New Light on the CIA's Secret Detention Program

Around 30 suspected senior al-Qaeda terrorists are being held in a secret network of "black sites" around the world, including a former Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to a detailed investigative report published on November 2 by the Washington Post.

The report, written by the Post's National Security Correspondent Dana Priest, provides the fullest account so far of the CIA's secret detention and interrogation program.  Two points emerge strongly from the story: first, that a central objective was to reduce legal and political oversight of the process to an absolute minimum; and secondly, that the CIA's policies were drawn up without any thought as to their long-term implications.

Priest reports that "the secret detention system was conceived in the chaotic and anxious first months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when the working assumption was that a second strike was imminent."   It was authorized by a presidential finding signed on September 17 "that gave the CIA broad authorization to disrupt terrorist activity, including permission to kill, capture and detain members of al Qaeda anywhere in the world."  

Initially, most detainees were held in Afghanistan and at a secret base in Thailand.  After the existence of the Thai base was revealed in June 2003, the country's government insisted it be shut down.  In the meantime a series of other bases had been opened -- including a number in newly democratic Eastern European countries, of which one is now said to be the CIA's most important detention centre.

The irony of CIA detainees being held secretly in Soviet-era compounds in newly democratic states hardly requires comment.  According to the Post report, "It is illegal for the government to hold prisoners in such isolation in secret prisons in the United States, which is why the CIA placed them overseas, according to several former and current intelligence officials and other U.S. government officials. Legal experts and intelligence officials said that the CIA's internment practices also would be considered illegal under the laws of several host countries, where detainees have rights to have a lawyer or to mount a defense against allegations of wrongdoing."

The continuation of the network of detention centres is therefore dependent on "keeping even basic information about the system secret from the public, foreign officials and nearly all members of Congress charged with overseeing the CIA's covert actions." 

The existence and 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."

"The CIA and the White House, citing national security concerns and the value of the program, have dissuaded Congress from demanding that the agency answer questions in open testimony about the conditions under which captives are held. Virtually nothing is known about who is kept in the facilities, what interrogation methods are employed with them, or how decisions are made about whether they should be detained or for how long."

Even acknowledging the existence of these "black sites...could open the U.S. government to legal challenges, particularly in foreign courts, and increase the risk of political condemnation at home and abroad," according to government officials interviewed by Dana Priest.

According to the report, the system is now increasingly debated within the CIA, "where considerable concern lingers about the legality, morality and practicality of holding even unrepentant terrorists in such isolation and secrecy, perhaps for the duration of their lives." Some suspects whose connection to al-Qaeda was less certain were sent to other countries for interrogation and have since been released (often claiming to have been tortured by the countries to which they were "rendered").  But the 30 or so detainees being held directly by the CIA are unlikely to be released -- yet probably cannot be brought to trial even in the military commissions set up by the United States because of the abusive treatment they have received.

They therefore face the prospect of being held indefinitely in incommunicado solitary confinement in locations whose existence is never publicly revealed.

As previously discussed on this site, the US government has developed a highly controversial interpretation of international law that would allow intelligence agents to use abusive treatment short of torture against foreign nationals outside the United States.  Under this interpretation, neither the laws applicable in "international" or "non-international" armed conflict are binding on the United States, and the Torture Convention allows abusive treatment short of torture to be practiced outside US territory against non-citizens (an interpretation that no US authority had even hinted at before 9/11).

However, US intelligence agents would in any case be bound by the laws of countries in which the secret detention centres are located -- for instance laws against torture, assault or unlawful confinement. 

The policies would also be likely to constitute violations of fundamental principles of human rights -- such as the right not to be held in prolonged arbitrary detention -- that the United States has acknowledged to be binding principles of international law.  In addition, Eastern European countries that allowed secret detention centres to be maintained on their territory would probably be in breach of the European Convention of Human Rights.

Related Chapters from Crimes of War: What the Public Should Know:

Terrorism

Torture

Related Links:

CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons

By Dana Priest

The Washington Post, October 5, 2005

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