Prisons abroad?

exerpts from:

CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons
Debate Is Growing Within Agency About Legality and Morality of Overseas System Set Up After 9/11

By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 2, 2005; A01

Here's the link to the full article, it's a really good read and raises a lot of questions about what the hell is going on with the "war against terrorism", which seems to be turning into a huge failure in my opinion due to incompetence and illogical policies that only hurt us in the end.

The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.

The hidden global internment network is a central element in the CIA's unconventional war on terrorism. It depends on the cooperation of foreign intelligence services, and on keeping even basic information about the system secret from the public, foreign officials and nearly all members of Congress charged with overseeing the CIA's covert actions.

....

Host countries have signed the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, as has the United States. Yet CIA interrogators in the overseas sites are permitted to use the CIA's approved "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques," some of which are prohibited by the U.N. convention and by U.S. military law. They include tactics such as "waterboarding," in which a prisoner is made to believe he or she is drowning.

....why would they need to be exempted from this? what are you gonna gain from a prisoner by torturing him? you might as well kill the person because it usually produces bad information anyways, and it ruins our reputation abroad.

More than 100 suspected terrorists have been sent by the CIA into the covert system, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials and foreign sources. This figure, a rough estimate based on information from sources who said their knowledge of the numbers was incomplete, does not include prisoners picked up in Iraq.

....

But many CIA officers believed that the al Qaeda leaders would be worth keeping alive to interrogate about their network and other plots. Some officers worried that the CIA would not be very adept at assassination.

"We'd probably shoot ourselves," another former senior CIA official said.

....i understand the reasoning for keeping them alive and not assassinating them, but does torturing them or keeping them alive in secret prisons serve us any better? If they are so dangerous and guilty, why not prosecute them in the US, and if the laws don't allow that (which is what i keep hearing), then change the frickin laws.

"Then came grisly reports, in the winter of 2001, that prisoners kept by allied Afghan generals in cargo containers had died of asphyxiation. The CIA asked Congress for, and was quickly granted, tens of millions of dollars to establish a larger, long-term system in Afghanistan, parts of which would be used for CIA prisoners.

The largest CIA prison in Afghanistan was code-named the Salt Pit. It was also the CIA's substation and was first housed in an old brick factory outside Kabul. In November 2002, an inexperienced CIA case officer allegedly ordered guards to strip naked an uncooperative young detainee, chain him to the concrete floor and leave him there overnight without blankets. He froze to death, according to four U.S. government officials. The CIA officer has not been charged in the death.

The Salt Pit was protected by surveillance cameras and tough Afghan guards, but the road leading to it was not safe to travel and the jail was eventually moved inside Bagram Air Base. It has since been relocated off the base."

...who are the warlords in Afghanistan? I'd like to remind people what the definition is:

n : supreme military leader exercising civil power in a region especially one accountable to nobody when the central government is weak (www.dictionary.com)

....hmmm....i'm not saying that the US government or military leaders are warlords or that they're doing everything wrong, most of what they do is good. But it only takes one weak link in the chain...secret prisons that torture people - avoiding all civil laws - along with military operations that aim to piss off villagers by purposely burning bodies of the taliban - these seem to be the weak links that could be easily fixed with some common sense, not by BS excuses and evadement by government officials.

"In hindsight, say some former and current intelligence officials, the CIA's problems were exacerbated by another decision made within the Counterterrorist Center at Langley.

The CIA program's original scope was to hide and interrogate the two dozen or so al Qaeda leaders believed to be directly responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks, or who posed an imminent threat, or had knowledge of the larger al Qaeda network. But as the volume of leads pouring into the CTC from abroad increased, and the capacity of its paramilitary group to seize suspects grew, the CIA began apprehending more people whose intelligence value and links to terrorism were less certain, according to four current and former officials.

The original standard for consigning suspects to the invisible universe was lowered or ignored, they said. "They've got many, many more who don't reach any threshold," one intelligence official said. "

...It doesn't seem like this can go on for much longer, if it's not right to do this in our country, or any other country with a strong rule of law for that matter, it's eventually going to be uncovered and blowup in a huge media exhibition like Abu Grave. It always does