Source: The Bureau of Investigative Journalism/Revealed: The Boom and Bust of the CIA’s Secret Torture Sites
Please take a few minutes to read this detailed, harrowing account by The Bureau of Investigative Journalism of the covert torture sites–“blacksites”–used by the CIA (in places like Thailand, Poland, Lithuania, Romania, Afghanistan) over the last 15 years, and the gruesome practices of torture, euphemistically labelled “enhanced interrogation” techniques that Agency officials, guided by overpaid psychologists, used on the individuals they detained and abused. Note the extremely bizarre lengths gone to in order to evade exposure and questioning by media, circumvent international treaties and laws, duck under national laws, and create “cover” or “color of law” for their actions.
It is especially important to understand what the CIA has been doing covertly that it has been forced to reveal– because other things they are doing covertly are yet to be “officially” revealed. Covert Actions, which include MK ULTRA-Extended Mind Hacking Human Subject Experimentation targeting thousands of individuals in the USA and worldwide, as attested to by CIA/DoD scientists, are continuing today in the USA and abroad.
It’s troubling to read accounts like this, but it forces us, as Americans, as citizens of the world, to understand more clearly what extremes of abuse and torture are being committed in the name of National Security, Intelligence, Counter-Intelligence, and Counter-Terrorism by our Secret Services and Intelligence and Security Agencies–who spend a lot of time wearing an innocuous face in public. If we do not take on board the atrocities being committed — in our name, ultimately, and with taxpayer money — we will continue to turn a blind eye to what they are doing, and continue to give them enormous power as Agencies to be feared and let alone.
Fully realizing, in all consciousness, the extent of the abuse they are engaging in — one cannot but experience a supreme revulsion — must force us to take action. We must come to a point, collectively as a nation to ask: Who are these secret agencies? How can they possibly engage in such outrageous abuse? Who are they accountable to? Who pays their salaries? Why are we permitting them to engage in Any kind of covert action at all? Do we really want to live in a country where we permit a powerful, moneyed Agency to run Black Ops, Covert Ops, Clandestine Ops–both here in the USA and abroad, on covertly-targeted citizens and others–in order to fine-tune undisclosed and “innovative” Torture Technologies, such as No-Touch Torture, as detailed here by Dr. Robert Duncan, in our very midst? Or do we want to wake up and demand Full Disclosure to the Press and Immediate Termination of all their Covert Electronic Torture Experiments on the American and global public?
Excerpt, from the opening:
“In spring 2003 an unnamed official at CIA headquarters in Langley sat down to compose a memo. It was 18 months after George W Bush had declared war on terror. “We cannot have enough blacksite hosts,” the official wrote. The reference was to one of the most closely guarded secrets of that war – the countries that had agreed to host the CIA’s covert prison sites.
Between 2002 and 2008, at least 119 people disappeared into a worldwide detention network run by the CIA and facilitated by its foreign partners.
Lawyers, journalists and human rights organisations spent the next decade trying to figure out whom the CIA had snatched and where it had put them. A mammoth investigation by the US Senate’s intelligence committee finally named 119 of the prisoners in December 2014. It also offered new insights into how the black site network functioned – and gruesome, graphic accounts of abuses perpetrated within it.
Many of those 119 had never been named before.
The report’s 500-page summary, which contained the CIA official’s 2003 remarks, was only published after months of argument between the Senate committee, the CIA and the White House. It was heavily censored, while the full 6,000-page study it was based on remains secret. All names of countries collaborating with the CIA in its detention and interrogation operations were removed, along with key dates, numbers, names and much other material.
In nine months of research, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and The Rendition Project have unpicked these redactions to piece together the hidden history of the CIA’s secret sites.”
Other excerpts:
“The CIA’s authority to operate prisons began with a document called a “covert action memorandum of notification” – a secret order signed by President Bush the week after the 9/11 attacks. For the first time in its history, the CIA was given permission not only to take prisoners but also to decide whom to detain, why and for how long.”
“Abu Zubaydah was repeatedly waterboarded, sleep-deprived, forced into stress positions and held in boxes. These included a coffin-shaped box, in which he spent eleven days in total, and a box less than three feet square in which he spent 29 hours. Observing one of his interrogations in August, a medical officer wrote:
The sessions accelerated rapidly progressing quickly to the water board after large box, walling, and small box periods. [Abu Zubaydah] seems very resistant to the water board. Longest time with the cloth over his face so far has been 17 seconds. This is sure to increase shortly. NO useful information so far … He did vomit a couple of times during the water board with some beans and rice. It’s been 10 hours since he ate so this is surprising and disturbing. We plan to only feed Ensure for a while now. I’m head[ing] back for another water board session.
The goal, as the two contractor psychologists who masterminded the interrogations put it in August 2002, was “to reach the stage where we have broken any will or ability of subject to resist or deny providing us information (intelligence) to which he had access.”
Please read the whole article at the Bureau’s site: Revealed: The Boom and Bust of the CIA’s Secret Torture Sites
