WP: New light shed on CIA’s secret prisons

[rebel with a cause]

Former inmate’s account offers inside view
By Dafna Linzer and Julie Tate
The Washington Post
Updated: 12:13 a.m. CT Feb 28, 2007

On his last day in CIA custody, Marwan Jabour, an accused al-Qaeda paymaster, was stripped naked, seated in a chair and videotaped by agency officers. Afterward, he was shackled and blindfolded, headphones were put over his ears, and he was given an injection that made him groggy. Jabour, 30, was laid down in the back of a van, driven to an airstrip and put on a plane with at least one other prisoner.

His release from a secret facility in Afghanistan on June 30, 2006, was a surprise to Jabour -- and came just after the Supreme Court rejected the Bush administration's assertion that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to prisoners like him.

Jabour had spent two years in "black sites" -- a network of secret internment facilities the CIA operated around the world. His account of life in that system, which he described in three interviews with The Washington Post, offers an inside view of a clandestine world that held far more prisoners than the 14 men President Bush acknowledged and had transferred out of CIA custody in September.

"There are now no terrorists in the CIA program," the president said, adding that after the prisoners held were determined to have "little or no additional intelligence value, many of them have been returned to their home countries for prosecution or detention by their governments."

But Jabour's experience -- also chronicled by Human Rights Watch, which yesterday issued a report on the fate of former "black site" detainees -- often does not accord with the portrait the administration has offered of the CIA system, such as the number of people it held and the threat detainees posed. Although 14 detainees were publicly moved from CIA custody to the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, scores more have not been publicly identified by the U.S. government, and their whereabouts remain secret. Nor has the administration acknowledged that detainees such as Jabour, considered so dangerous and valuable that their detentions were kept secret, were freed.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17372067/

[Gman]

1. Outrage...?

Anyone...? Go ahead... speak up... don't be shy... anyone?

[Spangle]

2. CRIMINALS!

They do this in OUR name. We are liable for what they do. Hmmm... People want to know why 9-11 happened.. they should read storys like THIS! "WE" are not above the law, "WE" are not above the world.

Funding for the CIA should be cut totally out.

[rebel with a cause]

3. It should at least be controlled,

lets say by a new "commander in chief" in the WH.

The CIA may have a role to play in the intelligence game, but this is not it. This is an agency that is out of control, or under the control of "evil doers". ;-( Their (everyone that can be connected to the falacy of all these doings, including agencies) powers need to be taken away. NOW!

By the way, isn't it odd that this puritan country we live in seems to think the first thing to do to a prisoner is to strip them naked and take their pictures? And the best way to treat them is to keep them naked and chained up in the dark? Kind of reminds me of what I have read about the slave ships. Why is that?

[LynnTheDem]

4. What kind of nation has secret prisons? What kind of nation disappears people?

What kind of nation launches unprovoked invasions on other nations?

Other than Saddam Hussein's Iraq, that is.

USA! USA! USA!

[rebel with a cause]

5. Three little letters

that mean so much today. :puke: Nervous stomach, you know the feeling. You sometimes get it when you know something bad has happened or is going to happen.

[Solly Mack]

6. "often does not accord with the portrait the administration has offered"

Translation: Liars

and they'll keep lying and America will keep pretending that somehow this will all be just A-OK if only Bush is gone

America tortures.America detains people, hidden away in secret prisons, for no reason and it's government policy. How will that ever be OK? It is not enough to just stop the torture, stop the secret prisons...the guilty must be held accountable.


Never again begins with accountability...otherwise, the words are meaningless.

[Supersedeas]

7. a legacy of human rights violations - but nothing to see here, right Abrams??

[peacetalksforall]

8. Why all the focus on the CIA? Don't you think it was Rumsfeld's

DIA that started all this, but that the torture program was transferred to the CIA? Either in name only (i.e., the DIA is still in charge) - or - to avoid any kind of military budget and oversite issue with Congress? Could the blame or actual conversion have taken place when Tenet exited and Goss entered?

Perhaps they evenhad a fight over who could do it?

The CIA already had the aircraft?

The State Dept already set up the coalition partners to let us make fuel stops?

Or is it just a NSA-DIA-CIA-WH-Corporation-Baron partnership?

This country is sick, utterly sick, disastrously sick.

Remember the reality threat that was made?

When next you hear Cheney, Rice, Bush or any on their team talk about our democracy - stand up and scream for those whose screams we can only imagine.

[magellan]

9. I think I'm going to take up knitting.

Or perhaps collecting navel lint, or studying the growth of grass. Anything would be more productive than waiting for these lying criminals to be brought to account for all the evil they've done.

[rebel with a cause]

10. Ain't it the truth.

:mad:

[izzybeans]

11. I am sad and ashamed.

[bemildred]

12. Our own imperial secret police, and our own Gulag Archipelago.

So much for American exceptionalism.

[Jack Rabbit]

13. I am outraged that an international tribunal has not yet been convened

I am outraged that the war criminals Bush and Cheney have not been impeached and removed from office.

We don't need to refer to Nazis any more. A neoconservative is bad enough.

[donkeyotay]

14. Aside from being immoral, the harm being done to our country is incalculable.

Cheney said some crap about us having to go over to the dark side. It's another one of those things no one has publicly explained. If we're dealing with really bad people, how does our adopting their tactics make us successful against them? If our system of freedom and democracy is so superior, why can't it stand on its own? Why do they immediately have to destroy democracy to defend it?

The CIA itself had said, before our government came out of the closet on torture, that torture didn't work. Yet, we do it. Why?

Maybe one day Cheney can explain what an enormous success this has been, but in the meantime we KNOW that it has been a political disaster for the US. Other than not being a successful tactic, it's disgusting and immoral. Come to think of it, it's also illegal. But none of that seems to matter anymore. It's your world, Dick.

[KT2000]

15. The least our representatives

could do is act on impeachment, otherwise these prisons and torture stand for all americans. It is time for Democrats in congress to take a stand.

[muriel_volestrangler]

16. 38 people are still known to be missing, but under US control

so they have no Red Cross access, no legal representation of any kind. Thay may easily be tortured - or even killed.

And kudos to the Israelis for following something like a proper legal process with Jabour, and releasing him at the end.