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Report: CIA running secret prisons
Moe_D
11/02/05 at 14:51:08
Report: CIA running secret prisons
   





NEW YORK (AP) — The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a compound in Eastern Europe, U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement said, the Washington Post reported.

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 countries in Eastern Europe, as well as a small centre at the Guantanamo Bay prison in U.S.-occupied Cuba, current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents said, the paper reported Tuesday on its website.

The hidden global internment network is a central element in the CIA’s war on terrorism, the Post said. It depends on the co-operation 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, U.S. 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, it said.

The CIA and the White House, citing national security concerns and the value of the program, have dissuaded Congress from demanding 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 U.S. Defence 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, officials familiar with the program told the Post, 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 legislators, foreign governments and human rights groups about the opaque CIA system. Those concerns escalated last month, when U.S. Vice-President Cheney and CIA Director Porter 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 the successful defence of the United States requires 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 said it 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 the disclosure might disrupt counter-terrorism efforts in those countries and elsewhere and could make them targets of possible terrorist retaliation.

The secret detention system was conceived in first months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, when the working assumption was 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 the system was unsustainable and diverted the agency from its unique espionage mission, the Post said.

Re: Report: CIA running secret prisons
thezman
11/02/05 at 23:27:47
   [slm]

the original source to run the story was the washington post (4 parts).

they have people residing in the dungeons of hell.

very barbaric and inhumane...


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