We learned yesterday of the death of at least one member of a group of CIA "ghost prisoners", captured detainees who have since simply disappeared, their current whereabouts still unknown. Bet you didn't know that there are still at least 10 CIA prisoners whose locations remain, in the best tradition of Dick Cheney, undisclosed.
Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, one of the first 9/11 operatives captured, was tortured until he told U.S. interrogators what they wanted to hear about links between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s alleged post Gulf-War chemical and germ warfare programs, plots that were later shown to be based in a third-country deception. Al-Libi has in recent weeks become the focus of attention by those seeking evidence that the Bush-Cheney White House forced false confessions to bolster its case for invading Iraq.
Al-Libi is now reported by Reuters to have committed suicide in a Libyan jail after the CIA renditioned him there.
This raises the question - was al-Libi silenced, and what has happened to other missing "ghost detainees"?
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We're Going to Change Your Brain" 
Have U.S. intelligence officials been engaged in a Bush White House operation to torture prisoners to falsify details about the War on Terrorism and the 9/11 attacks?
The answer to that may be discerned in the stark words spoken to Binyam Mohamed – one of the "dirty-bomb suspects", now released in the UK -- after the CIA renditioned him to a prison in Morocco. A torturer told him, "we’re going to change your brain."
We’ve now seen government documents produced that detailed the waterboarding of the principle 9/11 planners: Abu Zubaydeh (AZ), Khalid Sheikh Mohamed (KSM), and Rahim al-Nashiri. AZ was waterboarded 83 times in August, 2002, KSM 183 times after his capture in March 2003, and al-Nashiri twice after his capture in the Emirates and transfer to the CIA in late 2002.
Despite the use of the most extreme forms of "enhanced interrogation" against these individuals, no credible evidence of any real "ticking time-bomb" type attack on the United States was ever extracted from these "high-value" detainees. What emerged from their repeated, prolonged partial drowning was a confused mish-mash of disinformation and scrambled memories of imagined plots that those being tortured thought their interrogators wanted to hear.
In addition to al-Libi, who has now turned up dead, the roster of disappeared CIA detainees includes the following:
Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, Abdul Aziz, Abdul Rahim al-Sharqawi, Muhammed al-Darbi, Mohammed Omar Abdel-Rahman, Yassir al-Jazeeri, Adil al-Jazeeri, Tariq Mahmood, Hassan Ghul, Musaad AruchiCurious, have you seen anyone asking where they are, and what might have been done during their interrogations?
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Prolonged Waterboarding, Sleep Deprivation - Lost and Altered Memory
Late last week, another important document was released that showed AZ was intentionally deprived of sleep for periods as long as 11 continuous days. Sleep deprivation for longer than a week is considered life-threatening.
Another detainee that has been identified with extreme sleep deprivation is Binyam Mohamed, who was suspended by shackles, sleepless and bombarded with noise for ten days on end at the CIA's "dark prison" in Afghanistan. Jose Padilla, also an accused dirty-bomb plotter, emerged a near-vegetable after his four years of isolation, and sensory and sleep deprivation at the Navy Brig in Charleston, SC.
After reviewing the terms of his confinement detailed in Padilla’s court filings, the US Supreme Court found that the practice of holding "unlawful enemy combatants" without access to counsel and the courts violated the US Constitution. Two fellow prisoners held at the Brig under similar conditions of isolation and lack of stimuli, Yasser Hamdi and Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, suffered similar mental anguish. Their mental incapacitation became so alarming that military doctors wrote 91-pages of memos made public last October concerning the psychological torture they observed against Padilla and the two other American citizens imprisoned there.
In the last two weeks, we’ve also seen White House and Justice Department documents that authorization 11 forms of Enhanced Interrogation (aka, torture), along with a list of Congressional leaders who were advised about their use.
What hasn’t been explained was why any reasonable policy-maker would consent to the use of waterboarding and prolonged sleep deprivation to obtain information, as these techniques are well-known to cause hallucination, permanent memory loss, cognitive dysfunction, and brain damage. That is, if the point was to extract accurate informantion and preserve evidence. You know, like civilized countries that uphold the Rule of Law.
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CIA Torture Center (CTC) – Who Was Really In Charge?In previous articles, I identified former head of the CIA Counter-Terrorism Center (CIA/CTC) Cofer Black as in immediate charge of the unit that actually carried out the rendition and torture of Abu Zubaydeh. See, "THE CIA OFFICER WHO OVERSAW TORTURE: Cofer Black",
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/leveymg/337; Daily Kos: "Perjury by CIA Counterterrorism Center Director - the Blocked Memo",
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/6/10/105125/910 According to a recently disclosed document, we now know that after AZ was captured on March 28, 2002, he was waterboarded 83 times during the month of August, and that Zubuydah's blood-oxygen level was not monitored during waterboarding. That followed shortly after the Bybee memo dated August 1 that proclaimed the legality and "harmless" nature of waterboarding and the rest of the 11 EI techniques.
As CTC Director since 1999, Cofer Black set up and was in charge of the CIA’s renditions and interrogations programs that started scooping up and disappearing suspected al-Qaeda operatives to CIA-operated "black sites" in early 2002. Previously, there had been some 70 renditions going back to 1995, started by Black’s predecessor, Michael Scheuer. What was different about the new Bush-Cheney program was that Americans would be carrying out the torture,
in some cases against other Americans. The types of torture officially permitted also diverged from previous U.S. practice to include waterboarding and sleep/sensory deprivation lasting longer than a week, along with sensory overload and deprivation (MK-ULTRA program "psychic driving"), techniques that were known to obtain unreliable information but also to cause permanent brain damage and insanity.
The articles also points out some aspects about Mr. Black’s career that included activities and contacts that contradicted the sanitized, official narrative of CIA-al Qaeda contact offered by the 9/11 Commission.
Black’s career as a CIA officer was highly unusual in that he specialized in one subject – UBL. Black was CIA Chief of Station in Khartoum at the same time bin Laden was running worldwide operations from that location in mid-1990s. Indeed, Black is the only CIA official who has publicly acknowledged having face-to-face contact with UBL after the Russians withdrew from Afghanistan in 1991.
Black recounts that the two had a confrontation in 1996, shortly before going their separate ways. Also in Sudan with bin Laden at the time was Abu Zubaydeh.
AZ was then busy coordinating al-Qaeda training of Islamic militants carrying out terrorist attacks on the Russians in Chechnya and Bosnia. As I pointed out after a conversation here at DU with Paul Thompson, AZ and a Syrian named Louai al-Sakka ran camps in Afghanistan, Turkey and Pakistan with the aid of several intelligence services in the region. The U.S. still officially denies any involvement in support of those operations, a claim that is widely disputed around the world. In statements through a lawyer, Sakka says that he was a double-agent working for Syrian intellignce and the CIA before he was captured by Turkey, where he is being held. He also claims that he passed a message to the CIA warning of the 9/11 attack, but that was ignored. The Times of London reported that Paul Thompson uncovered evidence that indicates that Tenet received Sakka's warning before 9/11. See,
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article2936761.eceSomething else that some in the CIA might not want Americans to know is that Abu Zubaydeh had a hand in training six of the principal 9/11 hijackers, including Nawaf al-Hazmi, who led the Flt. 77 hijacking that slammed into the Pentagon. Al-Hazmi and some of the others, including Binyam Mohamed, were originally recruited and trained by AZ to fight the Russians in Chechnya. Starting to see a pattern here?
Cofer Black was in charge of the CTC on January 15, 2000, when al-Hazmi along with Khalid al-Midhar, entered the U.S. after attending a week-long planning summit in Kuala Lumpur that was monitored by the CIA and "a half dozen allied agencies", as George Tenet testified before the Joint Intelligence Committee in 2002.
The FBI has long accused the CIA of withholding crucial evidence about the pair and obstructing Bureau efforts to locate and track al-Qaeda cells known to be inside the U.S. before 9/11. In early 2000, a series of cables were drafted by FBI liaison persons posted at CTC that would have alerted the Bureau to the presence of al-Hazmi and al-Midhar, but each of those cables was withheld at the order of the CTC Assistant Director. However, both the CIA and FBI Directors were repeatedly briefed about the Kuala Lumpur summit - it was handled at the top of both agencies as an extremely important event.
The CTC Assistant Director at the time has been alternately identified in official documents as "Richard", "Rich B", and as "James" in the FBI OIG’s report. We will call him Richard, the name he is referred to in the 9/11 Commission report. Regardless, it's certain that Cofer Black was Director and operational head of CTC at the time the principal 9/11 hijackers were allowed into the U.S., and Richard was his deputy. Richard replaced Michael Scheuer as operations chief of Alec Station, the CIA’s bin Laden unit within CTC at Tyson’s Corner, VA as part of a 1999 shakeup of the unit ordered by George Tenet. Cofer Black and Richard, in particular, were considered to be Tenet proteges.
While Director Louis Freeh was fully briefed, those FBI draft cables never reached John O’Neill, the FBI's top al-Qaeda hunter, head of the FBI National Security Unit in New York. O'Neill had a series of furious run-ins with Black and his deputy from 1999 until the day he died at the World Trade Center shortly after his forced FBI resignation.
Al-Hazmi and al-Midhar's identities as al-Qaeda operatives were well known to Cofer Black and Richard, and a number of others in intelligence agencies around the world. U.S. and British intelligence has been monitoring al-Midhar’s communications and movements since the mid-1990s, when British Intelligence and the NSA started monitoring a communications center in Yemen run by al-Midhar’s father-in-law. Despite being designated international terrorists, the pair traveled internationally and inside the U.S. with such apparent ease that Author Joe Trento concludes Al-Hazmi and al-Midhar were handled by the CIA as double-agents working for Saudi intelligence. In other words, they were being protected from U.S. law enforcement, and they knew it.
Al-Midhar was known to the CIA to have a valid US visa, information the FBI claims wasn’t passed on to Bureau investigators until August 2001. Al-Midhar left the US after a few months without interference and freely traveled around the world on al-Qaeda business, renewed his visa (which shouldn't have happened), and taking a key role organizing the Cole bombing and recruiting the dozen or so "muscle hijackers" in Saudi Arabia, returning in the months before 9/11.
In late 1999, Al-Hazmi and al-Midhar were dispatched to the Malaysia planning session by Khalid Sheikh Mohamed (KSM), whose identity as a terrorist had been known to various intelligence services for an even longer period, since the 1993 WTC bombing. KSM received the most waterboarding sessions. The third al-Qaeda detainee waterboarded, al Nashiri, is credited as the chief planner of the USS Cole attack. He was also observed in attendance at the early January planning session in Malaysia, as was Ramzi bin al-Sheibh, Mohamed Atta’s roommate in Hamburg. Al-Shibh actually traveled back to Hamburg and returned to the conference - had anyone bothered to track him, he would have led the CIA directly to Atta. Bin al Shibh is reported to also have had a brief acquaintance with the waterboard.
So, who was in charge of the CIA unit that carried out torture of the 9/11 detainees? George Tenet dug in as CIA Director until his resignation with the Presidential Medal of Freedom on June 4, 2004. Many around him left at about this time. Deputy Director John McLaughlin announced his departure the next day. James Pavitt, head of CIA Operations, retired in August 2004.
The Washington Post announced Black’s reassignment on May 17, 2002. Black immediately moved to a largely ceremonial post at the State Dept. with Ambassadorial rank – and diplomatic immunity -- as head of counter-terrorism before joining Blackwater, the principal Iraq security contractor with the Department. Richard dropped off the screen with Black. The only hint as to Black’s replacement is contained in an article about the present difficulties of the Obama Administration dealing with the legacy of torture by John Sifton. Sifton advises:
Investigations should focus also on high-level executive officers in the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center (CTC) who are still at the agency, for example, G— —, a former deputy to Jose Rodriquez, the chief of CTC back in 2002-2004 and who now enjoys a prestigious CIA station-chief posting in Europe. (I can’t reveal her name or posting; it remains covert. It should also be noted that the former CTC chief of operations also remains at the agency.)
As we’ve recently learned, Abu Zubaydeh was waterboarded 83 times in August, 2002. Reportedly, no effort was made to monitor his blood oxygen levels during his sessions, resulting in black-outs, cessation of respiration, and near-death. Obviously, preserving his testimony for later legal proceedings was not the point, particularly after Mr. Rodriguez ordered the tapes of his and KSM's interrogations destroyed. KSM was captured the following March, and he suffered 183 partial drownings during the month of April, 2003.
Whoever was in charge of CTC after Black, inherited a fully developed renditions and torture mechanism and a team that was ready to put many unpleasant memories behind them.
We really should now demand to find out what happened to the others who were disappeared.
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Available in Orange with links:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/5/11/730314/-Reuters:-Disappeared-CIA-Ghost-Detainee-Reported-Suicide 
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