[Mb-civic] CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons

[William Swiggard]

CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons
Debate Is Growing Within Agency About Legality and Morality of Overseas 
System Set Up After 9/11

By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 2, 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?' "

(continued)...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/01/AR2005110101644.html?referrer=email
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