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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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November 2nd, 2005 - CIA Holds
Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons |
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CIA Holds Terror Suspects in
Secret Prisons Debate Is Growing Within Agency About Legality and Morality of Overseas
System Set Up After 9/11 By Dana Priest Washington Post November 2, 2005 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. © 2006 The Washington Post
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