Nov 3, 11:26 PM
Secret CIA facilities
The Washington Post reported yesterday that the CIA’s system of secret facilities for holding and interrogating terrorism suspects includes a Soviet-era building somewhere in Eastern Europe.
Over the last four years, other CIA facilities have been located in at least eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan, Cuba (Guantanamo Bay) and “several democracies” in Eastern Europe, the Post reports
As the story makes clear, the decision to violate American and international law in this way was made rashly and has proven counterproductive.
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.
Since then, the arrangement has been 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. Mid-level and senior CIA officers began arguing two years ago that the system was unsustainable and diverted the agency from its unique espionage mission.
“We never sat down, as far as I know, and came up with a grand strategy,” said one former senior intelligence officer who is familiar with the program but not the location of the prisons. “Everything was very reactive. That’s how you get to a situation where you pick people up, send them into a netherworld and don’t say, ‘What are we going to do with them afterwards?’ ”
The article quotes CIA officials saying that perhaps 30 of the detainees are, in fact ranking al Qaeda operatives. Seventy more are in a group “considered less important, with less direct involvement in terrorism and having limited intelligence value.” These are held in facilities run not by the CIA but by officials in the “host” countries.
It’s this latter group that includes people like Canadian citizen Maher Arar who was abducted in late 2002 and held in the US for two weeks before being flown to Syria, where he claims he was held and tortured for a year before being simply returned, apparently for lack of any evidence he had done or planned to do anything wrong. The US officially denied to Canada that it had any knowledge of its citizen.
I’m not saying that all the suspects are as clean as Arar apparently is; I’m sure that many of them are awful people who have done awful things. So let’s put them on trial and determine who is guilty and who isn’t. Let’s follow due process. Let’s believe in our system and show that it can work.
Our present course is accomplishing nothing and it is risking a great deal. Namely, we’re jeopardizing the ability to be seen ever again as a trustworthy, law-abiding country—let alone one that can stand as a champion for human rights and democracy. We are violating our most deeply held principles and hurting our own foreign policy interests in the process.
Also
The Post reporters write that they decided not to list the names of the European countries involved in the secret program because of fear that it would make those countries susceptible to terrorist attack. There is some validity to that concern, but I would say it’s all the more evidence that foisting our illegal activity onto other countries is deeply wrong. How cowardly to sneak around and put other countries in danger that we would not take on ourselves.
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