The Washington Independent

Posts Tagged black sites

Obama Troop Announcement Renews Focus on Bagram

By | 12.02.09 | 11:56 am

One of many consequences of President Obama’s decision to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan is that those troops are likely to capture many more prisoners that end up at the U.S.-run prison at Bagram air base.  That’s raising concerns among human rights groups that the More…

Did the Defense Department Stop Reporting Deaths of Detainees in U.S. Custody?

By | 09.04.09 | 4:40 pm

Dr. Steven Miles, a professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School and faculty member of its Center for Bioethics, for years tried to track the deaths of “war on terror” detainees being held in U.S. custody. The author of the book “Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity and More…

As Expected, CIA Continues to Withhold Key Documents

By | 09.01.09 | 3:06 pm

As Spencer noted, in responding to a federal judge’s order to turn over another batch of documents including President George W. Bush’s authorization of CIA secret prisons, and records of investigations into the abuse of detainees in U.S. custody, the Department of Justice instead opted More…

Crooked Dusty Foggo Helped Set Up CIA Black Sites

By | 08.13.09 | 12:59 pm

In a story more baroque than could have been imagined, The New York Times reports that Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, a senior former CIA official and key figure in the corruption scandals that brought down Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham — the guy even wanted to run for Cunningham’s congressional More…

New Details on CIA ‘Black Sites’

By | 08.13.09 | 9:51 am

The New York Times has a blockbuster story this morning about the infamous secret prisons — or “black sites” — operated by the CIA for housing and interrogating high-value terror suspects. The article contains new details about the locations of the sites:

One jail was a renovated

More…

ACLU Asks UN to Investigate Extraordinary Rendition

By | 06.26.09 | 3:43 pm

The American Civil Liberties Union yesterday, along with Alkarama for Human Rights, asked two U.N. special rapporteurs to investigate the “extraordinary rendition,” detention and torture of Abou Elkassim Britel, an Italian citizen and one of the victims suing Jeppesen Dataplan, the subsidiary of Boeing the allegedly helped the More…

Abu Zubaydah’s Interrogation, In His Own Words

By | 04.28.09 | 6:12 pm

For a forthcoming piece, I was combing through the International Committee of the Red Cross’s formerly-confidential 2007 interviews with the 14 detainees who, until September 2006, the CIA kept at its undisclosed “black site” secret prisons. (Mark Danner disclosed the document in a recent New York Review of Books More…

Where Are The Ghost Detainees?

By | 04.22.09 | 12:21 pm

Don’t miss Dafna Linzer’s ProPublica report — following up on her post last week about an inadvertently acknowledged secret CIA detainee — on so-called “ghost detainees” believed to held by the CIA but unreported to, say, the Red Cross. If another country did this, we’d probably call these More…

Report Details Origins of Bush-Era Interrogation Policies

By | 04.21.09 | 10:00 pm

A wealth of new details emerged Tuesday about how techniques designed to help captured U.S. troops resist torture formed the basis for the post-9/11 interrogation policies of the Bush-era Pentagon.

Instructors of those techniques proved to be eager in 2002 and 2003 to disseminate them to an emerging crop of More…

Redaction Fail: Where is Hassan Ghul?

By | 04.17.09 | 9:39 am

Dafna Linzer at ProPublica has a fantastic find from her close reading of the CIA memos. What appears to be an inadvertent lack of redaction hints that CIA held a detainee called Hassan Ghul in one of its black site secret prisons. He wasn’t sent to Guantanamo Bay along More…