CIA asks Justice Dept. to investigate spying on Senate

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White House Knew CIA Snooped On Senate, Report Says
Posted: 01/15/2015 1:25 pm EST Updated: 16 minutes ago BRENNAN MCDONOUGH

WASHINGTON -- Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan consulted the White House before directing agency personnel to sift through a walled-off computer drive being used by the Senate Intelligence Committee to construct its investigation of the agency’s torture program, according to a recently released report by the CIA’s Office of the Inspector General.

The Inspector General’s report, which was completed in July but only released by the agency on Wednesday, reveals that Brennan spoke with White House chief of staff Denis McDonough before ordering CIA employees to “use whatever means necessary” to determine how certain sensitive internal documents had wound up in Senate investigators’ hands.

Brennan’s consultation with McDonough also came before the CIA revealed the search to then-Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), whose staff was the target of the snooping.

The new information suggesting the White House was aware of -- and did not stop -- the CIA’s computer snooping is unlikely to improve the existing distrust between Senate committee members and the executive branch. Feinstein has said that the CIA's computer search likely violated the constitutional separation of powers, an allegation the White House has declined to directly address.

The Oval Office’s prior knowledge of the controversial computer review will no doubt worsen the tensions that have erupted over the matter between the executive branch, its chief intelligence agency and the lawmakers tasked with their oversight.

In January 2014, agency personnel became concerned that a set of sensitive, internal CIA documents known as the Panetta Review had somehow made their way into the hands of Feinstein’s investigators, who were working at a secure, off-site CIA facility to compile a 6,600-page study on the CIA's post-9/11 torture program. To determine whether Senate staff had obtained the documents, five CIA employees -- two lawyers and three IT personnel -- sifted through a walled-off hard drive on the Senate's side of a shared computer network. (The Inspector General later determined that those five employees had engaged in wrongdoing.)

After determining that the document did indeed exist on the Senate’s side of the highly secure computer system, an agency lawyer consulted Brennan. It was not immediately clear whether this lawyer was one of the five employees identified by the Inspector General, though the lawyer does write that he was "ultimately responsible for ensuring the security" of the shared computer system used to compile the torture study.

In a memo included in the IG report, the lawyer says he warned Brennan against discussing the matter with the Senate committee or the White House until the agency could be completely sure the contested documents had, for certain, been accessed by Feinstein’s staff. Following the conversation, Brennan ordered the team to "pursue all available options" to determine how Senate investigators had accessed the material.

The following day, the lawyer wrote that Brennan informed him that he had “discussed the possible security breach with ... McDonough.” The director reiterated his previous orders that the lawyer should do whatever was needed to find out how staffers had accessed the documents. Although Brennan apparently told the lawyer he wanted to inform Feinstein and the Senate Intelligence Committee of the computer search as soon as possible, the CIA chief said that conversation couldn’t happen until the agency was sure of how committee staffers had accessed the document.

“I was to use whatever means necessary to answer the question of how the documents arrived on the SSCI side of the system so that his communication with the Hill could occur,” the lawyer writes of his orders, referring to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the panel's full name.

Brennan, however, staunchly denied to the Inspector General that he had ever ordered such an invasive search. When asked about his alleged order to use "whatever means necessary," Brennan said that he "would never use those words," according to the IG report. The director said that he "only" recalled asking whether the lawyers were sure Senate staff had actually obtained the internal CIA material.

Additionally, a CIA Accountability Review Board defended Brennan in findings also released on Wednesday, saying the spy chief had not understood the kind of computer search that would be required to determine what he wanted to know.

“A misunderstanding ... arose because [Brennan] did not appreciate what forensic techniques were necessary to answer his questions,” the Accountability Review Board wrote in its report.

The White House declined to comment to The Huffington Post for this story. The CIA also declined to comment and referred to the documents released yesterday.

The Panetta Review is a collection of summaries pertaining to the agency’s now-defunct torture operation, and allegedly aligns with the damning conclusions of the Senate panel’s behemoth torture study. The document supposedly contrasts with the CIA's official position, which generally defends the use of torture and takes issue with many of the Senate study's harsh findings.

The White House has taken special care to avoid wading into the explosive feud that erupted between the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee over the controversial Panetta Review. McDonough, though, has found his way into nearly all aspects of the dispute. Over the course of the belabored, monthslong declassification process preceding the public release of the torture study’s executive summary, McDonough served as a mediator between the intelligence committee and the spies -- though his role, according to some in Congress, was hardly objective. Democratic lawmakers have mercilessly hammered McDonough for aiding the agency in delaying the report’s release.

After CIA Inspector General determined in July that five CIA employees had wrongly conducted the initial computer search, Brennan convened the Accountability Review Board in order to determine whether any of those employees should be punished. In the findings released Wednesday, the board determined that no punishment was merited, and that Brennan’s role in ordering the snooping was proper and reasonable.

Those controversial findings have stoked outrage on Capitol Hill, where some lawmakers have long been demanding Brennan’s resignation for his role in the controversial search.

“It is incredible that no one at the CIA has been held accountable for this very clear violation of Constitutional principles,” said Intelligence Committee member Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). “Director Brennan either needs to reprimand the individuals involved or take responsibility himself. So far he has done neither.”

[Grizzly]

pertaining to the agency’s now-defunct torture operation

...lol fuck THESE MONSTERS..

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BUSH WHITE HOUSE’S REPEATED TORTURE DENIALS LED CIA TORTURERS TO SEEK REPEATED REASSURANCES

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“New Torture Files”: Declassified Memos Detail Roles of Bush White House and DOJ Officials Who Conspired to Approve Torture

By David Cole
Monday, March 2, 2015 at 9:30 AM


Last week, I wrote, both here and in the New York Times, that after reading all 828 pages of the released SSCI report on the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation program and responses to it from the CIA and Republican committee members, I had concluded that the report’s focus on whether the techniques used by the CIA were “effective” was misguided, and essentially gave a pass to too many culpable actors beyond the CIA, especially in the White House, the Cabinet, and the Justice Department.

This week, in the name of correcting the record, and thanks, ironically, to the CIA’s own effort to defend itself, I want to place blame where it rightly belongs – with the CIA, to be sure, but also with specific high-level officials and lawyers outside the agency who were directly involved in reviewing the CIA’s tactics, and either said yes or failed to say no. It’s now been brought to my attention that lost in all the focus on the irresolvable “efficacy” debate were a series of recently declassified documents that fill out the picture of joint responsibility that is the real story of our descent into torture. These documents, not addressed in any other reporting on the subject of which I am aware, name names, describe specific meetings, and demonstrate that many well-respected lawyers and statesmen said yes when they should have said no. They provide an important – if likely uncomfortable for some – addition to the narrative, and show just how widespread the blame for the torture program really goes.

The SSCI deserves credit for prompting disclosure of the new documents, which were declassified by the CIA in response to the report’s allegations. Had it not been for the SSCI investigation, it is likely that these documents would remain classified to this day. But as is all too often the case, when the CIA saw that it might be in its own interest to disclose what it previously said could not be revealed without endangering national security, it declassified. Feeling the heat of the SSCI inquiry, the CIA chose to declassify a series of memoranda and communications that reflect and record multiple high-level meetings at the White House and the DOJ involving the torture program. The CIA’s interest in declassification is clear. It wants to show that it repeatedly sought – and received – legal assurances from higher-ups that its actions were legal and authorized. But as is so often the case when co-conspirators try to deflect blame by pointing the finger at others, the CIA’s newly declassified documents don’t so much exculpate it as inculpate others.

The documents are reproduced at the website launched by agency alumni last December and dedicated to defending the CIA, with a name only a security consultant could have dreamt up, “ciasavedlives.com.” They recount in detail multiple meetings and communications, in which White House and DOJ officials repeatedly gave the CIA a green light to torture. Some parts of the story have been told before, in particular by the DOJ Office of Professional Responsibility, which recommended in 2009 that Jay Bybee and John Yoo, the OLC lawyers who wrote the first memos authorizing the CIA program, be referred to their respective bars for disciplinary proceedings. (That recommendation was overridden in 2010 by a senior Justice Department official, David Margolis). The documents, however, fill in the gaps with a great deal of important and damning detail, and show that responsibility extends beyond Bybee and Yoo to a host of other top lawyers and government officials.

The overall picture that the documents paint is not of a rogue agency, but of a rogue administration. Yes, the CIA affirmatively proposed to use patently illegal tactics — waterboarding, sleep deprivation, physical assault, and painful stress positions. But at every turn, senior officials and lawyers in the White House and the Department of Justice reassured the agency that it could — and should — go forward. The documents reveal an agency that is extremely sensitive to whether the program is legally authorized and approved by higher-ups — no doubt because it understood that what it was doing was at a minimum controversial, and very possibly illegal. The documents show that the CIA repeatedly raised questions along these lines, and even suspended the program when the OLC was temporarily unwilling to say, without further review, whether the techniques would “shock the conscience” in violation of the Fifth Amendment. But at every point where the White House and the DOJ could have and should have said no to tactics that were patently illegal, they said yes.

From the start, the administration crafted its policies to give the CIA leeway. In February 2002, for example, even before the CIA detainee and interrogation program had formally begun, President Bush issued a memo declaring that while the Geneva Conventions do not apply to al Qaeda and Taliban detainees, US Armed Forces would nonetheless as a matter of policy treat detainees humanely. At the time, critics, myself included, focused on Bush’s caveat that “military necessity” might justify inhumane treatment. But one of the documents reveals that the administration also intentionally drafted the memo to exclude the CIA. (To his credit, Marty Lederman may have been the first to identify the significance of the focus on the Armed Forces, but that was not until many years later in January 2005.) A declassified February 2003 memo drafted by CIA General Counsel Scott Muller reports that Justice Department lawyer John Yoo told Muller in January 2003 “that the language of the [February 2002] memorandum had been deliberately limited to be binding only on ‘the Armed Forces’ which did not include the CIA.” Yoo also confirmed that in drafting his memo authorizing the CIA program, he had considered the intent and effect of the February 2002 memo, and concluded that it posed no bar.

The declassified documents also reveal that Condoleezza Rice, National Security Adviser, and John Bellinger, her lawyer, both of whom many years later sought to restrict use of the CIA’s techniques, were personally and intimately involved in the initial approval of the tactics. In April 2002, shortly after Abu Zubaydah was captured, Bellinger arranged the first meeting on the subject of enhanced interrogation, and told OLC that the State Department should be kept out of the loop. His boss, Rice, gave policy approval to the tactics in July 2002, pending legal sign-off by the Department of Justice, which came one week later, in the now infamous August 1, 2002 memo drafted by Yoo and Bybee. The documents do not reveal what Rice was told by Bellinger, her counsel, about the legality of approving waterboarding, extended sleep deprivation, and the like, but there is no sign that he told her the tactics were illegal. If he had done so, it would have been very difficult for her to approve the tactics in the face of such advice.

In December 2002, Bellinger twice confirmed to CIA General Counsel Muller that “use of the type of techniques authorized by the Attorney General had been extensively discussed and was consistent with the President’s …. February Memo.” On January 13, 2003, in a meeting with Muller, White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, Counsel to the Vice-President David Addington, Yoo, and Defense Department General Counsel Jim Haynes, Gonzales and Addington also reaffirmed that the February 2002 memo about humane treatment did not apply to the CIA. And three days later, in a meeting with Rice, Secretary of Defense Dnnald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Vice-President Dick Cheney, and Haynes, Muller yet again raised the possible inconsistency between “what the CIA was authorized to do and what at least some in the international community might expect in light of the Administration’s public statements about ‘humane treatment’ of detainees.” According to Muller, “Everyone in the room evinced understanding of the issue. CIA’s past and ongoing use of enhanced techniques was reaffirmed…. Rice clearly distinguished between the issues to be addressed by the military and CIA.”

In July 2003, after Jim Haynes wrote a letter to Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) contending that US policy “is to treat all detainees and conduct all interrogations, wherever they may occur, in a manner consistent with [the Constitution],” the CIA again raised concerns about whether the administration’s public commitment to humane treatment could be squared with its program – understandably, as its tactics were the very opposite of humane, and would plainly be unconstitutional if applied to anyone protected by the Constitution. Another declassified document shows that CIA Director George Tenet sent a memo to Rice requesting express reaffirmation of the CIA’s program. Later that month, Tenet met with, among others Attorney General Ashcroft, DOJ lawyer Patrick Philbin, Rice, Gonzales, Bellinger, and Cheney to review the program. Ashcroft, backed by a full explication by Philbin, “forcefully reiterated the view of the Department of Justice that the techniques being employed by the CIA were and remain lawful and do not violate the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment.” When Ashcroft was told that Khaled Sheikh Mohammed had been waterboarded 119 times, Ashcroft replied “that he was fully aware of the facts and that CIA was ‘well within’ the scope of the [OLC] opinion.” Cheney, Rice, and Ashcroft all confirmed that the CIA was “executing Administration policy.”

After the Abu Ghraib photos were released in April 2004, the CIA again sought reaffirmation of its program. In fact, in May 2004, Tenet suspended the interrogation program, and expressly requested the NSC Principals and the Attorney General to approve of the CIA’s tactics yet again. The next month, the Washington Post published the August 2002 OLC memo, the first written approval of the torture tactics, which until then had remained a secret. As soon as that memo became public, then-OLC head Jack Goldsmith withdrew it; what everyone went along with in private was not sustainable once exposed to the light of day. Yet at a meeting in July 2004 with Rice, Ashcroft, Gonzales, Bellinger, and Deputy Attorney General James Comey, Rice said that the CIA’s techniques were in her view humane, and Ashcroft reaffirmed their legality (apart from waterboarding, which the DOJ was then reevaluating). The next month, Daniel Levin, the new head of the OLC, authorized the use of the waterboard for a particular detainee (although the CIA did not ultimately use the waterboard in that instance).

In December 2004, as has been previously reported, Levin issued a new memo on interrogation techniques, to replace the withdrawn August 1, 2002 memo. Its rhetoric was designed to sound more reasonable than the initial memo, but it included a critical footnote, stating that the OLC did not believe any of its conclusions regarding previously approved interrogation techniques would be different under the new standards. In other words, nothing material had changed. The OLC was still saying yes. About six months later, still another OLC head, Stephen Bradbury, wrote two memos opining that none of the CIA’s techniques were cruel, inhuman, or degrading, nor would they violate the Constitution if employed against detainees in the United States.

In short, the declassified documents reveal that the CIA was very nervous about the legal authority for its interrogation program – even after DOJ and White House officials had repeatedly given the program their blessings. It is almost as if the CIA had a guilty conscience; it knew what it was doing was wrong, so it had to be repeatedly reassured that it was okay. Above all, it seems, the agency wanted to make sure it had legal cover.

But the documents also underscore an equally important point, one not sufficiently emphasized by the SSCI Report and the coverage of it: the CIA was only one part of this conspiracy to commit war crimes. The scheme had the participation and express or tacit assent of many others, from President Bush and Vice-President Cheney and the NSC Principals on down to Justice Department lawyers John Yoo, Jay Bybee, Patrick Philbin, Daniel Levin, Stephen Bradbury, DOD General Counsel Jim Haynes, Counsel to the Vice-President David Addington, and Counsel to the National Security Adviser John Bellinger. Not one of these people said no. Had any one of them done so, the program might well have been stopped in its tracks. Yet most of them have gone on to lucrative, prestigious, and/or powerful positions in private practice, the academy, or other government positions. Where is the accountability for their part in the CIA’s grievous wrong?

Editors’ note. This post has been updated to more explicitly reflect the fact that the website hosting the declassified documents was launched in December 2014.

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Judge Orders US Government to Stop Suppressing Evidence of Torture and Abuse
Ruling on Friday is latest development in years-long legal battle, in which the ACLU has argued the photos 'are crucial to the public record'
bySarah Lazare

A federal judge on Friday ordered the U.S. government to release more than 2,000 photographs showing abuse and torture of people detained by the American military in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The decision is the latest development in a more than 10-year-long legal battle, in which the American Civil Liberties Unions has argued that disclosure of the records is critical for public debate and government accountability.

Many of the concealed photographs were taken by U.S. military service members and collected during more than 200 military investigations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some could be on par with, or worse than, those released from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

U.S. district judge Alvin Hellerstein ruled (pdf) that the government "is required to disclose each and all of the photographs" in response to a Freedom of Information Act Request from the ACLU. In the order, Hellerstein argued that the government did not adequately prove that "disclosure would endanger Americans."

The decision gives the Solicitor General two months to decide whether to appeal.

The ACLU has pressed for the release of records relating to torture and extrajudicial killings of prisoners in U.S. custody around the world since 2003.

The administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama have vigorously fought to keep these photographs suppressed, and in 2009, the White House collaborated with Congress to secretly change FOIA law to enable the concealment of the images, arguing it is necessary to protect national security.

However, ACLU deputy legal director Jameel Jaffer argued in response to Friday's ruling, "To allow the government to suppress any image that might provoke someone, somewhere, to violence would be to give the government sweeping power to suppress evidence of its own agents’ misconduct. Giving the government that kind of censorial power would have implications far beyond this specific context."

"The photos are crucial to the public record," Jaffer continued. "They’re the best evidence of what took place in the military’s detention centers, and their disclosure would help the public better understand the implications of some of the Bush administration’s policies. And the Obama administration’s rationale for suppressing the photos is both illegitimate and dangerous."

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WEEKEND EDITION MARCH 20-22, 2015

What About Diego?
What the Torture Report Missed
by ALYSSA RÖHRICHT
The Senate Torture Report released in December 2014 reads worse than even the foulest imaginings of Hieronymus Bosch: sleep deprivation, isolation and sensory deprivation, forced nudity, rectal feeding and rectal rehydration, waterboarding, beatings, threatening detainees with the rape of their mothers and harm of their children, chaining detainees to the ceiling for days clothed in only a diaper, rape, even human experimentation.

The house of horrors detailed in the Senate report – which even in its over 500 pages doubtless only scratches the surface of the depravity of U.S. “War on Terror” tactics – has been discussed at length. But what is outlined in the report is only part of the story. What the report omits is almost equally important to understanding the lengths that the U.S. will go to maintain and expand its Empire. One such omission: Diego Garcia.

Despite it being one of the most strategically important U.S. military bases on the planet, few have ever even heard of Diego Garcia or the Chagos archipelago on which it sits. The chain of over 50 small islands (today known as the British Indian Ocean Territory, or BIOT) is in the center of the Indian Ocean was once inhabited by a thriving population of indigenous islanders. Today, it is home to the US military base of Camp Justice or the Naval Support Facility Diego Garcia, nicknamed (ironically) the “Footprint of Freedom.” In some ways, the island looks like any American town – a bowling alley, tennis court, library, Post Office, gyms, a bank, a chapel, and even a 9-hole golf course. The B-1, B-2, and B-52 bombers, 30 warships, satellite spy station, deep space surveillance system, nuclear storage facility, and the almost 5,000 U.S. servicemen and women that live there give lie to the façade, as do the crumbling homes, school, and church of the island’s previous inhabitants.

The Chagossians – the rightful inhabitants of the islands – have sustained a very different sort of torture. They were not beaten or raped, they were not waterboarded or forcibly deprived of sleep, but they were threatened, they were ripped from their homelands (ancestors, communities, schools, homes), they were forced onto the hull of a ship, and they were dropped on foreign islands and forgotten. And this didn’t happen in long ago history, it happened only 40 years ago – a slow and pronounced torture that continues today.

The first permanent inhabitants of the Chagos Islands were slaves brought by the French to work on coconut plantations around 1783. By 1814, one colonizer replaced another, and the British took control of Mauritius, including the Chagos Islands. In 1968, Mauritius received its independence from the U.K., but for a price. Mauritius would be freed from U.K. rule only if it did not lay claim to the Chagos Islands – thus the British Indian Ocean Territory was born. The U.S. and U.K. developed an informal lease agreement that would allow the U.S. to use Diego Garcia for a military base – prime real estate situated with eyes on the Middle East, Asia, and Russia. The agreement was hid from both U.S. Congress and the British Parliament and in direct contradiction with UN resolution 1514 and international law, which stated that colonies being decolonized had to be done as a whole – not carved up for profit.

The U.S./U.K. terror campaign was launched to have the islands “swept” and “sanitized” of the Chagossian people, first through an embargo aimed at starving the population out. Without basic supplies like milk, salt, and medication, many Chagossians left. In the Spring of 1971, officials in the U.S. military gave the order to round up all of the pet dogs on the island and have them killed. 1,000s of pet dogs were murdered – some taken straight from screaming children – gassed with exhaust fumes from military vehicles. The Chagossians that had held out were then rounded onto a ship allowed to take only one suitcase. The horses took precedence and were put on deck. The Chagossians – women and children – slept in the hull on bird fertilizer – bird shit.

Marie Lisette Talate, a Chagossian, recalled in the documentary written and directed by John Pilger, Stealing a Nation, “All of us Chagossians, women, children, it was ourselves who were the animals on the Nordvaer.”

They were taken to the Seychelles and kept in prison cells until finally being transported to Mauritius where many Chagossians remain today. They were dropped there with nothing – no food, money, housing, jobs, water, or any institutional support in a country unknown to them. Unable to provide for themselves, many Chagossians began to die. Malnutrition, disease, and drugs plagued the community. But many islanders say that the Chagossian people were dying of sagren, sadness.

Marie Rita Elysée Bancoult, one of the Chagossian people, recounted her life after the forced relocation in an interview with Vine. After learning that they would never be returning home, her husband, Julien, suffered a stroke and died five years later. In the years that followed, her sons Alex, 38, Eddy, 36, and Rénault, 11, also died.

“My life has been buried…It’s as if I was pulled from my paradise to put me in hell. Everything here you need to buy. I don’t have the means to buy them. My children go without eating. How am I supposed to bear this life?”

This type of torture may leave no visible scars, but it is no less effective. The Chagossians have seen their homes destroyed, have left behind their land and belongings, have abandoned the graves of their ancestors, watched as their pets were ripped away and killed, and were left – deserted – on the shores of foreign lands, the forgotten refuse of Empire.

The torture continues today, as the Chagossians are ping-ponged back and forth between the two governments. The U.K. claims that the U.S. will not allow the islanders to live on the islands due to national security concerns of the base. Meanwhile the U.S. obviates responsibility, claiming it has no jurisdiction over the islands and that the Chagossians must direct their requests to the Crown. Justice, it seems, is only for the few.

What’s more, they must watch from afar as their homeland is destroyed and denigrated by the U.S. military. In addition to a recent admission by a senior Bush administration official to VICE News that the island of Diego Garcia has been used as a “transit site” where people were “interrogated from time to time,” studies of the waters surrounding the Diego Garcia military base as well have revealed massive environmental harms caused by the base, including decades of contamination from wastewater sewage, which the U.S. has been discharging into the water since at least the 1980s. The dumping of the treated sewage waters have resulted in elevated levels of nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphates up to four times higher than normal and may be causing damage to the coral reefs.

Just the construction of Diego Garcia alone has eliminated much of the vegetation coverage on the island and decimated the coral reef – forests were bulldozed and coral reefs were blasted and dredged. As with most military bases, the usual nuclear contamination, fuel spills of millions of gallons of oil, carcinogenic pollutants in the soil and water, dangerous underwater sonars that harm marine life, and a litany of unexploded munitions plague the island. And yet, many argue against the Chagossian return to their native lands on environmental grounds, the implication being that the U.S. military is a better guardian of these islands than the people who had lived there in harmony for generations. The implicit racism in this notion is hard to ignore.

Despite the setbacks, Chagossians continue to fight, and while the U.S. and U.K. governments have continued to abdicate responsibility for their complicity in these crimes against humanity, the Chagossians seem better positioned for a return than at any other point in history. The U.K. government recently commissioned a feasibility study to determine whether a settlement may be achievable on the islands, which found “no insurmountable legal obstacles” to the Chagossians returning home. At the same time, negotiations over the military base are up for discussion between the U.S. and U.K. to decide if the informal lease of the land will be extended for the U.S. military.

The decades of torture imposed upon these people has yet to be adequately addressed or remunerated, and while the international community has expressed outrage over the U.S. use of some of the most vile and perverted means of torture against prisoners in rendition sites across the globe, the same international outcry must be directed at the decades of human rights abuses imposed upon the people of the Chagos Islands. Torture, after all, is not just carried out with drills, straps, and chains; there is also a psychological torture – the torture of neglect and marginalization that renders a people invisible – that can do just as much damage.

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CounterPunch

MAY 20, 2015

There's Still Time to Prosecute the Torturers
The Red Line of Torture
by JOHN KIRIAKOU

After I blew the whistle on the CIA’s torture program in 2007, the fallout for me was brutal. To make a long story short, I served nearly two years in federal prison and then endured a few more months of house arrest.

What happened to the torture program? Nothing.

Following years of waiting for the government to do something, I was heartened when I read in my prison cell — in a four-day-old copy of The New York Times — that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence had finally released in December a heavily censored summary of its report on the CIA’s brutal “enhanced interrogation” techniques.

Finally, I thought, Congress will do something about our government’s shameful embrace of torture. It was big news — for two or three days.

I thought there’d be quick action by courageous members of both parties who respect human rights and civil liberties. I thought they’d work together to ensure that our collective name would never again be sullied by torture — that we’d respect our own laws and the international laws and treaties to which we’re signatories.

In retrospect, I was naïve, even after having served in the CIA for nearly 15 years and as a Senate committee staffer for several more.

Despite repeated efforts by the CIA to impede investigations into its conduct, the report confirmed that the program was even worse than most Americans had thought.

Take the case of Ammar al-Baluchi, who was arrested in Pakistan and sent to a secret CIA prison, where interrogators held his head under water, beat him repeatedly with a truncheon, and slammed his head against the wall, causing lasting head trauma.

This abuse wasn’t authorized by the Justice Department. So why weren’t the perpetrators charged with a crime?

Perhaps worst of all, CIA officers tortured as many as 26 people who were probably innocent of any ties to terrorism.

Sadly, the report’s release didn’t lead to any action by the White House or the Justice Department. The architects of the program haven’t been held accountable. Nor have those who clearly violated the law by torturing prisoners without any legal justifications. Why should the government have locked me up for telling the truth and given them full impunity?

But there’s still time for President Barack Obama to order the Justice Department to prosecute these perpetrators of torture. And there’s a clear precedent in how the government has confronted similar actions in the past.

In 1968, for example, The Washington Post published a photo of a U.S. soldierwaterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner. The Defense Department investigated the incident, court-martialed the soldier, and convicted him of torture.

Why should the Senate’s torture report elicit less response than a photograph? It was wrong in 1968 to commit torture. It’s still wrong — and prosecutable — in 2015.

Some current and former CIA leaders will argue that torture netted actionable intelligence that saved American lives. I was working in the CIA’s counterterrorism center at the same time they were, and I can tell you that they’re lying.

Torture may have made some Americans feel better in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. It may have made them feel that the government was avenging our fallen compatriots. But the report found that “the harsh interrogation methods did not succeed in exacting useful intelligence.”

Whether or not it ever gleans useful intelligence, however, is beside the point. The question isn’t whether torture works. Torture is immoral.

There has to be a red line: The United States of America must oppose torture and ban its use absolutely. That begins in the Oval Office, and Obama needs to belatedly do something about it.

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The Boom and Bust of the CIA's Secret Torture Sites
Sunday, 18 October 2015 00:00
By Crofton Black and Sam Raphael, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism | News Analysis

Abu Zubaydah, the CIA's first black site prisoner. (Photo: Department of Defense)

Also see: Court Appeal Highlights Poland's Role in CIA Torture Program

In spring 2003 an unnamed official at CIA headquarters in Langley sat down to compose a memo. It was 18 months after George W Bush had declared war on terror. "We cannot have enough blacksite hosts," the official wrote. The reference was to one of the most closely guarded secrets of that war - the countries that had agreed to host the CIA's covert prison sites.

Between 2002 and 2008, at least 119 people disappeared into a worldwide detention network run by the CIA and facilitated by its foreign partners.

Lawyers, journalists and human rights organisations spent the next decade trying to figure out whom the CIA had snatched and where it had put them. A mammoth investigation by the US Senate's intelligence committee finally named 119 of the prisoners in December 2014. It also offered new insights into how the black site network functioned - and gruesome, graphic accounts of abuses perpetrated within it.

Many of those 119 had never been named before.

The report's 500-page summary, which contained the CIA official's 2003 remarks, was only published after months of argument between the Senate committee, the CIA and the White House. It was heavily censored, while the full 6,000-page study it was based on remains secret. All names of countries collaborating with the CIA in its detention and interrogation operations were removed, along with key dates, numbers, names and much other material.

In nine months of research, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and The Rendition Project have unpicked these redactions to piece together the hidden history of the CIA's secret sites. This account unveils many of the censored passages in the report summary, drawing on public data sources such as flight records, aviation contracts, court cases, prisoner testimonies, declassified government documents and media and NGO reporting.

Although many published accounts of individual journeys through the black site network exist, this is the first comprehensive portrayal of the system's inner dynamics from beginning to end.

[Click here to search The Rendition Project's interactive database of all CIA prisoners]

The "Covert Action" Memo

The CIA's authority to operate prisons began with a document called a "covert action memorandum of notification" - a secret order signed by President Bush the week after the 9/11 attacks. For the first time in its history, the CIA was given permission not only to take prisoners but also to decide whom to detain, why and for how long.

After several weeks of discussions, high level officials concluded it would be a mistake for the agency to manage its own detention system. The risks - including media exposure, diplomatic problems with countries hosting prisons and complications over site maintenance - were judged too great, and military custody was settled on as the best long-term solution.

This assessment, passed down by senior officials in November 2001, proved to be prescient.

It did not take long for the CIA's caution to founder in the tide of events, however.

In late March 2002, everything changed. The CIA captured the man they took to be their first "high value" detainee. He was a Palestinian named Abu Zubaydah, and the agency believed - wrongly - that he was "number three in al-Qaeda".

The decision to hold him in secret and under CIA control was hastily taken. The agency began considering what to do with him around March 24, four days before he was captured. It rejected the idea of having the US military hold him, "because of the lack of security and the fact that [he] would have to be declared to the International Committee of the Red Cross". They were worried that if he went to the newly established military prison at Guantánamo Bay they might lose control of their prize. Nor did they want to send him to one of the countries which had recently dealt with prisoners on their behalf - perhaps Jordan or Egypt - because "the results of that country's recent interrogations had been disappointing".

Instead, CIA bosses reversed their previous decision and set up their own detention facility.

To conceal the locations of the CIA's prison sites, the 2014 Senate report gave them colour code-names. But it also gave enough details of events at each site to allow us to match the code-names with public source data pointing conclusively to specific countries.

Get the data:

Our complete table of CIA prisoners with capture dates, detention dates, and what happened afterwards

Our black site database matching prisoners to locations

The first prison, which the report nicknamed "Green", was in Thailand. The country was not far from Pakistan, where Abu Zubaydah had been captured, and its officials swiftly agreed to host the site and provide security for it.

Problems with the hosts soon emerged. Reshuffles of Thai government personnel meant that the CIA Station Chief had to engage in "continued lobbying" to keep the prison open. Less than a month after the site was set up, the agency estimated that the number of Thai officials who knew about it was already in double figures. It did not take long for media organisations to pick up on the fact that the CIA's most important catch was being held in Thailand.

It was an inauspicious beginning. Barely more than six months after the site had opened, its continued operation was judged to be too great a risk. The prison was closed down on December 4 2002.

By this time it had accommodated only two prisoners: Abu Zubaydah and the suspected organiser of the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Aden, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. Nashiri had been captured in the United Arab Emirates in October and handed over to the CIA in November.

Torture in Thailand

Although it never held many prisoners, the Thailand site was where the basic blueprint of the CIA's detention regime was invented. It was also where the CIA's interrogators pioneered their new "enhanced" questioning techniques. Abu Zubaydah was repeatedly waterboarded, sleep-deprived, forced into stress positions and held in boxes. These included a coffin-shaped box, in which he spent eleven days in total, and a box less than three feet square in which he spent 29 hours. Observing one of his interrogations in August, a medical officer wrote:

The sessions accelerated rapidly progressing quickly to the water board after large box, walling, and small box periods. [Abu Zubaydah] seems very resistant to the water board. Longest time with the cloth over his face so far has been 17 seconds. This is sure to increase shortly. NO useful information so far … He did vomit a couple of times during the water board with some beans and rice. It's been 10 hours since he ate so this is surprising and disturbing. We plan to only feed Ensure for a while now. I'm head[ing] back for another water board session.
The goal, as the two contractor psychologists who masterminded the interrogations put it in August 2002, was "to reach the stage where we have broken any will or ability of subject to resist or deny providing us information (intelligence) to which he had access."



"There Is Nothing Like This in the Federal Bureau of Prisons"

Immediately after Abu Zubaydah's capture, the CIA had started to make plans for a detention centre nearer the centre of the action, in Afghanistan. It was to be "totally under [CIA] control". Initial construction costs of over $200,000 were approved in June 2002 and the building was ready to hold its first prisoners in mid-September.

Meanwhile, a handful of prisoners captured outside Afghanistan before September had been held in Afghan facilities where "the CIA had unlimited access to them". These were three men captured in Georgia at the end of April (Zakariya, Jamal Eldin Boudraa and Abbar al-Hawari) and two picked up in Pakistan in late May (Hassan Muhammad Abu Bakr Qa'id - better known as Abu Yahya al-Libi - and Ridha Ahmad Najar).

The CIA's first prison in Afghanistan - which the Senate report nicknamed "Cobalt" - had 20 cells. It operated until April 2004. During this time, the CIA documented 64 prisoners held there. But as the Senate's researchers noted, "inadequate record keeping" meant that the CIA itself could not precisely determine how many people it had detained.

According to the Senate report, 20 prisoners were held in Cobalt between September and December 2002. They were Ayub Marshid Ali Salih, Bashir al-Marwalah, Ha'il al-Mithali, Said Saleh Said and 16 others.

Our research shows that, excluding Abu Zubaydah, 37 prisoners had entered the detention programme by the end of December. A few of these were quickly moved out. Hassan bin Attash and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, captured in Pakistan on September 11, were in Afghanistan for around three days before being transferred for interrogation to other countries where the CIA did not have its own prisons. Nashiri had been sent to Thailand. Ten prisoners were passed over to the US military in Bagram before the end of the year: Ayub Ali Salih, Bashir al-Marwalah, Ha'il al-Mithali, Said Saleh Said, Musab al-Mudwani, Shawqi Awad, Rafiq al-Hami, Tawfiq al-Bihani, Bisher al-Rawi and Jamil el-Banna.

Aside from Nashiri, however, there is no indication that anyone was sent from Afghanistan to Thailand, despite one CIA officer claiming that Cobalt was intended as a holding site "for those detainees en route to [Green]".

Like Green, Cobalt was a place where the CIA experimented with its enhanced interrogation techniques. The agency held its first training course for interrogators on the use of EITs between November 12 and 18. By this time, its agents had already tried out the techniques on at least seven prisoners in Afghanistan, as well as on Nashiri and Abu Zubaydah. The seven were Ridha Najar, Rafiq al-Hami, Tawfiq al-Bihani, Lutfi al-Gharisi, Hikmat Nafi Shaukat, Gul Rahman and Abu Badr Ghulam Rabbani. One, Gul Rahman, died.

The CIA's interrogation chief described Cobalt as a "dungeon", while a senior analyst stated that the site itself "is an EIT". And a delegation from the Federal Bureau of Prisons, who visited in November 2002, were "wow'ed" - "They have never been in a facility where individuals are so sensory deprived," an official reported.

Afghanistan was to remain the principal holding bay for the CIA's prisoners throughout the detention programme. By the end of 2002, the agency had embarked on one of the programme's most extraordinary and problematic aspects: the use of secret detention sites in Europe, far away from the battlefield.

"A Train Wreck Waiting to Happen"

The lakeland region of Masuria in northern Poland might seem an incongruous neighbourhood in which to house al-Qaeda's most wanted. But the choice was not random. The region is home to a military and intelligence training base and the neighbouring town of Szczytno boasts a major police academy. The discreet airbase at Szymany - a few kilometres down the road - was used to receiving visiting dignitaries and businessmen. Everyone in Szczytno knows someone in the security services, according to one local resident, and people here are adept at keeping their mouths shut.

Nashiri and Abu Zubaydah arrived in Poland on board a chartered Gulfstream jet on a snowy day in December 2002. Initially the Polish site had been planned to house just them. Six months later it held five, beyond the capacity of its "three purpose-built 'holding units'".

Ramzi bin al-Shibh was the first to be added to the new location. He arrived at Szymany airport on February 8 2003. Khaled Sheikh Mohamed, the alleged 9/11 mastermind, followed at the start of March on a flight from Kabul. Abu Yasir al-Jaza'iri, initially held in Afghanistan, was also moved to Poland, probably at the end of March. Others followed in June and July.

A month into its operation, the atmosphere in the site was already tense. Base officers disagreed with headquarters about how to treat Nashiri, while headquarters thought that the on-site team were being "too lenient". An unqualified officer was found to have experimented on Nashiri with a drill, an unloaded gun and a stiff brush, prompting an investigation by the CIA's Inspector General into what interrogation methods were being used at the remote sites and how they were being authorised.

Then in January 2003, despite assessments by interrogators that Nashiri was not withholding information, one of the psychologists managing the interrogation programme proposed a new plan for him, including waterboarding and "the full range of enhanced exploitation and interrogation measures."

In response, the CIA's chief of interrogations announced his intention to quit. "This is a train wreak [sic] waiting to happen," he told colleagues. "I intend to get the hell off the train before it happens."

"Three or Four Rooms … No Questions Asked"

As the most important prisoners were filtered into Poland on business jets in spring and summer 2003, the CIA was taking possession of more captives in Afghanistan. Some were flown in from far afield.

After a lengthy period in Egyptian custody (during which he fabricated information linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda that proved critical in the Bush administration's public relations push around the Iraq war) Ibn Shaykh al-Libi was brought into the CIA's Afghanistan site in February. Tanzanian national Suleiman Abdallah was flown in from Djibouti in March. Several men captured in Pakistan were also transferred into the Afghanistan site. They included Libyan anti-Gaddafi fighters Abu Hazim al-Libi and Mohammed al-Shara'iya, the son of the imprisoned Egyptian "blind sheikh" Mohammed Asadallah, and Mustafa al-Hawsawi.

By mid-August, data compiled by the Bureau and The Rendition Project shows that the programme was starting to creak at the seams, with 44 prisoners. Most of these were still in Afghanistan; a couple more - Khallad bin Attash among them - had been transferred to Poland, while two inmates of the Polish site had been moved out to a "temporary patch" in Morocco.

The CIA supplemented Cobalt with another site in Afghanistan, nicknamed Gray, which Senate investigators calculated held eight prisoners in 2003, although "almost no records" were kept for it. But they still needed more space. One solution was to use Afghan facilities for prisoners deemed not sufficiently important for the agency's own sites. As Cobalt's manager wrote:

They [Afghan officials] also happen to have 3 or 4 rooms where they can lock up people discretely [sic]. I give them a few hundred bucks a month and they use the rooms for whoever I bring over - no questions asked. It is very useful for housing guys that shouldn't be in [Cobalt] for one reason or another but still need to be kept isolated and held in secret detention.
As the Senate report authors commented, "The host country [Afghanistan] had no independent reason to detain these individuals and held them solely at the behest of the CIA." At least four prisoners were farmed out to Afghan sites: they included Hamid Aich and Mohamed Dinshah.

Two of the CIA's prisoners, Laid Saidi and Majid Khan, were also held at a "safehouse" in Afghanistan. And Hassan Ghul, although only in Afghanistan for two days in January 2004, was removed from Cobalt to a "[redacted] facility for portions of his interrogations".

Testimonies from former prisoners show that many of them were shuttled around two or three different locations in the vicinity of Kabul at this time.

Unsettling Discovery

On September 22 2003 the CIA carried out a major reshuffle of its most important detainees. The Polish site was closed and its inmates spread between a prison in Romania, called "Black" in the Senate report, and two sites in Guantánamo Bay ("Maroon" and "Indigo"). The "temporary patch" in Morocco was also emptied as Bin al-Shibh and Nashiri were moved out to Guantánamo. Some of Cobalt's prisoners, including Ibn Shaykh al-Libi, were transferred to the new locations too.

The secret Guantánamo sites were short lived. After less than four months the CIA became concerned that an anticipated US Supreme Court decision would mean legal representation and habeas corpus rights for the five prisoners it was holding there. They were hurriedly shipped out again on a series of contracted flights to Morocco and Romania between March 27 and April 14 2004.

With these new sites established in September, the CIA had hit peak capacity. More than 50 and perhaps as many as 60 prisoners were on its books in October and November 2003. Some 44 were in Afghanistan.

The programme had become bloated. That December, CIA officers in Afghanistan made an "unsettling discovery": "we are holding a number of detainees about whom we know very little".

The majority of [CIA] detainees in [Afghanistan] have not been debriefed for months and, in some cases, for over a year. Many of them appear to us to have no further intelligence value for [the CIA] and should more properly be turned over to the [U.S. military], to [Afghan] authorities or to third countries for further investigation and possibly prosecution. In a few cases, there does not appear to be enough evidence to continue incarceration, and, if this is in fact the case, the detainees should be released.
This "unsettling discovery" was followed by another blow, as the International Committee of the Red Cross informed US authorities of their discovery that CIA prisoners in Afghanistan were being held "incommunicado for extensive periods of time, subjected to unacceptable conditions of internment, to ill treatment and torture, while deprived of any possible recourse." The letter, which included a "fairly complete list" of CIA prisoners, "prompted CIA Headquarters to conclude that it was necessary to reduce the number of detainees in CIA custody".

Around May 2004, the CIA transferred 18 prisoners to US military custody in Bagram. It released five more and transferred another seven to foreign custody around the same time.

Our research shows that, between January and August 2004, two prisoners were sent to Algeria (Jamal Boudraa in January and Laid Saidi in August) and three to Libya (Al-Shara'iya, Adnan al-Libi and Abu Abdallah al-Zulaytini, all in August). Mohamed Dinshah was transferred to the custody of an unspecified country between the end of January and the middle of March.

Meanwhile, the CIA closed down Cobalt and moved its occupants to a new prison in Afghanistan, nicknamed Orange. The first prisoners arrived in Orange in an en-masse transfer in April 2004.

Orange was billed as a "quantum leap forward" because of its "heating/air conditioning, conventional plumbing, appropriate lighting, shower, and laundry facilities." As the Senate report noted, however, "although some of the cells at [Orange] included plumbing, detainees undergoing interrogation were kept in smaller cells, with waste buckets rather than toilet facilities."

"Querulous and Unappreciative"

After its rapid growth in 2003, and the upheavals which followed this - the swift exit from the undisclosed Guantánamo sites, the wholesale transfer from Cobalt to Orange and the shedding of prisoners prompted by the ICRC - the programme's volume levelled off. In late June 2004 there were 34 prisoners spread between Afghanistan, Romania and the re-established temporary holding unit in Morocco.

This number had dropped to 29 by December. After the switch from Cobalt to Orange, only eight prisoners entered the programme in the rest of 2004. Most of these are known to have been captured in Pakistan.

Although the pressure of overcrowding had now reduced, other causes of instability increased during this period. In February 2005, after months of rising tensions with local officials in which the they were accused of being "querulous and unappreciative recipients" of Moroccan cooperation, the CIA lost access to the prison it had been using as an overflow facility. On February 17-18 it moved its detainees out of there and began operations in a new prison in Lithuania (nicknamed Violet). On the day of the transfer the CIA counted 29 prisoners in its programme in total, spread between Afghanistan, Romania and Lithuania.

Five prisoners - two Libyans and three Yemenis - were sent back to their home countries in April and May 2005. They were Abu Hazim al-Libi, Ayyub al-Libi, Salah Nasir Salim Ali, Mohd al-Shomaila and Muhammad Abdullah Saleh.

Four new prisoners were brought in to the detention programme in 2005. Two, Ibrahim Jan and Abu Ja'far al-Iraqi, were handed over to the CIA by the US military in Iraq in the autumn. The others, Abu Munthir al-Magrebi and Abu Faraj al-Libi, had been flown in in May. Research indicates that Abu Munthir had been picked up in Tunisia. Abu Faraj was captured in Pakistan and passed briefly through Afghanistan; he was then transferred into Romania along with Abu Munthir.

"Mediocre or, I Dare Say, Useless Intelligence"

The Romanian site held "many of the detainees the CIA assessed as 'high-value'". These included Khaled Sheikh Mohamed, Hassan Ghul, Janat Gul and Nashiri.

By the time that Abu Faraj al-Libi was flown in there, the site's own manager considered the prison to be dysfunctional. He was troubled by the "natural and progressive effects of long-term solitary confinement on detainees". And he was exasperated by the personnel deployed there, "more than a few" of whom he described as "basically incompetent". The quality of debriefers and security officers being sent to the site was degenerating, while the information coming out of it was "mediocre or, I dare say, useless".

The CIA transferred some prisoners, including Khaled Sheikh Mohamed, from Romania to Lithuania in October 2005. The following month it was forced to abandon the site altogether. Revelations about the secret prison network in the Washington Post caused the Romanian authorities to demand the prison's closure within days, and the remaining captives were flown to Afghanistan via Jordan on November 5.

The CIA now had only two active prison sites: one in Lithuania, the other in Afghanistan. At this point the programme held 27.

"Endgame"

In March 2006, the Lithuanian site also closed. Medical care for Mustafa al-Hawsawi - who had been subjected to "rectal exams … with 'excessive force'" and was suffering from "chronic hemorrhoids, an anal fissure, and symptomatic rectal prolapse" - was inaccessible there, making the site itself unsustainable. The CIA shifted its prisoners out of Lithuania and into a final Afghan site, nicknamed Brown, which held 10 people between March and September 2006.

At this point the CIA was locked in argument with the Department of Defense about the long-term "endgame" for its captives. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had decided not to accept any more CIA prisoners in Guantánamo Bay. Without this option, the agency had only two possibilities: "to begin transferring those detainees no longer producing intelligence to third countries, which may release them" - or simply to release them itself.

Starting in February, the CIA gradually began to disperse the prisoners that it was willing to send to foreign custody. Saud Memon was first to go - probably to Pakistan - while the Bureau's research indicates that Ibn Shaykh al-Libi was sent to Libya on April 14. At the end of June, several other prisoners were shipped out. They include Marwan al-Jabbur, who was taken to Jordan. Bureau research indicates that the same plane could have transferred Abd al-Bari al-Filistini to Jordan and Abu 'Abdallah to Saudi Arabia. Firas al-Yemeni was returned to Yemen around the start of September.

Other prisoners who were transferred abroad at this time were Janat Gul, Hassan Ghul, Qattal al-Uzbeki, Abu Yasir al-Jaza'iri, Abdi Rashid Samatar, Abu Munthir al-Magrebi, Ibrahim Jan and Abu Ja'far al-Iraqi.

The last 14 remaining "high value detainees" were finally sent to Guantánamo at the start of September 2006. On their arrival, President Bush announced to the world that in addition to those held in military detention, "a small number of suspected terrorist leaders and operatives captured during the war have been held and questioned outside the United States, in a separate program operated by the Central Intelligence Agency." The speech was the US government's first acknowledgement of what had by then become an open secret.

After September 6 2006 the programme was dormant. It revived sporadically for the detention of the last two CIA prisoners: Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi (held November 2006 to April 2007) and Muhammad Rahim (July 2007 to March 2008).

After Rahim was sent to Guantánamo the CIA continued to maintain two prison sites, empty but ready and waiting. They were managed by a contracting company, Mitchell Jessen Associates. The company had been set up by James Mitchell and John Jessen - the two psychologists who had engineered the blueprint for the interrogation programme.

A letter from the CIA's director, Leon Panetta, in April 2009, obtained by Vice News, stated that Mitchell Jessen Associates had a contract "for services related to the two remaining CIA detention facilities". Previously MJA had provided "interrogation services, security teams for renditions, facilities, training, and other services". By 2009, however, the CIA had informed them that their services would be reduced to providing security teams for the empty facilities, "given that the agency would not be engaging in interrogation or operating blacksites".

The contract - due to run until March 2010 - was terminated early. But - Panetta told congressional overseers - the agency retained the authority to carry out renditions and "to detain individuals on a short-term, transitory basis".

42 of the CIA's 119 prisoners are now known to have been released. 30 are still in US custody. Seven have died. Of the rest, some are still in the custody abroad, while others remain untraced.

35 prisoners held in Afghanistan in 2002

Zakariya, Jamal Eldin Boudraa, Abbar al-Hawari, Hassan Muhammad Abu Bakr Qa'id, Ridha Ahmad Najar, Ayub Ali Salih, Bashir al-Marwalah, Ha'il al-Mithali, Musab al-Mudwani, Said Saleh Said, Shawqi Awad, Umar Faruq, Abd al-Salam al-Hilah, Asat Sar Jan, Akbar Zakaria, Rafiq al-Hami, Tawfiq al-Bihani, Lutfi al-Gharisi, Hikmat Nafi Shaukat, Yaqub al-Baluchi, Abd al-Rahim Ghulam Rabbani, Gul Rahman, Abu Badr Ghulam Rabbani, Haji Ghalgi, Nazar Ali, Juma Gul, Wafti bin Ali, Adel, Qari Mohib Ur Rehman, Shah Wali Khan, Hayattulah Haqqani, Bisher al-Rawi, Jamil el-Banna, Ghairat Bahir, Pacha Wazir

18 prisoners transferred to Bagram around May 2004

Abu Nasim al-Tunisi, Muhammad Jafar al-Qahtani, Adel Ben Hamlili, Abdullah Ashami, Ridha Ahmad Najar, Ghairat Bahir, Noor Jalal, Hassan bin Attash, Abd al-Rahim Ghulam Rabbani, Abu Badr Ghulam Rabbani, Muhammad Amein al-Bakri, Ali Jan, Riyadh the Facilitator, Abd al-Salam al-Hilah, Binyam Mohamed, Sanad al-Kazimi, Suleiman Abdullah; and probably Muhammad Khan (son of Suhbat)

8 prisoners entering CIA custody April-Dec 2004

Abd al-Bari al-Filistini, Ayyub al-Libi, Marwan al-Jabbur, Qattal al-Uzbeki, Janat Gul, Ahmed Ghailani, Sharif al-Masri, Abdi Rashid Samatar

27 prisoners held across CIA sites in November 2005 when the Romanian site shut down

Abu Zubaydah, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Ibn Shaykh al-Libi, Khalid Shaykh Mohammad, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, Abu Yasir al-Jaza'iri, Ammar al-Baluchi, Khallad bin Attash, Majid Khan, Abu Zubair, Bashir bin Lap, Hambali, Firas al-Yemeni, Hassan Ghul, Saud Memon, Hassan Ahmed Guleed, Abu 'Abdallah, Abd al-Bari al-Filistini, Marwan al-Jabbur, Qattal al-Uzbeki, Janat Gul, Ahmed Ghailani, Abdi Rashid Samatar, Abu Faraj al-Libi, Abu Munthir al-Magrebi, Ibrahim Jan

14 HVDs sent to Guantánamo from Afghanistan in September 2006

Abu Zubaydah, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Khalid Shaykh Mohammad, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, Ammar al-Baluchi, Khallad bin Attash, Hambali, Bashir bin Lap, Hassan Ahmed Guleed, Ahmed Ghailani, Abu Faraj al-Libi, Majid Khan, Abu Zubair

Who Was in the European Prisons?

Poland:

Abu Zubaydah, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Khalid Shaykh Mohammad, Khallad bin Attash. Our research also indicates Abu Yasir al-Jaza'iri and Samr el-Barq.

Romania:

Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, Khalid Shaykh Mohammad, Khallad bin Attash, Samr al-Barq, Hassan Ghul, Janat Gul, Abu Faraj al-Libi. Associated Press also gives Hambali, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Ammar al-Baluchi. Our research indicates Abu Munthir al-Magrebi.

Lithuania:

Khalid Shaykh Mohammad, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, Abu Zubaydah]The Boom and Bust of the CIA's Secret Torture Sites[/url]
Sunday, 18 October 2015 00:00
By Crofton Black and Sam Raphael, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism | News Analysis
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Abu Zubaydah, the CIA’s first black site prisoner. (Photo: Department of Defense)

Also see: Court Appeal Highlights Poland's Role in CIA Torture Program

In spring 2003 an unnamed official at CIA headquarters in Langley sat down to compose a memo. It was 18 months after George W Bush had declared war on terror. "We cannot have enough blacksite hosts," the official wrote. The reference was to one of the most closely guarded secrets of that war - the countries that had agreed to host the CIA's covert prison sites.

Between 2002 and 2008, at least 119 people disappeared into a worldwide detention network run by the CIA and facilitated by its foreign partners.

Lawyers, journalists and human rights organisations spent the next decade trying to figure out whom the CIA had snatched and where it had put them. A mammoth investigation by the US Senate's intelligence committee finally named 119 of the prisoners in December 2014. It also offered new insights into how the black site network functioned - and gruesome, graphic accounts of abuses perpetrated within it.

Many of those 119 had never been named before.

The report's 500-page summary, which contained the CIA official's 2003 remarks, was only published after months of argument between the Senate committee, the CIA and the White House. It was heavily censored, while the full 6,000-page study it was based on remains secret. All names of countries collaborating with the CIA in its detention and interrogation operations were removed, along with key dates, numbers, names and much other material.

In nine months of research, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and The Rendition Project have unpicked these redactions to piece together the hidden history of the CIA's secret sites. This account unveils many of the censored passages in the report summary, drawing on public data sources such as flight records, aviation contracts, court cases, prisoner testimonies, declassified government documents and media and NGO reporting.

Although many published accounts of individual journeys through the black site network exist, this is the first comprehensive portrayal of the system's inner dynamics from beginning to end.

[Click here to search The Rendition Project's interactive database of all CIA prisoners]

The "Covert Action" Memo

The CIA's authority to operate prisons began with a document called a "covert action memorandum of notification" - a secret order signed by President Bush the week after the 9/11 attacks. For the first time in its history, the CIA was given permission not only to take prisoners but also to decide whom to detain, why and for how long.

After several weeks of discussions, high level officials concluded it would be a mistake for the agency to manage its own detention system. The risks - including media exposure, diplomatic problems with countries hosting prisons and complications over site maintenance - were judged too great, and military custody was settled on as the best long-term solution.

This assessment, passed down by senior officials in November 2001, proved to be prescient.

It did not take long for the CIA's caution to founder in the tide of events, however.

In late March 2002, everything changed. The CIA captured the man they took to be their first "high value" detainee. He was a Palestinian named Abu Zubaydah, and the agency believed - wrongly - that he was "number three in al-Qaeda".

The decision to hold him in secret and under CIA control was hastily taken. The agency began considering what to do with him around March 24, four days before he was captured. It rejected the idea of having the US military hold him, "because of the lack of security and the fact that [he] would have to be declared to the International Committee of the Red Cross". They were worried that if he went to the newly established military prison at Guantánamo Bay they might lose control of their prize. Nor did they want to send him to one of the countries which had recently dealt with prisoners on their behalf - perhaps Jordan or Egypt - because "the results of that country's recent interrogations had been disappointing".

Instead, CIA bosses reversed their previous decision and set up their own detention facility.

To conceal the locations of the CIA's prison sites, the 2014 Senate report gave them colour code-names. But it also gave enough details of events at each site to allow us to match the code-names with public source data pointing conclusively to specific countries.

Get the data:

Our complete table of CIA prisoners with capture dates, detention dates, and what happened afterwards

Our black site database matching prisoners to locations

The first prison, which the report nicknamed "Green", was in Thailand. The country was not far from Pakistan, where Abu Zubaydah had been captured, and its officials swiftly agreed to host the site and provide security for it.

Problems with the hosts soon emerged. Reshuffles of Thai government personnel meant that the CIA Station Chief had to engage in "continued lobbying" to keep the prison open. Less than a month after the site was set up, the agency estimated that the number of Thai officials who knew about it was already in double figures. It did not take long for media organisations to pick up on the fact that the CIA's most important catch was being held in Thailand.

It was an inauspicious beginning. Barely more than six months after the site had opened, its continued operation was judged to be too great a risk. The prison was closed down on December 4 2002.

By this time it had accommodated only two prisoners: Abu Zubaydah and the suspected organiser of the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Aden, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. Nashiri had been captured in the United Arab Emirates in October and handed over to the CIA in November.

Torture in Thailand

Although it never held many prisoners, the Thailand site was where the basic blueprint of the CIA's detention regime was invented. It was also where the CIA's interrogators pioneered their new "enhanced" questioning techniques. Abu Zubaydah was repeatedly waterboarded, sleep-deprived, forced into stress positions and held in boxes. These included a coffin-shaped box, in which he spent eleven days in total, and a box less than three feet square in which he spent 29 hours. Observing one of his interrogations in August, a medical officer wrote:

The sessions accelerated rapidly progressing quickly to the water board after large box, walling, and small box periods. [Abu Zubaydah] seems very resistant to the water board. Longest time with the cloth over his face so far has been 17 seconds. This is sure to increase shortly. NO useful information so far … He did vomit a couple of times during the water board with some beans and rice. It's been 10 hours since he ate so this is surprising and disturbing. We plan to only feed Ensure for a while now. I'm head[ing] back for another water board session.
The goal, as the two contractor psychologists who masterminded the interrogations put it in August 2002, was "to reach the stage where we have broken any will or ability of subject to resist or deny providing us information (intelligence) to which he had access."



"There Is Nothing Like This in the Federal Bureau of Prisons"

Immediately after Abu Zubaydah's capture, the CIA had started to make plans for a detention centre nearer the centre of the action, in Afghanistan. It was to be "totally under [CIA] control". Initial construction costs of over $200,000 were approved in June 2002 and the building was ready to hold its first prisoners in mid-September.

Meanwhile, a handful of prisoners captured outside Afghanistan before September had been held in Afghan facilities where "the CIA had unlimited access to them". These were three men captured in Georgia at the end of April (Zakariya, Jamal Eldin Boudraa and Abbar al-Hawari) and two picked up in Pakistan in late May (Hassan Muhammad Abu Bakr Qa'id - better known as Abu Yahya al-Libi - and Ridha Ahmad Najar).

The CIA's first prison in Afghanistan - which the Senate report nicknamed "Cobalt" - had 20 cells. It operated until April 2004. During this time, the CIA documented 64 prisoners held there. But as the Senate's researchers noted, "inadequate record keeping" meant that the CIA itself could not precisely determine how many people it had detained.

According to the Senate report, 20 prisoners were held in Cobalt between September and December 2002. They were Ayub Marshid Ali Salih, Bashir al-Marwalah, Ha'il al-Mithali, Said Saleh Said and 16 others.

Our research shows that, excluding Abu Zubaydah, 37 prisoners had entered the detention programme by the end of December. A few of these were quickly moved out. Hassan bin Attash and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, captured in Pakistan on September 11, were in Afghanistan for around three days before being transferred for interrogation to other countries where the CIA did not have its own prisons. Nashiri had been sent to Thailand. Ten prisoners were passed over to the US military in Bagram before the end of the year: Ayub Ali Salih, Bashir al-Marwalah, Ha'il al-Mithali, Said Saleh Said, Musab al-Mudwani, Shawqi Awad, Rafiq al-Hami, Tawfiq al-Bihani, Bisher al-Rawi and Jamil el-Banna.

Aside from Nashiri, however, there is no indication that anyone was sent from Afghanistan to Thailand, despite one CIA officer claiming that Cobalt was intended as a holding site "for those detainees en route to [Green]".

Like Green, Cobalt was a place where the CIA experimented with its enhanced interrogation techniques. The agency held its first training course for interrogators on the use of EITs between November 12 and 18. By this time, its agents had already tried out the techniques on at least seven prisoners in Afghanistan, as well as on Nashiri and Abu Zubaydah. The seven were Ridha Najar, Rafiq al-Hami, Tawfiq al-Bihani, Lutfi al-Gharisi, Hikmat Nafi Shaukat, Gul Rahman and Abu Badr Ghulam Rabbani. One, Gul Rahman, died.

The CIA's interrogation chief described Cobalt as a "dungeon", while a senior analyst stated that the site itself "is an EIT". And a delegation from the Federal Bureau of Prisons, who visited in November 2002, were "wow'ed" - "They have never been in a facility where individuals are so sensory deprived," an official reported.

Afghanistan was to remain the principal holding bay for the CIA's prisoners throughout the detention programme. By the end of 2002, the agency had embarked on one of the programme's most extraordinary and problematic aspects: the use of secret detention sites in Europe, far away from the battlefield.

"A Train Wreck Waiting to Happen"

The lakeland region of Masuria in northern Poland might seem an incongruous neighbourhood in which to house al-Qaeda's most wanted. But the choice was not random. The region is home to a military and intelligence training base and the neighbouring town of Szczytno boasts a major police academy. The discreet airbase at Szymany - a few kilometres down the road - was used to receiving visiting dignitaries and businessmen. Everyone in Szczytno knows someone in the security services, according to one local resident, and people here are adept at keeping their mouths shut.

Nashiri and Abu Zubaydah arrived in Poland on board a chartered Gulfstream jet on a snowy day in December 2002. Initially the Polish site had been planned to house just them. Six months later it held five, beyond the capacity of its "three purpose-built 'holding units'".

Ramzi bin al-Shibh was the first to be added to the new location. He arrived at Szymany airport on February 8 2003. Khaled Sheikh Mohamed, the alleged 9/11 mastermind, followed at the start of March on a flight from Kabul. Abu Yasir al-Jaza'iri, initially held in Afghanistan, was also moved to Poland, probably at the end of March. Others followed in June and July.

A month into its operation, the atmosphere in the site was already tense. Base officers disagreed with headquarters about how to treat Nashiri, while headquarters thought that the on-site team were being "too lenient". An unqualified officer was found to have experimented on Nashiri with a drill, an unloaded gun and a stiff brush, prompting an investigation by the CIA's Inspector General into what interrogation methods were being used at the remote sites and how they were being authorised.

Then in January 2003, despite assessments by interrogators that Nashiri was not withholding information, one of the psychologists managing the interrogation programme proposed a new plan for him, including waterboarding and "the full range of enhanced exploitation and interrogation measures."

In response, the CIA's chief of interrogations announced his intention to quit. "This is a train wreak [sic] waiting to happen," he told colleagues. "I intend to get the hell off the train before it happens."

"Three or Four Rooms … No Questions Asked"

As the most important prisoners were filtered into Poland on business jets in spring and summer 2003, the CIA was taking possession of more captives in Afghanistan. Some were flown in from far afield.

After a lengthy period in Egyptian custody (during which he fabricated information linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda that proved critical in the Bush administration's public relations push around the Iraq war) Ibn Shaykh al-Libi was brought into the CIA's Afghanistan site in February. Tanzanian national Suleiman Abdallah was flown in from Djibouti in March. Several men captured in Pakistan were also transferred into the Afghanistan site. They included Libyan anti-Gaddafi fighters Abu Hazim al-Libi and Mohammed al-Shara'iya, the son of the imprisoned Egyptian "blind sheikh" Mohammed Asadallah, and Mustafa al-Hawsawi.

By mid-August, data compiled by the Bureau and The Rendition Project shows that the programme was starting to creak at the seams, with 44 prisoners. Most of these were still in Afghanistan; a couple more - Khallad bin Attash among them - had been transferred to Poland, while two inmates of the Polish site had been moved out to a "temporary patch" in Morocco.

The CIA supplemented Cobalt with another site in Afghanistan, nicknamed Gray, which Senate investigators calculated held eight prisoners in 2003, although "almost no records" were kept for it. But they still needed more space. One solution was to use Afghan facilities for prisoners deemed not sufficiently important for the agency's own sites. As Cobalt's manager wrote:

They [Afghan officials] also happen to have 3 or 4 rooms where they can lock up people discretely [sic]. I give them a few hundred bucks a month and they use the rooms for whoever I bring over - no questions asked. It is very useful for housing guys that shouldn't be in [Cobalt] for one reason or another but still need to be kept isolated and held in secret detention.
As the Senate report authors commented, "The host country [Afghanistan] had no independent reason to detain these individuals and held them solely at the behest of the CIA." At least four prisoners were farmed out to Afghan sites: they included Hamid Aich and Mohamed Dinshah.

Two of the CIA's prisoners, Laid Saidi and Majid Khan, were also held at a "safehouse" in Afghanistan. And Hassan Ghul, although only in Afghanistan for two days in January 2004, was removed from Cobalt to a "[redacted] facility for portions of his interrogations".

Testimonies from former prisoners show that many of them were shuttled around two or three different locations in the vicinity of Kabul at this time.

Unsettling Discovery

On September 22 2003 the CIA carried out a major reshuffle of its most important detainees. The Polish site was closed and its inmates spread between a prison in Romania, called "Black" in the Senate report, and two sites in Guantánamo Bay ("Maroon" and "Indigo"). The "temporary patch" in Morocco was also emptied as Bin al-Shibh and Nashiri were moved out to Guantánamo. Some of Cobalt's prisoners, including Ibn Shaykh al-Libi, were transferred to the new locations too.

The secret Guantánamo sites were short lived. After less than four months the CIA became concerned that an anticipated US Supreme Court decision would mean legal representation and habeas corpus rights for the five prisoners it was holding there. They were hurriedly shipped out again on a series of contracted flights to Morocco and Romania between March 27 and April 14 2004.

With these new sites established in September, the CIA had hit peak capacity. More than 50 and perhaps as many as 60 prisoners were on its books in October and November 2003. Some 44 were in Afghanistan.

The programme had become bloated. That December, CIA officers in Afghanistan made an "unsettling discovery": "we are holding a number of detainees about whom we know very little".

The majority of [CIA] detainees in [Afghanistan] have not been debriefed for months and, in some cases, for over a year. Many of them appear to us to have no further intelligence value for [the CIA] and should more properly be turned over to the [U.S. military], to [Afghan] authorities or to third countries for further investigation and possibly prosecution. In a few cases, there does not appear to be enough evidence to continue incarceration, and, if this is in fact the case, the detainees should be released.
This "unsettling discovery" was followed by another blow, as the International Committee of the Red Cross informed US authorities of their discovery that CIA prisoners in Afghanistan were being held "incommunicado for extensive periods of time, subjected to unacceptable conditions of internment, to ill treatment and torture, while deprived of any possible recourse." The letter, which included a "fairly complete list" of CIA prisoners, "prompted CIA Headquarters to conclude that it was necessary to reduce the number of detainees in CIA custody".

Around May 2004, the CIA transferred 18 prisoners to US military custody in Bagram. It released five more and transferred another seven to foreign custody around the same time.

Our research shows that, between January and August 2004, two prisoners were sent to Algeria (Jamal Boudraa in January and Laid Saidi in August) and three to Libya (Al-Shara'iya, Adnan al-Libi and Abu Abdallah al-Zulaytini, all in August). Mohamed Dinshah was transferred to the custody of an unspecified country between the end of January and the middle of March.

Meanwhile, the CIA closed down Cobalt and moved its occupants to a new prison in Afghanistan, nicknamed Orange. The first prisoners arrived in Orange in an en-masse transfer in April 2004.

Orange was billed as a "quantum leap forward" because of its "heating/air conditioning, conventional plumbing, appropriate lighting, shower, and laundry facilities." As the Senate report noted, however, "although some of the cells at [Orange] included plumbing, detainees undergoing interrogation were kept in smaller cells, with waste buckets rather than toilet facilities."

"Querulous and Unappreciative"

After its rapid growth in 2003, and the upheavals which followed this - the swift exit from the undisclosed Guantánamo sites, the wholesale transfer from Cobalt to Orange and the shedding of prisoners prompted by the ICRC - the programme's volume levelled off. In late June 2004 there were 34 prisoners spread between Afghanistan, Romania and the re-established temporary holding unit in Morocco.

This number had dropped to 29 by December. After the switch from Cobalt to Orange, only eight prisoners entered the programme in the rest of 2004. Most of these are known to have been captured in Pakistan.

Although the pressure of overcrowding had now reduced, other causes of instability increased during this period. In February 2005, after months of rising tensions with local officials in which the they were accused of being "querulous and unappreciative recipients" of Moroccan cooperation, the CIA lost access to the prison it had been using as an overflow facility. On February 17-18 it moved its detainees out of there and began operations in a new prison in Lithuania (nicknamed Violet). On the day of the transfer the CIA counted 29 prisoners in its programme in total, spread between Afghanistan, Romania and Lithuania.

Five prisoners - two Libyans and three Yemenis - were sent back to their home countries in April and May 2005. They were Abu Hazim al-Libi, Ayyub al-Libi, Salah Nasir Salim Ali, Mohd al-Shomaila and Muhammad Abdullah Saleh.

Four new prisoners were brought in to the detention programme in 2005. Two, Ibrahim Jan and Abu Ja'far al-Iraqi, were handed over to the CIA by the US military in Iraq in the autumn. The others, Abu Munthir al-Magrebi and Abu Faraj al-Libi, had been flown in in May. Research indicates that Abu Munthir had been picked up in Tunisia. Abu Faraj was captured in Pakistan and passed briefly through Afghanistan; he was then transferred into Romania along with Abu Munthir.

"Mediocre or, I Dare Say, Useless Intelligence"

The Romanian site held "many of the detainees the CIA assessed as 'high-value'". These included Khaled Sheikh Mohamed, Hassan Ghul, Janat Gul and Nashiri.

By the time that Abu Faraj al-Libi was flown in there, the site's own manager considered the prison to be dysfunctional. He was troubled by the "natural and progressive effects of long-term solitary confinement on detainees". And he was exasperated by the personnel deployed there, "more than a few" of whom he described as "basically incompetent". The quality of debriefers and security officers being sent to the site was degenerating, while the information coming out of it was "mediocre or, I dare say, useless".

The CIA transferred some prisoners, including Khaled Sheikh Mohamed, from Romania to Lithuania in October 2005. The following month it was forced to abandon the site altogether. Revelations about the secret prison network in the Washington Post caused the Romanian authorities to demand the prison's closure within days, and the remaining captives were flown to Afghanistan via Jordan on November 5.

The CIA now had only two active prison sites: one in Lithuania, the other in Afghanistan. At this point the programme held 27.

"Endgame"

In March 2006, the Lithuanian site also closed. Medical care for Mustafa al-Hawsawi - who had been subjected to "rectal exams … with 'excessive force'" and was suffering from "chronic hemorrhoids, an anal fissure, and symptomatic rectal prolapse" - was inaccessible there, making the site itself unsustainable. The CIA shifted its prisoners out of Lithuania and into a final Afghan site, nicknamed Brown, which held 10 people between March and September 2006.

At this point the CIA was locked in argument with the Department of Defense about the long-term "endgame" for its captives. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had decided not to accept any more CIA prisoners in Guantánamo Bay. Without this option, the agency had only two possibilities: "to begin transferring those detainees no longer producing intelligence to third countries, which may release them" - or simply to release them itself.

Starting in February, the CIA gradually began to disperse the prisoners that it was willing to send to foreign custody. Saud Memon was first to go - probably to Pakistan - while the Bureau's research indicates that Ibn Shaykh al-Libi was sent to Libya on April 14. At the end of June, several other prisoners were shipped out. They include Marwan al-Jabbur, who was taken to Jordan. Bureau research indicates that the same plane could have transferred Abd al-Bari al-Filistini to Jordan and Abu 'Abdallah to Saudi Arabia. Firas al-Yemeni was returned to Yemen around the start of September.

Other prisoners who were transferred abroad at this time were Janat Gul, Hassan Ghul, Qattal al-Uzbeki, Abu Yasir al-Jaza'iri, Abdi Rashid Samatar, Abu Munthir al-Magrebi, Ibrahim Jan and Abu Ja'far al-Iraqi.

The last 14 remaining "high value detainees" were finally sent to Guantánamo at the start of September 2006. On their arrival, President Bush announced to the world that in addition to those held in military detention, "a small number of suspected terrorist leaders and operatives captured during the war have been held and questioned outside the United States, in a separate program operated by the Central Intelligence Agency." The speech was the US government's first acknowledgement of what had by then become an open secret.

After September 6 2006 the programme was dormant. It revived sporadically for the detention of the last two CIA prisoners: Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi (held November 2006 to April 2007) and Muhammad Rahim (July 2007 to March 2008).

After Rahim was sent to Guantánamo the CIA continued to maintain two prison sites, empty but ready and waiting. They were managed by a contracting company, Mitchell Jessen Associates. The company had been set up by James Mitchell and John Jessen - the two psychologists who had engineered the blueprint for the interrogation programme.

A letter from the CIA's director, Leon Panetta, in April 2009, obtained by Vice News, stated that Mitchell Jessen Associates had a contract "for services related to the two remaining CIA detention facilities". Previously MJA had provided "interrogation services, security teams for renditions, facilities, training, and other services". By 2009, however, the CIA had informed them that their services would be reduced to providing security teams for the empty facilities, "given that the agency would not be engaging in interrogation or operating blacksites".

The contract - due to run until March 2010 - was terminated early. But - Panetta told congressional overseers - the agency retained the authority to carry out renditions and "to detain individuals on a short-term, transitory basis".

42 of the CIA's 119 prisoners are now known to have been released. 30 are still in US custody. Seven have died. Of the rest, some are still in the custody abroad, while others remain untraced.

35 prisoners held in Afghanistan in 2002

Zakariya, Jamal Eldin Boudraa, Abbar al-Hawari, Hassan Muhammad Abu Bakr Qa'id, Ridha Ahmad Najar, Ayub Ali Salih, Bashir al-Marwalah, Ha'il al-Mithali, Musab al-Mudwani, Said Saleh Said, Shawqi Awad, Umar Faruq, Abd al-Salam al-Hilah, Asat Sar Jan, Akbar Zakaria, Rafiq al-Hami, Tawfiq al-Bihani, Lutfi al-Gharisi, Hikmat Nafi Shaukat, Yaqub al-Baluchi, Abd al-Rahim Ghulam Rabbani, Gul Rahman, Abu Badr Ghulam Rabbani, Haji Ghalgi, Nazar Ali, Juma Gul, Wafti bin Ali, Adel, Qari Mohib Ur Rehman, Shah Wali Khan, Hayattulah Haqqani, Bisher al-Rawi, Jamil el-Banna, Ghairat Bahir, Pacha Wazir

18 prisoners transferred to Bagram around May 2004

Abu Nasim al-Tunisi, Muhammad Jafar al-Qahtani, Adel Ben Hamlili, Abdullah Ashami, Ridha Ahmad Najar, Ghairat Bahir, Noor Jalal, Hassan bin Attash, Abd al-Rahim Ghulam Rabbani, Abu Badr Ghulam Rabbani, Muhammad Amein al-Bakri, Ali Jan, Riyadh the Facilitator, Abd al-Salam al-Hilah, Binyam Mohamed, Sanad al-Kazimi, Suleiman Abdullah; and probably Muhammad Khan (son of Suhbat)

8 prisoners entering CIA custody April-Dec 2004

Abd al-Bari al-Filistini, Ayyub al-Libi, Marwan al-Jabbur, Qattal al-Uzbeki, Janat Gul, Ahmed Ghailani, Sharif al-Masri, Abdi Rashid Samatar

27 prisoners held across CIA sites in November 2005 when the Romanian site shut down

Abu Zubaydah, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Ibn Shaykh al-Libi, Khalid Shaykh Mohammad, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, Abu Yasir al-Jaza'iri, Ammar al-Baluchi, Khallad bin Attash, Majid Khan, Abu Zubair, Bashir bin Lap, Hambali, Firas al-Yemeni, Hassan Ghul, Saud Memon, Hassan Ahmed Guleed, Abu 'Abdallah, Abd al-Bari al-Filistini, Marwan al-Jabbur, Qattal al-Uzbeki, Janat Gul, Ahmed Ghailani, Abdi Rashid Samatar, Abu Faraj al-Libi, Abu Munthir al-Magrebi, Ibrahim Jan

14 HVDs sent to Guantánamo from Afghanistan in September 2006

Abu Zubaydah, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Khalid Shaykh Mohammad, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, Ammar al-Baluchi, Khallad bin Attash, Hambali, Bashir bin Lap, Hassan Ahmed Guleed, Ahmed Ghailani, Abu Faraj al-Libi, Majid Khan, Abu Zubair

Who Was in the European Prisons?

Poland:

Abu Zubaydah, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Khalid Shaykh Mohammad, Khallad bin Attash. Our research also indicates Abu Yasir al-Jaza'iri and Samr el-Barq.

Romania:

Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, Khalid Shaykh Mohammad, Khallad bin Attash, Samr al-Barq, Hassan Ghul, Janat Gul, Abu Faraj al-Libi. Associated Press also gives Hambali, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Ammar al-Baluchi. Our research indicates Abu Munthir al-Magrebi.

Lithuania:

Khalid Shaykh Mohammad, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, Abu Zubaydah

[seemslikeadream]

ONE YEAR AFTER THE SENATE TORTURE REPORT, NO ONE’S READ IT AND IT MIGHT BE DESTROYED
Murtaza Hussain
Dec. 9 2015, 7:16 a.m.
One year ago today, the Senate Intelligence Committee published a highly redacted executive summary of its investigation into the CIA’s torture and rendition program. The 525-page summary was shocking in many of its details, revealing the torture and rape of detainees held in CIA custody and encompassing treatment far in excess of even the torture techniques formally authorized by the Bush administration.

Despite the passage of 12 months, the actual report, comprising 6,700 pages, still has not been made publicly available. In fact, reading it appears to be prohibited among officials in the executive branch. Nearly a month and a half after the report’s initial release, it had not even been taken out of the package in which it was delivered to the Department of Justice and Department of State, according to government lawyers. Even the organization that was the subject of the report, the CIA, tightly controlled internal access and made “very limited use” of it, as had the Department of Defense, the lawyers said in a court filing.

That shunning of the torture report appears to be ongoing and very much by design: It turns out the Department of Justice has “refuse[d] to allow executive branch officials to review the full and final study,” Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Patrick Leahy wrote in a letter last month to the attorney general and FBI director, urging that they or their “appropriately cleared” underlings read the full report.

“The legacy of this historic report cannot be buried in the back of a handful of executive branch safes, never to be reviewed by those who most need to learn from it,” they added.

Elizabeth Beavers, a policy coordinator focusing on torture at Amnesty International, believes that no one in the Obama administration, including at the Department of Justice, has read the full report. “They appear to be taking a ‘see no evil, hear no evil’ [stance] with regards to the proof of criminal acts it may contain,” she said. But “for the administration not even to read the whole report, and to look the other way while it is possibly buried or even destroyed, sets a dangerous precedent by excusing major crimes like torture and forced disappearance.”

In January, the new Republican head of the Senate committee that produced the study, Richard Burr, demanded that all extant copies be returned, reportedly over concerns they could be obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. The Obama administration declined to do so, at least barring a court ruling. But the report is certainly being sought under FOIA, including in an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit against the government.

Feinstein, for her part, anticipated that the full report would eventually be available to the public, writing last year that it would be “held for declassification at a later time.” (As chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Feinstein shepherded the study, often in the face of staunch CIA opposition.)

Of particular interest in the full report is Volume III, which Feinstein has said contains “excruciating” details of the treatment of detainees during interrogation by the CIA, including further details on the torture of prisoners like Janat Gul, who, according to the report’s executive summary, was tortured to the point that he begged his captors to let him “die or just be killed.” The agency later concluded that Gul had been implicated by a fabricated report from a source.

The release of the executive summary last year was widely hailed by civil rights groups as a landmark moment of accountability for post-9/11 human rights abuses. Although the administration has to date refused to press charges against those responsible for torturing CIA detainees, the release of the summary helped galvanize efforts at legal redress. A report last week by Human Rights Watch, drawing heavily from the executive summary of the Senate report, offered a detailed pathway for obtaining criminal prosecutions against those who both authorized and carried out acts of torture. The release of the full report would likely provide further ammunition with which to fight for accountability.

The one-year anniversary of the report coincides with an increasingly dark national mood; fears of terrorism are once again on the rise. Attacks at home and abroad by the militant Islamic State group, and widespread anger and fear sparked by those attacks, have led presidential candidates to call for a renewal of extreme measures to fight terrorists.

“The current environment feels very reminiscent of the days after 9/11, particularly with the terrible proposals being made,” said Beavers. “If the Senate report showing the abuses of that era ends up buried, the lessons from it simply won’t be learned. The message to future administrations will be that even the worst criminal acts can be concealed and that torture remains on the table for them as a policy option.”

[seemslikeadream]

Senate Intelligence Committee Members Ask White House For Official Apology From CIA For Hacking Senate Computers
from the CIA:-it's-time-to-let-unacknowledged-wrongdoing-remain-unacknowledged dept
Ron Wyden, Martin Heinrich and Mazie Hirono -- all members of Senate Intelligence Committee -- have sent a letter to the President demanding an official apology from CIA head John Brennan for the agency's surveillance of Senate staffers working on the Torture Report.
"In January 2014, CIA personnel conducted an unauthorized, unprecedented search of Senate committee files, including the emails and other files of Senate staff investigating the CIA's use of torture," says the letter...

"The CIA Inspector General stated in a July 2014 report that this search involved 'improper agency access to [Senate Intelligence Committee] files.' A review board selected by CIA Director Brennan concluded in December 2014 that this CIA search 'resulted in inappropriate access to [Senate Intelligence Committee] work product'."

[...]

"We believe that it is necessary for you to ensure that senior officials in your administration recognize the importance of adhering to the rule of law," the lawmakers wrote to Obama. "We ask that you instruct Director Brennan to acknowledge that the CIA's unauthorized search of Senate files was improper and will not be repeated."
The White House and CIA have yet to comment on the letter and there's nothing in the history of the incident that suggests either will move forward on this. Obama's on short time and the CIA already cleared itself of all wrongdoing with an in-house "investigation" and further showed its disdain for independent oversight by throwing its Inspector General and his report on the spying efforts under the bus.

Jason Leopold and Vice obtained hundreds of documents through FOIA requests that appeared to show the opposite of what the CIA's internal investigation claimed. But it was the CIA that had the last word, proclaiming itself innocent and simultaneously accusing Senate staffers of improperly accessing restricted documents.

But the most damning document -- at least in the context of a demand for an official apology from the CIA -- was the apology the agency unofficially disavowed when it cleared itself of hacking allegations.
[T]he documents turned over to VICE News included a July 28, 2014 letter from Brennan that was addressed to Feinstein and Saxby Chambliss, who was then the ranking Republican on the Intelligence Committee, in which he apologized to them and admitted that the CIA's penetration of the computer network used by committee staffers reviewing the agency's torture program was improper.
The thing is, Brennan never signed or sent this apology. It just sat in a Torture Report-related file until it was FOIAed. Brennan even offered a closed-door, off-the-record apology to Dianne Feinstein, but to date, the final official word remains the CIA's: we did nothing wrong.

[seemslikeadream]

Wyden hammers CIA chief over Senate spying

By Katie Bo Williams - 02/09/16 04:26 PM EST
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) on Tuesday berated CIA Director John Brennan for his failure to acknowledge the agency’s spying on Senate staffers.

“When you’re talking about spying on a committee responsible for overseeing your agency, in my view that undermines the very checks and balances that protect our democracy and it’s unacceptable in a free society,” Wyden said during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on global threats.
Brennan pushed back on Wyden’s characterization of the 2014 incident as “spying” and the two exchanged testy words.

“Do not say that we spied on Senate computers or your files. We did not do that,” Brennan said.

“I read the exact words of the Inspector General and the exact words of the review board,” Wyden replied. “They said there was improper access.”

As the clock was winding down on Wyden’s allotted time for questions, Brennan claimed that he mischaracterized the content of the pair of reports detailing the investigation into the incident.

“Pretty hard to mischaracterize a word-for-word quote, they used the word ‘improper access,’” Wyden said as committee chair Richard Burr (R-N.C.) attempted to shift the discussion to another senator.

The tense exchange was the latest skirmish in a long-running battle between lawmakers and the agency after Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) revealed in March 2014 that CIA staff had broken into and searched Senate files in a walled-off computer that the agency and the Intelligence Committee were using to share documents as part of the committee’s research for its report on the CIA's former torture techniques.

The agency's inspector general found in mid-2014 that five agency employees had "improperly accessed" the Senate network. Early last year, a CIA accountability board convened by Brennan determined that the staffers acted within their rights when they searched the Senate network.

“These were CIA computers at a CIA-leased facility, it was a CIA network shared between Senate staffers conducting that investigation for your report as well as CIA personnel,” Brennan said Tuesday. He repeatedly characterized the improper access as “very limited.”

He suggested that it was in fact the Senate staffers’ access of the files that was inappropriate.

“When it became quite obvious to CIA personnel that Senate staffers had unauthorized access to an internal draft document of the CIA, there was an obligation of CIA officers to investigate to see what might have been the reason for the access,” Brennan said.

“Separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches, senator, goes both ways,” he said later in the exchange.

Brennan has apologized privately, to Feinstein and then-Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), the committee's ranking member, in the wake of the CIA's IG report.

Wyden’s comments echo a letter he sent to President Obama last month, along with Sens. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) and Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), asking that Brennan be required to apologize for the search of Senate files.

“We believe that it is necessary for you to address this matter directly," the senators wrote.

[zangtang]

Perhaps the CIA could apologize with their fingers crossed behind their back?
should solve everything.

- apart from the flourescent tube rape-y thing.