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CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret
Prisons
By Dana Priest
The Washington Post
Wednesday 02 November 2005
Debate is growing within agency about legality and morality
of overseas system set up after 9/11.
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 US 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 US 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 US 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 US 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 US 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 US 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 US 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 US 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 US 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 US 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 US
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 US 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 US 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 US law, only the president can
authorize a covert action, by signing a document called a
presidential finding. Findings must not break US 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 US 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, US-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 US 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 US 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 US 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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