Washington Post
WASHINGTON — In Afghanistan, the CIA’s secret U.S. interrogation center in Kabul is known as “The Pit,” named for its despairing conditions. In Iraq, the most important prisoners are kept in a huge hangar near the runway at Baghdad International Airport. In Qatar, U.S. forces have been ferrying some Iraqi prisoners to a remote jail on the gigantic U.S. air base in the desert.
The Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where a unit of U.S. soldiers abused prisoners, is just the largest and suddenly most notorious in a worldwide constellation of detention centers — many of them secret and all off-limits to public scrutiny.
These prisons and jails are sometimes as small as shipping containers and as large as the sprawling Guantanamo Bay complex in Cuba. They are part of an elaborate CIA and military infrastructure whose purpose is to hold suspected terrorists or insurgents for interrogation and safe-keeping while avoiding U.S. or international court systems, where proceedings and evidence against the accused would be aired in public. Some are even held by foreign governments at the informal request of the United States.
“The number of people who have been detained in the Arab world for the sake of America is much more than in Guantanamo Bay. Really, thousands,” said Najeeb Nuaimi, a former justice minister of Qatar who is representing the families of dozens of prisoners.
The largely hidden array includes three systems that only rarely overlap: the Pentagon-run network of prisons, jails and holding facilities in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo and elsewhere; small and secret CIA-run facilities where top al-Qaida and other figures are kept; and interrogation rooms of foreign intelligence services — some with documented records of torture — to which the U.S. government delivers or “renders” mid- or low-level terrorism suspects for questioning.
All told, more than 9,000 people are held overseas by U.S. authorities with the vast majority under military control, according to Pentagon figures and estimates by intelligence experts.
Although some of those held by the military in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo have had visits by the International Committee of the Red Cross, some of the CIA’s detainees have, in effect, disappeared, according to interviews with former and current national security officials and to the Army’s report of abuses at Abu Ghraib.
The CIA’s “ghost detainees,” as they were called by members of the 800th MP Brigade, were routinely held by the soldier-guards at Abu Ghraib “without accounting for them, knowing their identities, or even the reason for their detention,” the report says.
Process has protocol
None of the arrangements that permit U.S. personnel to kidnap, transport, interrogate and hold foreigners is ad hoc or unauthorized, including the so-called renderings.
“People tend to regard it as an extra-judicial kidnapping; it’s not,” said former CIA officer Peter Probst. “There is a long history of this. It has been done for decades. It’s absolutely legal.”
In fact, every aspect of this new universe — including maintenance of covert airlines to fly prisoners from place to place, interrogation rules and the legal justification for holding foreigners without due process afforded most U.S. citizens — has been developed by military or CIA lawyers, vetted by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel and, depending on the particular issue, approved by White House General Counsel’s Office or the president himself.
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