WASHINGTON, 3 November 2005 — The CIA has been holding and interrogating Al-Qaeda captives at a secret facility in Eastern Europe and elsewhere, part of a covert prison system established after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, The Washington Post reported yesterday. Because it is illegal for the US government to hold prisoners in isolation in secret facilities in the United States, the CIA arranged for high-security terror prisoners to be placed in such facilities overseas, says yesterday’s Washington Post.
The existence and locations of these facilities — known as “black sites” in classified White House, CIA, Justice Department and congressional documents — are known to only a handful of officials in the United States, and usually only to the president and few top intelligence officers in each host country. These volatile revelations in the Post claim the CIA’s most important Al-Qaeda suspects are being held at a “Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe”.
The secret facility is part of a prison system that was set up six days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when President Bush authored a bill 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.”
The CIA declined to comment yesterday on the report. Asked about the report published yesterday, a CIA spokeswoman replied: “We decline to comment.”
The White House refused to confirm or deny yesterday that the CIA operates secret prisons, known as “black sites,” for Al-Qaeda suspects in Eastern Europe and other countries around the world. “I am not going to discuss any specific intelligence activities,” White House spokesman Scott McClellan said. “I would say that the president’s most important responsibility is to protect the American people.”
But former President Jimmy Carter denounced what he said was “a profound and radical change in the basic policies or moral values of our country” in reaction to the report. “This is just one indication of what has been done under this administration to change the policies that have persisted all the way through our history,” said Carter.
During the past four years, the CIA’s “black sites” have included locations in eight countries, says the Post, including “Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba.”
Earlier yesterday, Thailand denied that it had worked with the CIA to imprison terror suspects. But, according to the Post, Al-Qaeda’s Abu Zubaida and Sept. 11 planner Ramzi Binalshibh were flown to Thailand. “After published reports revealed the existence of the site in June 2003, Thai officials insisted the CIA shut it down, and the two terrorists were moved elsewhere,” the Post writes.
The Post said it did not publish the names of the Eastern European countries involved in the covert program due the request from senior US officials. “They argued that the disclosure might disrupt counterterrorism efforts in those countries and elsewhere and could make them targets of possible terrorist retaliation.”
“These disclosures make a mockery of the pretensions that the US is spreading liberty and democracy to other countries, claims that Bush administration has been making in Iraq,” said Howard Zinn, author of “A People’s History of the United States,” and professor emeritus at Boston University. “If this is the liberty and democracy that we have been bringing to other countries, then they have an absolute right to reject us.”
