CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons
Interested | 03.11.2005 16:29 | Anti-militarism | Globalisation | Repression | Terror War | Birmingham
American newspaper Washington Post publsihed an interesting article yesterday, 2nd November, about secret prisons run by the CIA on foreign soil. Unsurprisingly, the agency, as well as top US politicians, are trying hard to keep the information secret, as the article shows.
Salt Pit
CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons
By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, 2 November, 2005. Page 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?' "
By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, 2 November, 2005. Page 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?' "
Interested
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EU order an investigation
03.11.2005 21:15
Investigation into reports of CIA prisons
03/11/2005 - Allegations that the CIA set up secret jails in eastern Europe and elsewhere to interrogate al Qaida suspects today triggered a flurry of denials from governments in the former Soviet bloc and prompted European Union officials, the continent's top human rights organisation and the international Red Cross to investigate. Such prisons, European officials say, would violate the continent's human rights principles. At work may be a complex web of global politics, in which eastern European countries face choices between the views of the European Union and their interest in close ties with the United States.
According to a report in yesterday's Washington Post, the CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaida captives at Soviet-era compounds in eastern Europe.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, which has had exclusive rights to visit terror suspects detained at a US military base at Guantanamo, took strong interest in the claims - having long been concerned about reports US officials were hiding detainees from ICRC delegates. Red Cross chief spokeswoman Antonella Notari said the organisation had asked Washington about the allegations and requested access to the prisons if they exist.
Europe's top human rights organisation, the Council of Europe, said it, too, would investigate the claims.
Notari said the Red Cross, which also monitors conditions at US detention centres in Afghanistan and Iraq, has been unable to find some people who have reportedly been detained. She said the Red Cross was "concerned about the fate of an unknown number of persons detained as part of what is called the 'global war on terror' and held in undisclosed places of detention."
Human Rights Watch in New York said today it has evidence indicating the CIA transported suspected terrorists captured in Afghanistan to Poland and Romania.
The conclusion is based on an analysis of flight logs of CIA aircraft from 2001 to 2004 obtained by the group, said Mark Garlasco, a senior military analyst with the organisation.
Human Rights Watch said it matched the flight patterns of the CIA aircraft with testimony from some of the hundreds of detainees in the war on terrorism who have been released by the United States.
"The indications are that prisoners in Afghanistan are being (taken) to facilities in Europe and other countries in the world," Garlasco, a former civilian intelligence officer with the Defence Intelligence Agency, told The Associated Press.
He would not say how the organisation attained the flight logs, but he noted that two destinations of the flights in particular stood out as likely sites of any secret CIA detention centres: Szymany Airport in Poland, which is near the headquarters of Poland's intelligence service; and Mihail Kogalniceanu military airfield in Romania, Garlasco said.
The group also obtained the tail numbers of dozens of CIA aircraft to match them with the flight logs, Garlasco said.
On one of the flights, a Boeing 737 in September 2003 flew to Kabul, Afghanistan from Washington via Ruzyne in the Czech Republic and Tashkent, Uzbekistan he said. On September 22, the plane flew to Szymany Airport, then to Mihail Kogalniceanu, proceeded to Sale, Morocco and finally landed at the US Naval base in Guantanamo, Cuba, Garlasco said.
As far as he knew, Human Rights Watch has not found and interviewed detainees who were held in any alleged facilities in Poland and Romania.
Romania is one of the countries that had an agreement with the United States to use its air space during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and the US has used he Kogalniceanu air base in Romania.
But the Defence Ministry issued a statement saying it was "not aware that such a detention centre … existed at the Mihail Kogalniceanu base," and invited journalists to come see for themselves.
"I repeat: We do not have CIA bases in Romania," said Romanian Prime Minister Calin Popescu.
In Poland, an aide to President Aleksander Kwasniewski said authorities there had "no information" of such facilities.
Other European countries also issued denials.
Boglar Laszlo, a spokesman for Hungary's prime minister, told AP that an official report would be drawn up following consultations with air transportation officials and others "so we can bring this mattr to a close."
Baltic countries Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia also denied the allegations as did now-independent former Soviet republics such as Georgia and Armenia.
EU spokesman Friso Roscam Abbing told reporters that the European Commission, the EU's executive office, would launch an informal probe, requesting answers from all 25 member governments and EU candidates Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia and Turkey.
The investigation could create tensions between Washington and EU governments, many of which have been outspoken critics of how the US has been handling terrorist suspects at its detention camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. EU heavyweights France and Germany led international opposition to the U.S. decision to invade Iraq.
According to the Post's report, a covert prison system was set up by the CIA nearly four years ago which at various times included sites in eight countries, including Afghanistan and several eastern Europe nations. It quoted current and former intelligence officials and diplomats as sources for its story. U.S. officials have refused to confirm or deny the allegations.
Roscam Abbing said said such prisons could violate EU human rights laws and other European human rights conventions.
Matjaz Gruden, a spokesman for the Council of Europe, said the human rights watchdog would also be following the issue "very closely". - IOL
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another thought about this whole 'rendition' affair
many have known for months/years that this was going on
why, now, does Bob Woodward [editor in charge of the
Washington post] decide to do this?
i think this is realpolitik
trying to create a rift between EU & USA
in order to funnel all protest
of this global gulag
into a politically useful tool
see also
the Plame gate affair whereby
yesterday the democrats sealed of the senate for a anti bush war 'meeting'
and senator reid announced that
democrats did not know that iraq had NO WMD
or that 911 had nothing to do with Iraq
STRANGELY MANY, MANY PEOPLE SUSPECTED THIS WAS ALL A LIE AT THE TIME....
How do we know?
THEY MARCHED IN THE STREETS IN JANUARY 2003
HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS MARCHED WORLDWIDE
SO WHAT GIVES?
damage limitation?
or the smell of power in their nostrils?
do you trust these power hungry maniacs from both
sides of a redundant political paradigm
to represent humanity???
Forgive my cynicism
but
alas no
Rendition is but another strand to the medusas snake like hair
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In the mid 70's Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney -- were aides to the new president, Gerald Ford. At that time Rumsfeld and Cheney were persuading Ford to veto one of the most important Watergate-inspired reforms, an enhanced Freedom of Information Act
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before that [ren & stimpy]
Rumsfeld & Cheney - were still torture masters....
Secret documents have revealed US Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld are "linked to the murder" of a senior CIA scientist. Frank Olson, who was a key member of the CIA's secret brainwashing programme MK-ULTRA, was sent plunging from a New York hotel window after he had threatened to reveal the CIA involvement in "terminal experiments" in post-war Germany.
Frank Olson's son, Eric, a psychologist, believes that fact will not be overlooked by President Bush's opponents as they search for further evidence that Rumsfeld and Cheney have a long history of news management and hiding the truth that could be highly embarrassing to the White House. The documents reinforce how Rumsfeld and Cheney have honed their skills over the past thirty years to ensure that today they have so far managed to keep the current scandal of US torture in Iraq - and elsewhere - from ensnaring themselves and President Bush.
snip
For almost half a century Eric Olson has insisted his father was murdered "on orders from the highest level". Frank Olson's work for the CIA had included making biological weapons. He had devised an aerosol disguised as insect spray that contained the lethal pathogen, botulism. It was successfully used to kill a Russian GRU military intelligence officer on a visit to Gdansk, Poland, in 1951.
Another creation had been toothpaste containing salmonella, an incapacitating bacterium. The CIA arranged for it to be distributed in 1952 to Bulgarian troops in Sofia. Yet another weapon was inserted into Polish produced jam, the shigella bacterium, which produced incapacitating diarrhoea. For a time it produced a major outbreak among Polish and other Warsaw Pact frontline troops in 1952."
see also
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according to John Marks:
Frank Olson specialized in the airborne delivery of disease. He had been working in the field ever since 1943, when he came to Fort Detrick as one of the original military officers in the U. S. biological warfare program.
Before the end of the war, he developed a painful ulcer condition that led him to seek a medical discharge from the uniformed military, but he had stayed on as a civilian.
He joined SOD when it started in 1950. Obviously good at what he did, Olson served for several months as acting chief of SOD in 1952-53 but asked to be relieved when the added stress caused his ulcer to flare up. He happily returned to his lesser post as a branch chief, where he had fewer administrative duties and could spend more time in the laboratory.
A lover of practical jokes, Olson was very popular among his many friends. He was an outgoing man, but, like most of his generation, he kept his inner feelings to himself. His great passion was his family, and he spent most of his spare time playing with his three kids and helping around the house. He had met his wife while they both studied at the University of Wisconsin.
The Search for the Manchurian Candidate The CIA and Mind Control - John Marks
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Olson at Porton Down...
Frank Olson had come to Britain between 1950-53 to work on attachment at Porton Down and had also made frequent visits to an intelligence facility in Sussex. This is confirmed by entries in the special passport that Olson used.
[snip]
[Dr. William] Sargant wanted the British government to distance itself from the CIAs work with MK-ULTRA, Miniccino says he nevertheless was committed to the principle of mind control and became the link between the British Secret Intelligence Service and MK-ULTRA. Miniccino adds, So if Frank Olson expressed serious doubts about the MK-ULTRA project to Sargant, then he signed his own death warrant. What Miniccino is implying and what public prosecutor Saracco wants to prove is that the MK-ULTRA mind control projectwith its clinical trials on unsuspecting human beingswas such a sensitive issue with the western intelligence community that it would go to any lengths to prevent an insider like Olson, from blowing the whistle.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
With the information concerning biological weapons in the Korean War on the one hand and the information about the White House coverup in 1975 on the other, the story of the death of Frank Olson finally hit bottom. Frank Olson did not die as a consequence of a drug experiment gone awry. He died because of security concerns regarding disavowed programs of terminal interrogation and the use of biological weapons in Korea. This secret was so immense that even twenty-two years later the White House had been enlisted to maintain it.
olson family statement
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so... we have a prominent scientist being silenced
for his knowledge of secret human
experiments ...
remind you of anything recent???????
DR KELLY for instance?
who was ex-porton down scientist who specialised in
Chemical Biological WMD proliferation
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Arms to Iraq -
The Scott inquiry had been set up in 1992 following the collapse of the trial in the case of Matrix Churchill, a British firm exporting equipment to Iraq that could be put to military use.
Three senior executives of Matrix Churchill said the government knew what Matrix Churchill was doing, and that its managing director Paul Henderson had been supplying information about Iraq to the British intelligence agencies on a regular basis.
The inquiry revealed details of the British government's secret decision to supply Saddam with even more weapons-related equipment after the Halabja killings.
Former British foreign secretary Geoffrey Howe was found to have written that the end of the Iraq-Iran war could mean major opportunities for British industry in military exports, but he wanted to keep that proposal quiet.
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what i'm trying to say is that the rendition program is
the exact same operation that we have seen in South / Central America...
[see negropontes task force 121 in Honduras]
Iraq and other 'failed states'
N Korea are complicit in a huge charade
they are not failed in the eyes of the
experimenting nazis
running central operations
they are labs in which they can try out
fascism / chemical warfare / MK programs
while western populations unknowingly think they are the 'good guys'
via the ever present soft power of a complicit media etc
look around you
soon we will all be like the fascist states we are told
are 'the enemy'
every nation have 'anti terror laws' pending
does that make any sense to you?
cw