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CIA 'has secret terror jails'<br>
<a href="http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/D6917AE9-58EA-4E44-92C6-8F478F9D461D.htm" eudora="autourl">
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/D6917AE9-58EA-4E44-92C6-8F478F9D461D.htm<br>
<br>
</a>Thursday 03 November 2005 3:59 PM GMT <br><br>
<b>The CIA is holding some of its most important suspect al-Qaida
captives in a network of secret prisons including one at a Soviet-era
facility in Eastern Europe, the Washington Post has reported.<br><br>
</b>According to the paper the locations of the facilities "are
known to only a handful of officials in the United States and, usually,
only to the president and a few top intelligence officers in each host
country."<br><br>
The facilities are referred to as "black sites" in classified
White House, CIA, Justice Department and congressional documents, the
Post said.<br><br>
The report did not disclose the names of the Eastern European countries
involved in the programme, at the request of senior US officials.
Officials believed disclosure might disrupt counterterrorism efforts in
those countries and elsewhere.<br><br>
The secret facilities are part of a covert prison system set up by the
CIA after the September 11 attacks, that at various times has included
sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several
democracies in Eastern Europe, the Post reported.<br><br>
Another small center operated at the Guantanamo Bay prison complex in
Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and
diplomats from three continents, the paper said.<br><br>
<b>Prisoner information<br><br>
</b>Virtually nothing is known about who is kept in the facilities or
what interrogation methods are used.<br><br>
But the revelations of widespread prisoner abuse in Afghanistan and Iraq
by the US military - which operates under published rules and transparent
oversight of Congress - have increased concern among lawmakers, foreign
governments and human rights groups about the opaque CIA system.
<br><br>
The CIA has sent more than 100 suspects to the hidden global internment
network, the Post said, indicating that the number was a rough estimate
and did not include prisoners picked up from Iraq. <br><br>
Considerable concern lingers about the legality, morality and
practicality of holding even unrepentant terrorists in such isolation and
secrecy.<br><br>
"We never sat down, as far as I know, and came up with a grand
strategy," the paper quoted one former senior intelligence officer
who is familiar with the programme but not the location of the prisons.
<br><br>
"Everything was very reactive. That's how you get to a situation
where you pick people up, send them into a netherworld and don't say,
'What are we going to do with them afterwards?'" <br><br>
<b>Security concerns<br><br>
</b>Citing national security concerns the CIA and the White House have
dissuaded Congress from demanding that the agency answer questions in
open testimony about the conditions under which captives are held.
<br><br>
US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, speaking on CNN on Wednesday, was
evasive when asked about the report. <br><br>
"I'm not going to confirm or deny on this show the existence of this
programme. We normally do not talk about intelligence activities,"
Gonzales said. <br><br>
In a comment from the White House, spokesman Scott McClellan said,
"I'm not going to get into specific intelligence activities. I will
say that the president's most important responsibility is to protect the
American people." <br><br>
But former president Jimmy Carter denounced what he said was "a
profound and radical change in the basic policies or moral values of our
country" in reaction to the report. <br><br>
"This is just one indication of what has been done under this
administration to change the policies that have persisted all the way
through our history," said Carter, who championed human rights
during his 1977-81 presidency. <br><br>
<b>Eastern Europe denial<br>
</b> <br>
The existence of secret CIA detention centres has long been claimed.
Amnesty International denounced the "archipelago" of prisons in
June as a "gulag of our times". <br><br>
But the report that former Eastern European countries were among the
locations is new. <br><br>
<br>
Czech Interior Minister Frantisek Bublan was quoted by the on-line news
outlet Aktualne.cz as saying that the Czech Republic recently turned down
a US request to set up a detention centre on its territory. <br><br>
"The negotiations took place around a month ago," he was quoted
as saying. The Americans "made an effort to install some of the sort
here, but they did not succeed." <br><br>
Separately, Hungary's intelligence chief, Andras Toth, told AFP that
Budapest had not been approached. <br><br>
"The mere suggestion of this is absurd," Toth said, adding
"I know of no such request" from US officials. <br><br>
Russia's FSB security service, the main KGB-successor agency that leads
the country's battle against militant violence, denied any such
facilities on its territory, as did the Bulgarian Foreign Ministry.
<br><br>
"There is no detention centre of that nature in Slovakia,"
ministry spokesman Richard Fides told the news agency CTK. <br><br>
Vladimir Simko, spokesman for Slovakia's intelligence service SIS, told
CTK that even if Slovakia did collaborate with the CIA, he could not tell
the press. <br><br>
In Sofia, the foreign ministry spokesman Dimitar Tsanchev denied there
were any such American bases in Bulgaria. "Bulgaria has never had
CIA bases or bases for foreign detainees linked to al-Qaida," he
said. <br><br>
In Thailand, which was named along with Afghanistan as the location of
"black site" facilities in the Washington Post report,
government spokesman Surapong Suebwonglee said there was "no fact in
the unfounded claims" carried by the paper.<br><br>
<b>Agencies<br><br>
</b>You can find this article at:<br>
<a href="http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/D6917AE9-58EA-4E44-92C6-8F478F9D461D.htm" eudora="autourl">
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/D6917AE9-58EA-4E44-92C6-8F478F9D461D.htm</a>
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