Report: CIA Has Secret al-Qaida Prison - News

[Guest guest]

A

02 Nov 2005 10:39:31 -0800

News Story - Report: CIA Has Secret al-Qaida Prison -

News

 

 

 

 

 

http://news./s/ap/20051102/ap_on_go_ot/cia_al_qaida_secret_prisons

 

Wed Nov 2, 2:12 PM ET

 

NEW YORK - The

CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important

al-Qaida captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe,

according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement,

the Washington Post reported.

 

he 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 paper said Tuesday on its Web site.

 

The hidden global internment network is a central element in the CIA's

unconventional war on terrorism, the Post said. 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, it said.

 

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,

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

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 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 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, the Post said.