ICH
On the Trail of the CIA - murder, abduction and torture
Mon Dec 12, 2005 21:22
On the Trail of the CIA
Operating in the shadows, American secret services have been given wide-ranging powers by the Bush Administration. And they include murder, abduction and torture.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11284.htm
By MANFRED ERTEL, ERICH FOLLATH, HANS HOYNG
MARION KRASKE, GEORG MASCOLO AND JAN PUHL
12/10/05 "Der Spiegel" -- -- Since Sept. 11, the CIA has played a vital role in the war on terror. But what role is it? Operating in the shadows, American secret services have been given wide-ranging powers by the Bush Administration. And they include murder, abduction and torture.
It's Saturday, Sept. 15, 2001, four days after the terror attacks in New York and Washington. US President George W. Bush withdraws with his closest advisors to Camp David in order to escape the chaos of the week and to develop the first plans to confront the new and unprecedented challenge facing the United States.
In the afternoon, then CIA head George Tenet distributes a file to all participants of the crisis summit. It's called "Going to War." Inside are the first rough outlines of the coming war against terrorism. In the upper left corner of the file's cover, there is a red circle inside of which is a portrait of Osama bin Laden with a black line drawn through it.
Tenet wants to finally go on the offensive. And his list of priorities is ambitious. Goal number one: Destroy al-Qaida and close off the terror group's zones of safety wherever they might be.
According to Bob Woodward in his book "Bush at War," this is a list with wide-ranging powers granted to authorities battling worldwide terror. And Tenet does not hold back. He requests that his agents be given the go-ahead to eliminate al-Qaida wherever the CIA comes across the terror group. He wants Carte blanche for clandestine operations without having to first go through the long process of having them authorized. In addition, CIA agents should once again be given the authority to kill -- a power withdrawn from US intelligence agents in 1976 by then President Gerald Ford.
Also on Tenet's wish list is a request for hundreds of millions of dollars to be used in buying intelligence assistance from foreign secret services. Specifically, Tenet was thinking about agents from Egypt, Jordan and Algeria -- and he is sure that help from these country's secret services would dramatically increase the CIA's ability to track down and eliminate al-Qaida.
Three days later, Bush signs a Presidential Directive whose exact wording only a very few Americans know until this day. Point for point, the demands made by the CIA were granted, and with that, the document became the first shot fired in the worldwide war on terror. Bush ordered the CIA to be the first on the new front -- America's secret service was unleashed.
Four years later, America's secret services -- and especially the CIA (the "flagship of the business ... where you come if you want the gold standard," according to the agency's new director Porter Gosss) -- have become one of the most controversial weapons in the fight against terrorism. While the most powerful army in the world has become ever-more an occupying power in Iraq and, by it's mere presence, has attracted a whole new generation of mujahedeen, Bush's secret services have fought their part of the battle under the apparent motto, "The end justifies all means."
America's agents, whose worldwide presence and disdain for international legal norms right up through the 1970s gained them a reputation for being ugly Americans, are back on the international political stage. Not everybody is happy to see them.
And Bush is using all the tools at his disposal. Measured by sheer numbers and capability, America's gigantic secret service apparatus appears just as omnipotent as his military: Fifteen secret services with 200,000 employees and a yearly budget of some $40 billion. The sum represents more than most countries even spend on their militaries. The satellites of these agencies can read license plates from space -- and the newest generation of these advanced spy satellites are just as sophisticated as the Hubble Space Telescope. But instead of looking out into the depths of the universe, they are focused downwards to the goings on here on Earth.
Every day, analysts from this secret army deliver their findings to their superiors and, in the form of the Presidential Daily Briefing, to President Bush himself. It's a sort of super-secret daily newspaper -- with severely limited circulation of course -- generally comprising between 12 and 30 pages. It's the most important thing you have to read every day, Bush Senior -- himself head of the CIA for a year -- told his son when Bush Junior took office.
But the secret war does not end with America's spy agencies. Likewise in the shadows -- sometimes operating within international law, sometimes outside the boundaries -- are the special forces of the American military. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld sends them on missions across the globe; indeed they may, some say, already be operating inside of an Iran that continues its pursuit of nuclear weapons. He would be "surprised and disappointed" if covert measures were not already under way against Iran's armaments program, says Ashton Carter, assistant secretary of defense under Bill Clinton.
And where American personnel can't go, the National Security Agency's (NSA) worldwide network can eavesdrop. The NSA routinely listens in on what is going on in the United Nations in New York -- and UN General Secretary Kofi Annan, for awhile at least, was one of the agency's number one targets says James Bamford, a leading expert on the NSA.
One of the newest weapons in the secret service arsenal is called "geolocating." Should, for example, satellites identify the location of a suspect through a mobile phone signal, then special forces or warplanes can quickly strike. The technology has become so precise, that mobile telephones can be located to within one meter.
Indeed, the ability to precisely locate a target was instrumental, in November 2001, in killing al-Qaida military head Mohammed Atif in his house near Kabul, or in the arrest of bin-Laden aide Abu Subeida in Pakistan. But the system also makes grave mistakes. In 2002 in Afghanistan, for example, hastily scrambled bombers dropped their ordnance on a wedding party instead of on a targeted meeting of terrorists.
CIA head Goss, himself a CIA agent for 10 years before he went into politics, encourages the taking of risks by his agents. "And when it goes wrong, I will support you," he has told them. He sends his agents with deadly powers and backpacks full of dollars into operations all over the world where they also have the authority to call in air power. Or, alternatively, they can call in a Predator -- drones armed with laser-controlled Hellfire rockets and which can be steered from half a world away using a simple joystick.
In the 1980s and 90s, secret operations in foreign countries became more and more seldom and analysis was emphasized. That, though, was the old CIA -- an organization former agent Melissa Boyle derided by saying, that the days of James Bond were long gone. But now, the enemies of yesteryear are history. President Bush has repeatedly warned Americans that the new enemy confronting the US is totally different than all those that have come before.
The warning also represents the birth of the new CIA -- an agency that should strike fear into the hearts of its enemies.
So is the CIA on the road to re-establishing the notoriety it for so long had in the Third World? That of a frightening, secret power that kidnapped politicians, bought mercenary troops and toppled governments at will merely because Washington didn't approve of them?
Already shortly after the agency's founding on July 26, 1947 by President Harry Truman, the CIA had made the world its playground and had began deciding who were the good guys and who were the bad guys. And they punished the bad guys at the order of the White House.
The "firm" had license to kill, and used it during the Cold War against a Soviet enemy that was at least as brutal. In the 1960s, the CIA developed a highly poisonous arrow that was supposed to leave no traces whatsoever during an autopsy. They also experimented with training dolphins to deliver explosives to a given target.
But in reality, these were hollow victories. Mixed in with the successes were disastrous missions abroad and embarrassing mistakes at home. The combination led to the CIA becoming more of a burden then a help. The nation was horrified to learn that President Richard Nixon used former agents for the Watergate break-in; Americans were disgusted by the government's spying on tens of thousands of citizens critical of their government; the term "America's Gestapo" began to make the rounds.
The result was a reigning in of Big Brother. In 1974, a law went into effect requiring that all clandestine operations abroad had to be rubber-stamped by Congress. The secret services began concentrating almost exclusively on technological data-gathering methods -- and thus largely stayed out of the Iranian revolution. And in an Afghanistan fighting against the USSR, the CIA didn't pick up that the mujahedeen -- generously supplied by the Americans with arms and money -- were not only fanatic opponents of the Soviets, but were also against the American "crusaders."
Part II: Cheney goes to the dark side
Indeed, the pact with the Islamist warriors -- in combination with an almost blind faith in the Pakistani secret services -- played a large role in the development of the Taliban and al-Qaida both. Afghanistan became Bin Laden Land.
The fact that Sept. 11 resulted in major changes to the American secret services was thus hardly a surprise. What was surprising, though, was the speed with which the secret services regained their old, bad reputation. The list is growing once again: allegations that the CIA handed out large sums of money in Venezuela in an effort to topple Hugo Chavez; and a growing number of terrorists executed by the agency's drones.
A Hellfire rocket fired by a CIA Predator took out, in Yemen, the alleged ring-leader of the 2000 attack on the USS "Cole." The CIA killed the Egyptian Hamsa Rabia -- the al-Qaida number three -- in Pakistan not far from the Afghanistan border using the same weapon earlier this month.
Vice President Richard Cheney, who, even on his good days, increasingly resembles an old-style Soviet general secretary, publicly announced the CIA's change of directions. One has to operate in the shadows, he says. In order to defeat the terrorists, America's agents "have to work the dark side, if you will." If the enemy doesn't play by the rules, then we won't either, is Cheney's message.
The war in Afghanistan, and the hunt for bin Laden, showed to what extent the CIA was willing to use its new powers. Cofer Black, the coordinator for counter-terrorism, demanded the head of the al-Qaida boss and meant it quite literally. The gruesome trophy should be sent express -- and "on ice" -- to Washington, he said. Bush also takes the hunt for the terrorists personally: In his desk is a list of al-Qaida leaders that he crosses off each time one of them is captured or killed.
Originally, the CIA likely considered taking out all al-Qaida bigwigs using Hit Teams -- much like Israel's Mossad killed those responsible for the 1972 Olympic bloodbath in Munich or executed the military leaders of Hamas in the Gaza Strip. But then, the concern won out that even as the al-Qaida leaders were erased, unknown terror groups could strike again.
A new idea gained credence -- that of capturing al-Qaida members alive in order to interrogate them and profit from information about the organization and its plans. Information was the only way to combat the danger of new attacks.
Exactly how far this system to gather information has gone -- and how widespread the prisons set up to house those captured -- is known by only a very few Americans. At the request of Cheney, only the chairs and vice-chairs of the intelligence committees in the Senate and the House are informed. Such information is top secret, Cofer Black told a congressional group in September 2002. "This is a highly classified area," he said. "All I want to say is that there was before 9/11 and after 9/11. After 9/11 the gloves come off."
All congressional and legal investigations into the abuse of prisoners by Americans until now have had to be performed without the benefit of insight into the practices of the CIA. Not even the Red Cross has been allowed access to a number of high value prisoners from Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the planner of the attacks on New York and Washington, to Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, the head of an al-Qaida training camp. They have just disappeared.
For those in control of the scattered, CIA prisons, there is no higher power. The Republican John D. Rockefeller, a member of the Senate intelligence committee complains that the government has made it clear that all those who would demand an element of control over these areas are to be criticized as being unpatriotic.
Although the exact extent of the CIA's new powers remains unclear, that which is known is enough to know that human rights are being violated as are international conventions and treaties. Targeted liquidations, the kidnapping of suspects abroad and the delivery of prisoners to other country's secret services are very definitely examples of such violations.
But above all, the interrogation experts from the CIA are still equipped with six notorious torture tools with which they can force prisoners to talk. To define them, government lawyers have chosen harmless-sounding euphemisms: the "Attention Grab" describes the practice of grabbing the shirt of a prisoner and shaking him -- only, of course, to get his attention. Then there's the "Attention Slap" and the "Belly Slap." Doctors recommended not using the fist out of fire of causing internal injuries.
Worse, though, is "long time standing," whereby prisoners are forced to stand uninterruptedly for as long as 40 hours. Rumsfeld's boorish observation that he too has to stand for hours during his workday seems rather cynical by comparison.
The keyword "cold cell" describes a practice of cooling prisoners' cells down to 10 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit) and then repeatedly pouring cold water over them. But it's "waterboarding" that has generated the most outcry -- a form of water torture which leads the prisoner to believe that he is drowning or suffocating. Only a few seconds of waterboarding are necessary to get the most prisoners to talk. Khalid Sheik Mohammed is said to have held out a mere two minutes and a half. Senator Carl Levin, a Democratic member of the Senate intelligence committee, is demanding transparency. "It's totally unacceptable that documents that are requested from the CIA have not been forthcoming," Levin said during hearings held by a panel investigating the Abu Ghraib abuses.
Part III: Tortured to death by the CIA
It is likely that nobody will ever now how many terror suspects abducted by the CIA have died in the torture chambers of Egyptian, Algerian, Syrian or Saudi Arabian prisons. When every thing possible has been used to extract every last bit of information, the suspects trail often vanishes.
In fact, it is generally good news for prisoners when they end up in prisons controlled directly by the CIA. There, "only" those methods of Torture Light describe above are used. But those examples of prisoners dying while in American hands show just how quickly things can get out of control.
In November 2002, the guards at a secret prison -- called "Salt Pit" -- located not far from Kabul were ordered to strip one uncooperative Afghan prisoner naked, chain him to the concrete floor of his cells, and leave him there in below-zero temperatures all night. In the morning, he was dead. After a hurried autopsy, the guards quickly buried him in an unmarked grave on the edge of the city.
But only one
Operating in the shadows, American secret services have been given wide-ranging powers by the Bush Administration. And they include murder, abduction and torture.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11284.htm
By MANFRED ERTEL, ERICH FOLLATH, HANS HOYNG
MARION KRASKE, GEORG MASCOLO AND JAN PUHL
12/10/05 "Der Spiegel" -- -- Since Sept. 11, the CIA has played a vital role in the war on terror. But what role is it? Operating in the shadows, American secret services have been given wide-ranging powers by the Bush Administration. And they include murder, abduction and torture.
It's Saturday, Sept. 15, 2001, four days after the terror attacks in New York and Washington. US President George W. Bush withdraws with his closest advisors to Camp David in order to escape the chaos of the week and to develop the first plans to confront the new and unprecedented challenge facing the United States.
In the afternoon, then CIA head George Tenet distributes a file to all participants of the crisis summit. It's called "Going to War." Inside are the first rough outlines of the coming war against terrorism. In the upper left corner of the file's cover, there is a red circle inside of which is a portrait of Osama bin Laden with a black line drawn through it.
Tenet wants to finally go on the offensive. And his list of priorities is ambitious. Goal number one: Destroy al-Qaida and close off the terror group's zones of safety wherever they might be.
According to Bob Woodward in his book "Bush at War," this is a list with wide-ranging powers granted to authorities battling worldwide terror. And Tenet does not hold back. He requests that his agents be given the go-ahead to eliminate al-Qaida wherever the CIA comes across the terror group. He wants Carte blanche for clandestine operations without having to first go through the long process of having them authorized. In addition, CIA agents should once again be given the authority to kill -- a power withdrawn from US intelligence agents in 1976 by then President Gerald Ford.
Also on Tenet's wish list is a request for hundreds of millions of dollars to be used in buying intelligence assistance from foreign secret services. Specifically, Tenet was thinking about agents from Egypt, Jordan and Algeria -- and he is sure that help from these country's secret services would dramatically increase the CIA's ability to track down and eliminate al-Qaida.
Three days later, Bush signs a Presidential Directive whose exact wording only a very few Americans know until this day. Point for point, the demands made by the CIA were granted, and with that, the document became the first shot fired in the worldwide war on terror. Bush ordered the CIA to be the first on the new front -- America's secret service was unleashed.
Four years later, America's secret services -- and especially the CIA (the "flagship of the business ... where you come if you want the gold standard," according to the agency's new director Porter Gosss) -- have become one of the most controversial weapons in the fight against terrorism. While the most powerful army in the world has become ever-more an occupying power in Iraq and, by it's mere presence, has attracted a whole new generation of mujahedeen, Bush's secret services have fought their part of the battle under the apparent motto, "The end justifies all means."
America's agents, whose worldwide presence and disdain for international legal norms right up through the 1970s gained them a reputation for being ugly Americans, are back on the international political stage. Not everybody is happy to see them.
And Bush is using all the tools at his disposal. Measured by sheer numbers and capability, America's gigantic secret service apparatus appears just as omnipotent as his military: Fifteen secret services with 200,000 employees and a yearly budget of some $40 billion. The sum represents more than most countries even spend on their militaries. The satellites of these agencies can read license plates from space -- and the newest generation of these advanced spy satellites are just as sophisticated as the Hubble Space Telescope. But instead of looking out into the depths of the universe, they are focused downwards to the goings on here on Earth.
Every day, analysts from this secret army deliver their findings to their superiors and, in the form of the Presidential Daily Briefing, to President Bush himself. It's a sort of super-secret daily newspaper -- with severely limited circulation of course -- generally comprising between 12 and 30 pages. It's the most important thing you have to read every day, Bush Senior -- himself head of the CIA for a year -- told his son when Bush Junior took office.
But the secret war does not end with America's spy agencies. Likewise in the shadows -- sometimes operating within international law, sometimes outside the boundaries -- are the special forces of the American military. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld sends them on missions across the globe; indeed they may, some say, already be operating inside of an Iran that continues its pursuit of nuclear weapons. He would be "surprised and disappointed" if covert measures were not already under way against Iran's armaments program, says Ashton Carter, assistant secretary of defense under Bill Clinton.
And where American personnel can't go, the National Security Agency's (NSA) worldwide network can eavesdrop. The NSA routinely listens in on what is going on in the United Nations in New York -- and UN General Secretary Kofi Annan, for awhile at least, was one of the agency's number one targets says James Bamford, a leading expert on the NSA.
One of the newest weapons in the secret service arsenal is called "geolocating." Should, for example, satellites identify the location of a suspect through a mobile phone signal, then special forces or warplanes can quickly strike. The technology has become so precise, that mobile telephones can be located to within one meter.
Indeed, the ability to precisely locate a target was instrumental, in November 2001, in killing al-Qaida military head Mohammed Atif in his house near Kabul, or in the arrest of bin-Laden aide Abu Subeida in Pakistan. But the system also makes grave mistakes. In 2002 in Afghanistan, for example, hastily scrambled bombers dropped their ordnance on a wedding party instead of on a targeted meeting of terrorists.
CIA head Goss, himself a CIA agent for 10 years before he went into politics, encourages the taking of risks by his agents. "And when it goes wrong, I will support you," he has told them. He sends his agents with deadly powers and backpacks full of dollars into operations all over the world where they also have the authority to call in air power. Or, alternatively, they can call in a Predator -- drones armed with laser-controlled Hellfire rockets and which can be steered from half a world away using a simple joystick.
In the 1980s and 90s, secret operations in foreign countries became more and more seldom and analysis was emphasized. That, though, was the old CIA -- an organization former agent Melissa Boyle derided by saying, that the days of James Bond were long gone. But now, the enemies of yesteryear are history. President Bush has repeatedly warned Americans that the new enemy confronting the US is totally different than all those that have come before.
The warning also represents the birth of the new CIA -- an agency that should strike fear into the hearts of its enemies.
So is the CIA on the road to re-establishing the notoriety it for so long had in the Third World? That of a frightening, secret power that kidnapped politicians, bought mercenary troops and toppled governments at will merely because Washington didn't approve of them?
Already shortly after the agency's founding on July 26, 1947 by President Harry Truman, the CIA had made the world its playground and had began deciding who were the good guys and who were the bad guys. And they punished the bad guys at the order of the White House.
The "firm" had license to kill, and used it during the Cold War against a Soviet enemy that was at least as brutal. In the 1960s, the CIA developed a highly poisonous arrow that was supposed to leave no traces whatsoever during an autopsy. They also experimented with training dolphins to deliver explosives to a given target.
But in reality, these were hollow victories. Mixed in with the successes were disastrous missions abroad and embarrassing mistakes at home. The combination led to the CIA becoming more of a burden then a help. The nation was horrified to learn that President Richard Nixon used former agents for the Watergate break-in; Americans were disgusted by the government's spying on tens of thousands of citizens critical of their government; the term "America's Gestapo" began to make the rounds.
The result was a reigning in of Big Brother. In 1974, a law went into effect requiring that all clandestine operations abroad had to be rubber-stamped by Congress. The secret services began concentrating almost exclusively on technological data-gathering methods -- and thus largely stayed out of the Iranian revolution. And in an Afghanistan fighting against the USSR, the CIA didn't pick up that the mujahedeen -- generously supplied by the Americans with arms and money -- were not only fanatic opponents of the Soviets, but were also against the American "crusaders."
Part II: Cheney goes to the dark side
Indeed, the pact with the Islamist warriors -- in combination with an almost blind faith in the Pakistani secret services -- played a large role in the development of the Taliban and al-Qaida both. Afghanistan became Bin Laden Land.
The fact that Sept. 11 resulted in major changes to the American secret services was thus hardly a surprise. What was surprising, though, was the speed with which the secret services regained their old, bad reputation. The list is growing once again: allegations that the CIA handed out large sums of money in Venezuela in an effort to topple Hugo Chavez; and a growing number of terrorists executed by the agency's drones.
A Hellfire rocket fired by a CIA Predator took out, in Yemen, the alleged ring-leader of the 2000 attack on the USS "Cole." The CIA killed the Egyptian Hamsa Rabia -- the al-Qaida number three -- in Pakistan not far from the Afghanistan border using the same weapon earlier this month.
Vice President Richard Cheney, who, even on his good days, increasingly resembles an old-style Soviet general secretary, publicly announced the CIA's change of directions. One has to operate in the shadows, he says. In order to defeat the terrorists, America's agents "have to work the dark side, if you will." If the enemy doesn't play by the rules, then we won't either, is Cheney's message.
The war in Afghanistan, and the hunt for bin Laden, showed to what extent the CIA was willing to use its new powers. Cofer Black, the coordinator for counter-terrorism, demanded the head of the al-Qaida boss and meant it quite literally. The gruesome trophy should be sent express -- and "on ice" -- to Washington, he said. Bush also takes the hunt for the terrorists personally: In his desk is a list of al-Qaida leaders that he crosses off each time one of them is captured or killed.
Originally, the CIA likely considered taking out all al-Qaida bigwigs using Hit Teams -- much like Israel's Mossad killed those responsible for the 1972 Olympic bloodbath in Munich or executed the military leaders of Hamas in the Gaza Strip. But then, the concern won out that even as the al-Qaida leaders were erased, unknown terror groups could strike again.
A new idea gained credence -- that of capturing al-Qaida members alive in order to interrogate them and profit from information about the organization and its plans. Information was the only way to combat the danger of new attacks.
Exactly how far this system to gather information has gone -- and how widespread the prisons set up to house those captured -- is known by only a very few Americans. At the request of Cheney, only the chairs and vice-chairs of the intelligence committees in the Senate and the House are informed. Such information is top secret, Cofer Black told a congressional group in September 2002. "This is a highly classified area," he said. "All I want to say is that there was before 9/11 and after 9/11. After 9/11 the gloves come off."
All congressional and legal investigations into the abuse of prisoners by Americans until now have had to be performed without the benefit of insight into the practices of the CIA. Not even the Red Cross has been allowed access to a number of high value prisoners from Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the planner of the attacks on New York and Washington, to Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, the head of an al-Qaida training camp. They have just disappeared.
For those in control of the scattered, CIA prisons, there is no higher power. The Republican John D. Rockefeller, a member of the Senate intelligence committee complains that the government has made it clear that all those who would demand an element of control over these areas are to be criticized as being unpatriotic.
Although the exact extent of the CIA's new powers remains unclear, that which is known is enough to know that human rights are being violated as are international conventions and treaties. Targeted liquidations, the kidnapping of suspects abroad and the delivery of prisoners to other country's secret services are very definitely examples of such violations.
But above all, the interrogation experts from the CIA are still equipped with six notorious torture tools with which they can force prisoners to talk. To define them, government lawyers have chosen harmless-sounding euphemisms: the "Attention Grab" describes the practice of grabbing the shirt of a prisoner and shaking him -- only, of course, to get his attention. Then there's the "Attention Slap" and the "Belly Slap." Doctors recommended not using the fist out of fire of causing internal injuries.
Worse, though, is "long time standing," whereby prisoners are forced to stand uninterruptedly for as long as 40 hours. Rumsfeld's boorish observation that he too has to stand for hours during his workday seems rather cynical by comparison.
The keyword "cold cell" describes a practice of cooling prisoners' cells down to 10 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit) and then repeatedly pouring cold water over them. But it's "waterboarding" that has generated the most outcry -- a form of water torture which leads the prisoner to believe that he is drowning or suffocating. Only a few seconds of waterboarding are necessary to get the most prisoners to talk. Khalid Sheik Mohammed is said to have held out a mere two minutes and a half. Senator Carl Levin, a Democratic member of the Senate intelligence committee, is demanding transparency. "It's totally unacceptable that documents that are requested from the CIA have not been forthcoming," Levin said during hearings held by a panel investigating the Abu Ghraib abuses.
Part III: Tortured to death by the CIA
It is likely that nobody will ever now how many terror suspects abducted by the CIA have died in the torture chambers of Egyptian, Algerian, Syrian or Saudi Arabian prisons. When every thing possible has been used to extract every last bit of information, the suspects trail often vanishes.
In fact, it is generally good news for prisoners when they end up in prisons controlled directly by the CIA. There, "only" those methods of Torture Light describe above are used. But those examples of prisoners dying while in American hands show just how quickly things can get out of control.
In November 2002, the guards at a secret prison -- called "Salt Pit" -- located not far from Kabul were ordered to strip one uncooperative Afghan prisoner naked, chain him to the concrete floor of his cells, and leave him there in below-zero temperatures all night. In the morning, he was dead. After a hurried autopsy, the guards quickly buried him in an unmarked grave on the edge of the city.
But only one
- (Cont'd) On the Trail of the CIA —ICH, Mon Dec 12 21:25
- (Cont'd) On the Trail of the CIA —ICH, Mon Dec 12 21:27
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