees' chairmen
and vice chairmen on the program's generalities.
The Eastern European countries that the CIA has persuaded to hide al Qaeda
captives are democracies that have embraced the rule of law and individual
rights after decades of Soviet domination. Each has been trying to cleanse
its intelligence services of operatives who have worked on behalf of
others -- mainly Russia and organized crime.
Origins of the Black Sites
The idea of holding terrorists outside the U.S. legal system was not under
consideration before Sept. 11, 2001, not even for Osama bin Laden,
according to former government officials. The plan was to bring bin Laden
and his top associates into the U.S. justice system for trial or to send
them to foreign countries where they would be tried.
"The issue of detaining and interrogating people was never, ever
discussed," said a former senior intelligence officer who worked in the
CIA's Counterterrorist Center, or CTC, during that period. "It was against
the culture and they believed information was best gleaned by other
means."
On the day of the attacks, the CIA already had a list of what it called
High-Value Targets from the al Qaeda structure, and as the World Trade
Center and Pentagon attack plots were unraveled, more names were added to
the list. The question of what to do with these people surfaced quickly.
The CTC's chief of operations argued for creating hit teams of case
officers and CIA paramilitaries that would covertly infiltrate countries
in the Middle East, Africa and even Europe to assassinate people on the
list, one by one.
But many CIA officers believed that the al Qaeda leaders would be worth
keeping alive to interrogate about their network and other plots. Some
officers worried that the CIA would not be very adept at assassination.
"We'd probably shoot ourselves," another former senior CIA official said.
The agency set up prisons under its covert action authority. Under U.S.
law, only the president can authorize a covert action, by signing a
document called a presidential finding. Findings must not break U.S. law
and are reviewed and approved by CIA, Justice Department and White House
legal advisers.
Six days after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush signed a sweeping
finding that gave the CIA broad authorization to disrupt terrorist
activity, including permission to kill, capture and detain members of al
Qaeda anywhere in the world.
It could not be determined whether Bush approved a separate finding for
the black-sites program, but the consensus among current and former
intelligence and other government officials interviewed for this article
is that he did not have to.
Rather, they believe that the CIA general counsel's office acted within
the parameters of the Sept. 17 finding. The black-site program was
approved by a small circle of White House and Justice Department lawyers
and officials, according to several former and current U.S. government and
intelligence officials.
Deals With 2 Countries
Among the first steps was to figure out where the CIA could secretly hold
the captives. One early idea was to keep them on ships in international
waters, but that was discarded for security and logistics reasons.
CIA officers also searched for a setting like Alcatraz Island. They
considered the virtually unvisited islands in Lake Kariba in Zambia, which
were edged with craggy cliffs and covered in woods. But poor sanitary
conditions could easily lead to fatal diseases, they decided, and besides,
they wondered, could the Zambians be trusted with such a secret?
Still without a long-term solution, the CIA began sending suspects it
captured in the first month or so after Sept. 11 to its longtime partners,
the intelligence services of Egypt and Jordan.
A month later, the CIA found itself with hundreds of prisoners who were
captured on battlefields in Afghanistan. A short-term solution was
improvised. The agency shoved its highest-value prisoners into metal
shipping containers set up on a corner of the Bagram Air Base, which was
surrounded with a triple perimeter of concertina-wire fencing. Most
prisoners were left in the hands of the Northern Alliance, U.S.-supported
opposition forces who were fighting the Taliban.
"I remember asking: What are we going to do with these people?" said a
senior CIA officer. "I kept saying, where's the help? We've got to bring
in some help. We can't be jailers -- our job is to find Osama."
Then came grisly reports, in the winter of 2001, that prisoners kept by
allied Afghan generals in cargo containers had died of asphyxiation. The
CIA asked Congress for, and was quickly granted, tens of millions of
dollars to establish a larger, long-term system in Afghanistan, parts of
which would be used for CIA prisoners.
The largest CIA prison in Afghanistan was code-named the Salt Pit. It was
also the CIA's substation and was first housed in an old brick factory
outside Kabul. In November 2002, an inexperienced CIA case officer
allegedly ordered guards to strip naked an uncooperative young detainee,
chain him to the concrete floor and leave him there overnight without
blankets. He froze to death, according to four U.S. government officials.
The CIA officer has not been charged in the death.
The Salt Pit was protected by surveillance cameras and tough Afghan
guards, but the road leading to it was not safe to travel and the jail was
eventually moved inside Bagram Air Base. It has since been relocated off
the base.
By mid-2002, the CIA had worked out secret black-site deals with two
countries, including Thailand and one Eastern European nation, current and
former officials said. An estimated $100 million was tucked inside the
classified annex of the first supplemental Afghanistan appropriation.
Then the CIA captured its first big detainee, in March 28, 2002. Pakistani
forces took Abu Zubaida, al Qaeda's operations chief, into custody and the
CIA whisked him to the new black site in Thailand, which included
underground interrogation cells, said several former and current
intelligence officials. Six months later, Sept. 11 planner Ramzi
Binalshibh was also captured in Pakistan and flown to Thailand.
But after published reports revealed the existence of the site in June
2003, Thai officials insisted the CIA shut it down, and the two terrorists
were moved elsewhere, according to former government officials involved in
the matter. Work between the two countries on counterterrorism has been
lukewarm ever since.
In late 2002 or early 2003, the CIA brokered deals with other countries to
establish black-site prisons. One of these sites -- which sources said
they believed to be the CIA's biggest facility now -- became particularly
important when the agency realized it would have a growing number of
prisoners and a shrinking number of prisons.
Thailand was closed, and sometime in 2004 the CIA decided it had to give
up its small site at Guantanamo Bay. The CIA had planned to convert that
into a state-of-the-art facility, operated independently of the military.
The CIA pulled out when U.S. courts began to exercise greater control over
the military detainees, and agency officials feared judges would soon
extend the same type of supervision over their detainees.
In hindsight, say some former and current intelligence officials, the
CIA's problems were exacerbated by another decision made within the
Counterterrorist Center at Langley.
The CIA program's original scope was to hide and interrogate the two dozen
or so al Qaeda leaders believed to be directly responsible for the Sept.
11 attacks, or who posed an imminent threat, or had knowledge of the
larger al Qaeda network. But as the volume of leads pouring into the CTC
from abroad increased, and the capacity of its paramilitary group to seize
suspects grew, the CIA began apprehending more people whose intelligence
value and links to terrorism were less certain, according to four current
and former officials.
The original standard for consigning suspects to the invisible universe
was lowered or ignored, they said. "They've got many, many more who don't
reach any threshold," one intelligence official said.
Several former and current intelligence officials, as well as several
other U.S. government officials with knowledge of the program, express
frustration that the White House and the leaders of the intelligence
community have not made it a priority to decide whether the secret
internment program should continue in its current form, or be replaced by
some other approach.
Meanwhile, the debate over the wisdom of the program continues among CIA
officers, some of whom also argue that the secrecy surrounding the program
is not sustainable.
"It's just a horrible burden," said the intelligence official.
Researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
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