Wednesday, July 10, 2019
CIA Torture Unredacted: Four-Year Investigation Reveals What Was
Hidden in US Senate Torture Report
New
report is the
most comprehensive public account of one of the most disturbing elements of
America's so-called 'War on Terror’
commondreams.org/news/2019/07/10/cia-torture-unredacted-four-year-investigation-reveals-what-was-hidden-us-senate
One night in October 2001, shortly after
al-Qaeda's attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, a private jet
touched down in Karachi. Masood Anwar, a prominent Pakistani journalist,
received an unexpected tip from
a friend in the airport: "There were men in masks. They took a hooded man
onboard in the early hours. Someone videotaped the entire thing. No one was
allowed near the site."
Anwar's story, although no one knew it
at the time, would be the start of a thread which led to the heart of the
Central Intelligence Agency's most secret “War on Terror” operation: the
"rendition, detention, interrogation" (RDI) programme, a nine-year
covert effort which had scores of prisoners flown around the globe to be
tortured in undisclosed sites.
The CIA started by grabbing terror
suspects off the streets and transferring them in secret to interrogators in
the Middle East. But soon the agency decided it needed to run its own detention
facilities, or "black sites". Over the next few years, it set up a network
of prisons and a fleet of private jets to move people between them.
In December 2014, the Bureau,
alongside The Rendition Project,
began a major project to trace the history of the RDI programme. The impetus
for our investigation came from the long-awaited publication of a report into
CIA torture by the US Senate Select Intelligence Committee. The authors of this
report had high-level access to internal CIA documents, which they mined to
produce a damning assessment of the torture programme's brutality,
mismanagement and ineffectiveness. But they were compelled by the Obama
administration, and by the CIA itself, to censor — "redact" — all
parts of the report that could identify specific times and places where abuses
had occurred.
This is important, because without being
able to tie illegal activities to specific times and places, the quest for
redress is hamstrung, and meaningful accountability — legal, public, historical
— remains a mirage.
The Senate report did offer a crucial
insight, however: the first complete list of prisoners held in the CIA's black
sites. 119 names, each with a date of custody (redacted) and a record of how
many days they were held (also partly redacted).
In the days after the publication of the
Senate report, we set to work reconstructing this list to reveal the hidden
dates. Figuring out a date often meant that we could match it to a flight
record; matching to a flight record meant that we could determine where a
prisoner was brought from or sent to. As we cross-correlated thousands of data
points — from declassified government documents, footnotes in the Senate
report, aviation data, records of corporate outsourcing of rendition flights,
legal cases, media reporting and NGO investigations — the contours of the CIA's
programme of secret detention and torture began to emerge more clearly. Rather
than just understanding certain individual histories, we could begin to discern
the entire scope of the programme's development.
More than four years later, we're
publishing the results of our investigation in a 400-page report entitled CIA
Torture Unredacted. It is the first time that the entirety of the CIA's
detention programme has been systematically revealed.
When the Senate Committee released their
report, fewer than half the names on the list of prisoners were known. We
reported in 2015 that only 36 of
those held by the CIA had been taken on to Guantanamo Bay, while the fate of
many of the others remained a mystery. Seized in secret, held in secret, they
were then disposed of in secret — some back to their homes, some into continued
custody in other countries, again often in secret
Since then, we've been able to establish
the histories — at least to some extent — of around 100 prisoners. We've traced
over 60 operations to transport them to and from prison sites. We've uncovered
who was held in Afghanistan, and revealed more fully than before who was sent
to the European black sites, in Poland, Romania and Lithuania. We've also
brought to light further details of how deeply implicated the UK was in the
overall running of the CIA's torture network.
Last year, some of our findings were
cited in two judgments at the European Court of Human Rights, which held that
Romania and Lithuania had assisted the US in illegally holding prisoners
incommunicado on their territory. Elsewhere, our work has assisted legal teams,
police inquiries and citizen accountability projects.
CIA Torture Unredacted is the most comprehensive public
account of one of the most disturbing elements of the ‘War on Terror’: a global
programme of systematic disappearance and torture, carried out by the world’s
most powerful liberal democratic states in contravention of laws which they
purport to uphold. In the face of continued obstruction and denial by the
governments involved, we hope that it will stand as a central reference point
for all those interested in accountability, truth and the rule of law.
© 2016 Bureau of Investigative Journalism
Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center,
325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email:
mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class has always declared the wars; the
subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to
gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and
everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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