Infrastructure of Tyranny--Black Site Prisons

In the first part of this survey of what Conor Friedersdorf has called the "infrastructure of tyranny,"  we looked at the practice of extraordinary rendition, which is basically the art of making people disappear.  It sounds outlandish, and yet it happened.  It still happens.  It is publicly acknowledged, and apparently not uncommonly practiced.  But you couldn't really make folks disappear all that readily if you didn't have a place to put them.

Here's a good overview of black sites.  Excerpts:

Scores of detainees, including those designated as ‘high-value detainees’ (HVDs), have been held in isolated facilities built and run by the CIA. These prisons, often referred to as ‘black sites’, were constructed after September 2001 under newly-granted authority from President Bush. Although the existence of the CIA detention programme was publically acknowledged by President Bush in September 2006, the US Government has refused to discuss the locations of these sites. Evidence exists to suggest that black sites were operational in Afghanistan, Thailand, Romania, Poland and Lithuania.

 What occurred in black sites? Excerpts:

...in August 2009 – in connection with a separate ACLU FOIA request – the government had released a partially-redacted version of one report, the Special Review: Counterterrorism Detention and Interrogation Activities (September 2001–October 2003). In the Special Review, the CIA’s internal watchdog, the Office of Inspector General (OIG), detailed the agency’s overseas counterterrorism detention and interrogation activities, and made clear that individuals working for or with the CIA had engaged in conduct that neither the agency itself nor the OIG regarded as authorized. The most egregious examples of such conduct included an interrogator’s use of an unloaded handgun and a power drill to threaten a detainee. The Special Review also discussed the CIA’s use of such unauthorized techniques as the manipulation of pressure points, mock executions, blowing cigar smoke at a detainee, the use of a stiff brush on a detainee, and stepping on a detainee’s ankle shackles. The Special Review also referred to instances where detainees had died in CIA custody. (In addition, the report detailed the CIA’s use of approved interrogation techniques – such as waterboarding – in a manner that far exceeded the limitations set by the Department of Justice.)...

One document, for example, is titled “Investigation of the Death of ‘Abid Hamad Mahawish Al-Mahalawi,” and another concerns an “Investigation of the Death of Manadal Al-Jamaidi.” One report details the CIA’s “Investigation of Abuse of Detainees,” while another records the “Investigation of the Nonregistration of Detainees” – that is, the practice of detaining individuals without registering their names, so that they effectively are “disappeared.”...

More from the Miami Herald. Excerpts:

...Mohammed had endured the most brutal of the CIA's harsh interrogation methods and had confessed to a career of atrocities. But the agency had no long-term plan for him. Someday, he might prove useful again. Perhaps, he'd even stand trial one day.

And for that, he'd need to be sane.

"We didn't want them to go nuts," the former senior CIA official said, one of several who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about the now-shuttered CIA prisons or Mohammed's interest in vacuums...

By the CIA's own account, the program's methods were "designed to psychologically 'dislocate'" people. But once interrogations stopped, the agency had to try to undo the psychological damage inflicted on the detainees...

Accused al-Qaida terrorists Ramzi Binalshibh and Abd al-Nashiri, who were also locked up in Poland and Romania with Mohammed, have had mental issues. Al-Nashiri suffers from depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Binalshibh is being treated for schizophrenia with a slew of anti-psychotic medications.

"Any type of prolonged isolation in custody — much less the settings described in the press — have been known to have a severe impact on the mental condition of the detainee," said Thomas Durkin, Binalshibh's former civilian lawyer. Durkin declined to discuss Binalshibh's case...

Here's a schematic of one black site prison in Romania, via the AP.  HuffPo describes the political fallout in Poland of the gradual acknowledgement of the existence of such sites within its borders.  Excerpts:

For years, the notion that Poland could allow the CIA to operate a secret prison in a remote lake region was treated as a crackpot idea by the country's politicians, journalists and the public.

A heated political debate this week reveals how dramatically the narrative has changed.

In a string of revelations and political statements, Polish leaders have come closer than ever to acknowledging that the United States ran a secret interrogation facility for terror suspects in 2002 and 2003 in the Eastern European country...

For years Polish officials and the public treated the idea that the CIA ran a prison in Poland as absurd and highly unlikely – even after the United Nations and the Council of Europe said they had evidence of its existence. Polish officials repeatedly rebuffed international calls for serious investigations. The idea slowly only began to get serious consideration after Polish prosecutors opened an investigation into the matter in 2008.

A new breakthrough came Tuesday when a leading newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, reported that prosecutors have charged a former spy chief, Zbigniew Siemiatkowski, for his role in allowing the site. Siemiatkowski was reportedly charged with depriving prisoners of war of their freedom and allowing corporal punishment...

The issue is hugely sensitive because any Polish leaders who would have cooperated with the U.S. program would have been violating Poland's constitution, both by giving a foreign power control over part of Polish territory and allowing crimes to take place there.

Any officials who were involved could – in theory – be charged with serious crimes, including crimes against humanity...

The New York Times discusses what's emerged more recently:

...Reporting by The Times and other news media has long established that the C.I.A. operated a secret detention program with “black site” prisons outside the United States. In December, the Senate Intelligence Committee approved a highly critical, classified report on this program that has not been released. Committee members invoked its findings without revealing any useful new information at the recent confirmation hearing for John Brennan, the Obama administration’s top counterterrorism official, who was named to head the C.I.A. But the committee chairwoman, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, has said that the black sites and coercive techniques were “terrible mistakes.”

According to the Open Society report, 54 countries participated in this program, including many where the rule of law is weak or nonexistent, like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt, Malaysia and Somalia. More surprising and alarming is the collusion of leading democracies. Belgium, Finland and Denmark, among others, allowed their airports and airspace to be used for flights associated with C.I.A. rendition operations. Britain, Italy, Germany and Australia helped interrogate one or more suspects and either allowed or actively aided in their transfers.

The report also contains information about the identities and treatment of 136 suspects who were subjected to C.I.A. detention or rendition. There may be many more individuals caught in this program, but the total number remains unknown. There has been no accountability for the program’s violations of American or international law. President Obama refused to investigate Bush administration officials who bear responsibility for authorizing human rights abuses. He ordered an end to President George W. Bush’s torture policies and the closing of C.I.A. detention facilities, but the Open Society report said Mr. Obama did not repudiate rendition and suggested that some activities could be continuing, including a secret prison in Somalia run with C.I.A. involvement...

A recent article in Salon also discusses what is known about the present state of the black site system. Excerpts:

...The CIA has steadfastly refused to comment on the fates of most former detainees, publicly accounting for only 16 people of the roughly 100 the agency has said it once held. The U.S. has successfully dismissed lawsuits over rendition and asserted that much about the CIA program is still classified...

President Obama, for his part, ordered the CIA black-site prisons closed when he took office. (He allowed renditions to continue, with pledges of greater oversight of the countries where suspects were sent.) But still, little about the program has been officially disclosed.

Human Rights Watch and other organizations, as a consequence, have been trying to piece together the details of the CIA’s detention and rendition programs for years. In 2009, ProPublica published a list of more than thirty people believed to have been held by the CIA whose whereabouts were still unknown — including a Spin Ghul...

Since Qaddafi’s fall, evidence has emerged of close communication between the CIA and Libyan officials during the Bush administration, despite the Qaddafi regime’s reputation for torture and brutal prison conditions. Documents found in the abandoned office of Libya’s former top intelligence official refer to the rendition of several people to Libya and the sharing of information. Other “missing prisoners” believed to have been held by the CIA turned up in Libyan prisons. Some of them have given detailed accounts of detention in U.S. custody before being sent there.

“The U.S. delegated a lot of its detention capacity to abusive governments like Libya — they were perfectly happy to have Libya holding these people,” says Mariner...

There is some question about whether the program has in fact been shut down completely.

The ACLU notes certain discrepancies between internal documents from the various agencies involved and the public statements about the state of the program at different points in its history.  Excerpts:

...In this email from Laura M. Stone of the DOS to Anne S. Casper at the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok, Stone writes (PDF):

If iTV ask anything about the Black Sites here, I think we should stick to what we have done before: deny flat out that they exist.

Note that this email exchange took place on September 7, 2006, the day after President Bush's infamous September 6, 2006 speech in which he acknowledged the existence of these secret CIA prisons — a.k.a. "black sites" — and asserted that former CIA prisoners were now at Guantánamo Bay, and the CIA no longer held anyone in its custody. That's curious, because this memo from the OLC to the CIA (PDF) lays out the groundwork for the "enhanced interrogation" techniques authorized for use on CIA prisoners in July 2007. If the CIA had no prisoners in its custody after September 2006, why would it need such instruction in July 2007?
In this December 2005 exchange (PDF), talking points are discussed in regard to the U.S.'s extraordinary rendition program. Of note:

Wrong to speak of torture flights -- we do not send people off to be tortured. We do not torture nor turn over detainees to those who do. Despite media reports to the contrary, no plane has been through European airports carrying people off to be tortured.

This is plain false. Publicly available records demonstrate that Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen DataPlan Inc., based in San Jose, CA, facilitated more than 70 secret rendition flights over a four-year period to countries where it knew or reasonably should have known that detainees are routinely tortured or otherwise abused in contravention of universally accepted legal standards. The ACLU has brought lawsuits on behalf of torture and rendition victim Khaled el-Masri and against Jeppesen for its involvement in the extraordinary rendition program...

Even though the program has reportedly been scaled down dramatically under President Obama, the creation of the system shows that given sufficient provocation, the US government is capable of creating and operating such a system internationally, disappearing individuals who are identified as national security threats, putting them into conditions of psychological dislocation if not physical danger, and publicly denying the very existence of the program.  As Jon Stewart has said, in light of recent scandals, the burden of proof has shifted from the crazy paranoiacs who actually believe our government capable of such things to the government when it comes to asserting what has and has not been done.

But such things have only been done to non-citizens, say you?  Well, when you're willing to assassinate US citizens, I really don't see what would be seen as an abiding restraint against making them more prosaically disappear.

For Further Research:

• Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition
• The Rendition Project
• Was there a covert CIA prison system?