CIA Holds Terror Suspects In Secret Prisons
Debate Grows Within Agency About Legality, Morality Approach.
(By-Dana Priest)
The Washington Post
Nov. 2, 2005

The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of the 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 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 to the President and a few top intelligence officers in each host Country.

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.

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 have increased concern among law makers, 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.

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. 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 UN 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 UN Convention and by US Military Law.

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.

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.

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."

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 US and foreign government and intelligence officials.

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 and White House legal advisers.

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.
Then came grisly reports, in the winter of 2001, that prisoners kept by allied Afghan Generals in cargo containers had died of asphyxiation.

The largest CIA prison in Afghanistan was code-named the Salt Pit. 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.

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.

Note:
The Washington Post is not publishing the names of the Eastern European Countries involved in the program, at the request of senior US officials.

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9890829/