<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000">
<div
class="articleOpinion-title--container articleWidth-title--container js-toggle--fade hidden-phone">
<h1 class="articleOpinion-title articleWidth-title">Revealed: Senate
report contains new details on CIA black sites</h1>
</div>
<div class="articleOpinion-credit articleWidth-credit js-toggle--fade">John
Moore/Getty Images</div>
<div class="articleOpinion-inner">
<p class="articleOpinion-standfirst article-standfirst">Sources tell Al
Jazeera the Intelligence Committee report accuses spy agency of lying
about detention and interrogation</p>
<div class="articleOpinion-dateByline article-dateByline">
<div class="articleOpinion-dateTime article-dateTime"> <span
class="date">April 9, 2014</span> <span class="time">12:00AM ET</span>
</div>
<div class="articleOpinion-containerByline"> by <span
class="articleOpinion-byline"><a
href="http://america.aljazeera.com/profiles/l/jason-leopold.html"
title="Jason Leopold" class="articleOpinion-byline--link">Jason Leopold</a></span>
<span class="articleOpinion-contact"><span
class="articleOpinion-twitter"><a
href="http://www.twitter.com/JasonLeopold" target="_blank"
title="@JasonLeopold" class="articleOpinion-contact--link">@JasonLeopold</a><br>
<b><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/4/9/senate-cia-torture.html">http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/4/9/senate-cia-torture.html</a></small></small></b><br>
</span></span> </div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="text section">
<p>A Senate Intelligence Committee report provides the first official
confirmation that the CIA secretly operated a black site prison out of
Guantánamo Bay, two U.S. officials who have read portions of the report
have told Al Jazeera.</p>
<p>The officials — who spoke on condition of anonymity because the
6,600-page report on the CIA’s detention and interrogation program
remains classified — said top-secret agency documents reveal that at
least 10 high-value targets were secretly held and interrogated at
Guantánamo’s Camp Echo at various times from late 2003 to 2004. They
were then flown to Rabat, Morocco, before being officially sent to the
U.S. military’s detention facility at Guantánamo in September 2006.</p>
<p>In September 2006, President George W. Bush formally announced that
14 CIA captives had been <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/06/washington/06bush_transcript.html">transferred
to Guantánamo</a> and would be prosecuted before military tribunals. He
then acknowledged for the first time that the CIA had been operating a
secret network of prisons overseas to detain and interrogate high-value
targets.</p>
<p>The Senate report, according to Al Jazeera’s sources, says that the
CIA detained some high-value suspects on Diego Garcia, an Indian Ocean
island controlled by the United Kingdom and leased to the United
States. The classified CIA documents say the black site arrangement at
Diego Garcia was made with the “full cooperation” of the British
government. That would confirm long-standing claims by human rights
investigators and journalists, whose allegations — based on flight logs
and unnamed government sources — have routinely been denied by the CIA.</p>
<p>The CIA and State Department declined Al Jazeera’s requests for
comment.</p>
<p>The Intelligence Committee last week voted 11 to 3 to <a
href="http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/4/3/senate-torture-reportciadeclassify.html"
target="_blank">declassify the report’s 480-page executive summary</a>
and 20 conclusions and findings, which incorporate responses from
Republican members of the committee and from the CIA. The executive
summary will undergo a declassification review, led by the CIA, with
input from the State Department and the Office of the Director of
National Intelligence, the U.S. officials said.</p>
<p>The panel’s chairwoman, Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, said in a
statement last Thursday that the full 6,600-page report, with 37,000
footnotes, “will be held for declassification at a later time.” <br>
</p>
</div>
<div class="parbase textimage section">
<div class="image_right">
<div class="textImage-box clearfix"><figure
class="textImage-figure image"
id="cq-textimage-jsp-/content/ajam/articles/2014/4/9/senate-cia-torture/jcr:content/mainpar/textimage"
style="max-width: 320px;"></figure>
<div class="text">
<p>Leaked details of the committee’s report have caused waves in
countries like Poland, where the CIA is known to have operated a black
site prison — which Polish officials continue to deny having known
about.</p>
<p>The U.S. officials who spoke to Al Jazeera said that the Senate
report reveals 20 prisoners were secretly detained in Poland from 2002
to 2005. They added that Polish officials recently sought assurances
from diplomats and visiting U.S. officials that the Senate report would
conceal details about Poland’s role in allowing the CIA black site to
be operated on Polish soil. Al Jazeera’s sources said U.S. officials
reassured their Polish counterparts last year that it was almost
certain that the declassified version of the report would not identify
the countries that cooperated with the CIA’s detention and
interrogation program.</p>
<p>According to the Senate report, Al Jazeera’s sources said, a
majority of the more than 100 detainees held in CIA custody were
detained in secret prisons in Afghanistan and Morocco, where they were
subject to torture methods not sanctioned by the Justice Department.
Those methods are recalled by the report in vivid narratives lifted
from daily logs of the detention and interrogation of about 34
high-value prisoners. The report allegedly notes that about 85
detainees deemed low-value passed through the black sites and were
later dumped at Guantánamo or handed off to foreign intelligence
services. More than 10 of those handed over to foreign intelligence
agencies “to face terrorism charges” are now “unaccounted for” and
presumed dead, the U.S. officials said.</p>
<p>The Senate report says more than two dozen of these men designated
low-value had, in fact, been wrongfully detained and rendered to other
countries on the basis of intelligence obtained from CIA captives under
torture and from information shared with CIA officials by other
governments, both of which turned out to be false. The report allegedly
singles out a top CIA official for botching a handful of renditions and
outlines agency efforts to cover up the mistakes.</p>
<p>The Senate report allegedly accuses “senior CIA officials” of lying
during multiple closed-session briefings to members of Congress from
2003 to 2005 about the use of certain “enhanced” interrogation
techniques. The report says an agency official lied to Congress in 2005
when he insisted the U.S. was adhering to international treaties
barring cruel and degrading treatment of prisoners, the U.S. officials
told Al Jazeera.</p>
<p>The report not only accuses certain CIA officials of deliberately
misleading Congress; Al Jazeera’s sources say it also suggests that the
agency sanctioned leaks to selected journalists about phantom plots
supposedly disrupted as a result of information gained through the
program in order to craft a narrative of success.</p>
<p>The Senate report, like a <a
href="http://www.levin.senate.gov/download/?id=20d5eeec-4892-4d34-9b15-c32ee31f8245"
target="_blank">2009 Senate Armed Services Committee report (PDF)</a>,
says Air Force psychologists under contract to the CIA
reverse-engineered a decades-old resistance-training program taught to
U.S. airmen known as survival evasion resistance escape (SERE).</p>
<p>According to a SERE training document obtained by Al Jazeera titled
“Coercive Exploitation Techniques,” Air Force personnel were taught
that communist regimes used “deprivations” of “food, water, sleep and
medical care” as well as “the use of threats” in order to weaken a
captive’s mental and physical ability to resist interrogation.
“Isolation” would be used, according to the SERE program, to deprive
the “recipient of all social support” so that he develops a
“dependency” on his interrogator. And “physical duress, violence and
torture” are used to weaken “mental and physical ability to resist
exploitation.”</p>
<p>Ironically, perhaps, the SERE document (displayed below) notes that
such techniques were used by the Soviet Union, China and North Korea to
obtain false confessions.</p>
<p>Senate investigators allegedly obtained from the CIA a 2003
“business plan,” written by Air Force psychologists James Mitchell and
Bruce Jessen, that contained erroneous details about the positive
aspects of the enhanced interrogation program and the veracity of the
intelligence its extracted from detainees. The “business plan” states
that Al-Qaeda captives were “resistant” to “standard” interrogation
techniques, an argument the Senate report found lacked merit because
torture techniques were used before they were even questioned.</p>
<p>Neither Jessen, who lives in Spokane, Wash., nor Mitchell, who
resides in Land o’ Lakes, Fla., responded to phone calls or emails for
comment. Both men are featured prominently in the Senate’s report,
according to U.S. officials.</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="subHeading section">
<h2 class="subHeading-title">The ‘experiment’</h2>
</div>
<div class="text section">
<p>According to Al Jazeera’s sources, <a
href="http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/abu-zubaydah-diaries.html">Zain
Abidin Mohammed Husain Abu Zubaydah</a> was the only captive subjected
to all 10 torture techniques identified in an August 2002 Justice
Department memo. But the U.S. officials said the Senate report
concludes that the methods applied to Abu Zubaydah went above and
beyond the guidelines outlined in that memo and were used before the
memo establishing their legality was written.</p>
<p>The Senate report allegedly adopts part of a narrative from former
FBI special agent Ali Soufan, who first interrogated Abu Zubaydah at
the black site and wrote in his book “The Black Banners” that Mitchell
was conducting an “experiment” on Abu Zubaydah.</p>
<p>For example, the August 2002 Justice Department legal memo
authorized sleep deprivation for Abu Zubaydah for 11 consecutive days,
but Mitchell kept him awake far longer, the U.S. officials said, citing
classified CIA cables. Abu Zubaydah was stripped naked, strapped into a
chair and doused with cold water to keep him awake. He was then
interrogated and asked what he knew, at which point, his attorney told
Al Jazeera, Abu Zubaydah was “psychotic” and would have admitted to
anything.</p>
<p>Additionally, the report allegedly says that Abu Zubaydah was
stuffed into a pet crate (the type used to transport dogs on airplanes)
over the course of two weeks and routinely passed out, was shackled by
his wrists to the ceiling of his cell and subjected to an endless loop
of loud music. One former interrogator briefed about Abu Zubaydah’s
interrogations from May to July 2002 told Al Jazeera that the music
used to batter the detainee’s senses was by the Red Hot Chili Peppers.</p>
<p>Abu Zubaydah’s attorney, Brent Mickum, hopes the Senate report’s
executive summary will vindicate what he has been saying for years. “My
client was tortured brutally well before any legal memo was issued,”
Mickum said. He expects the report to “show that my client was a
nonmember of Al-Qaeda, contrary to all of the earlier reports by the
Bush administration. I am also confident that the report will show
that, after he was deemed to be compliant while he was held in
Thailand, that he continued to be tortured on explicit orders from the
Bush administration.”</p>
<p>The Senate report, according to Al Jazeera’s sources, says that CIA
interrogators were under an enormous pressure from top agency
officials, themselves under pressure from the White House, to use
“enhanced” interrogation techniques to obtain information from
detainees connecting Iraq and Al-Qaeda.</p>
<p>One interrogator who worked for the CIA and the U.S. military during
Bush’s tenure and participated in the interrogations of two high-value
CIA prisoners told Al Jazeera — speaking on condition of
anonymity because he is still employed by the U.S. government — that
the “enhanced” interrogation program was “nothing more than the
Stanford Prison Experiment writ large.” (The 1971 Stanford University
study <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-14564182"
target="_blank">shocked the public</a> by demonstrating how easily
people placed in authority over more vulnerable others resorted to
cruelty.)</p>
<p>“Interrogators were being pressured — You have to get info from
these people,’” the interrogator told Al Jazeera. “There was no
consideration that the person we were interrogating may not know. That
was always seen as a resistance technique. ‘They [the detainees] must
be lying!’ There was pressure on us from above to produce what they
wanted. Not a single person I worked with knew how to conduct an
interrogation or [had] ever conducted an interrogation.”</p>
</div>
<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863.9977
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.freedomarchives.org">www.freedomarchives.org</a>
</div>
</body>
</html>