Secret CIA prisons

Well, anyone who keeps up on the internet has known about these for years but the secret CIA prisons have just come to public light in the mainstream press. I want to call your attention to an editorial by the Star Tribune entitled, "U.S. must dismantle its secret CIA gulag". Here's part of what it says:

Not many months ago, Amnesty International and Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., got in hot water for respectively calling Guantánamo Bay prison "the gulag of our times" and comparing America's treatment of terror-war detainees to the kind of treatment one would expect from the Soviet gulag, Pol Pot, Nazis and others. Durbin apologized.

Now comes a story by the Washington Post's Dana Priest describing a string of secret CIA prisons scattered around the world, including one at an old Soviet facility in Eastern Europe. These are prisons that are known only to a handful of officials, facilities where inmates are kept, potentially until they die, in dark, sometimes underground cells. The prisoners have no contact with anyone except jailers, are afforded no legal rights and are subjected to "enhanced" interrogation techniques that include almost drowning them. That is a gulag, albeit a miniature one.

This string of prisons is where the most important terrorist suspects are kept. Those with less potential intelligence value are "renditioned" to other countries for interrogation, including some nations that are known by the State Department to practice torture.

All this has left many professionals at the CIA, Priest reports, distressed about the legality, morality and benefits of the operation. As many experts and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a former POW, have said, this sort of treatment does not yield good intelligence. It is also a poor reflection on the United States, a horrible example that enables other countries to use similar techniques.

Incredibly, the Bush administration wants the inhuman treatment to continue. McCain has sponsored legislation banning the "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment of prisoners by the U.S. military and its intelligence agencies. In early October, the Senate passed the measure by a vote of 90-9. It now awaits action by a conference committee. President Bush has threatened to veto the measure if it contains the McCain language, while Vice President Dick Cheney has been lobbying hard to get the CIA exempted. At the same time, Cheney's new chief of staff, David Addington, is pushing the Pentagon to avoid invoking the Geneva Conventions in a new code that top military leaders want to promulgate for the armed forces.

I was really disappointed in Durbin at the time for apologizing. I hope he feels vindicated.

Pay attention to what is being done in our name.