Investigation: The CIA's secret prisons

[cal04]

The acknowledgement of a global network of 'black sites' has revealed the existence of a sinister two-tier system of interrogation
(snip)
According to officials and reports here, there were eight camps in all. Among the locations were Afghanistan, Qatar, Thailand, the Indian island base of Diego Garcia (leased by the US from Britain) as well as Poland and Romania. The system was set up at the start of 2002. In the four and a half years since, some 100 inmates have passed through the network.

These were no ordinary prisoners, however. They were the highest-value targets - terror kingpins who, the CIA believed, possessed information about ongoing terrorist plots. To obtain this information, all means were considered justified. Some inmates were kept for a period in the camps and then - their value to the Americans exhausted - sent on under the practice known as "rendition" to friendly countries, Jordan, Pakistan and Egypt among them, where they faced equally brutal treatment, if not worse. Others, it is believed, were sent on to Guantanamo. A few, however, stayed.

(snip)
The camps may be empty, but the system could be re-activated at any moment in the event of a new onslaught. Last week Mr Bush sent a bill to Congress, setting out rules for new military commissions to try Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi Binalshibh and the rest, after the Supreme Court in June rejected the tribunals previously set in place by the Pentagon.

But the measure also provides for a two-tier system of detention that would allow the CIA far greater latitude than the military. As Mr Bush put it last week, "having a CIA programme for questioning terrorists will continue to be crucial to getting life-saving information". Or, to put it another way, the doctrine of what Vice-President Dick Cheney calls "working the dark side" is still alive and well.

Rupert Cornwell
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article1433341.ece