CIA secret prisons revelations

By Jan Peters:

CIA secret prisons organized from Germany

1 September 2009

A report in the New York Times on August 13 confirms that the CIA planned and organized secret prisons from the German city of Frankfurt/Main. At least three secret prisons were administered by the CIA branch office in Frankfurt beginning in 2003.

These illegal prisons belonged to the worldwide network of “black sites” to which the CIA transferred many of its prisoners in its “war against terror.” There were at least eight such secret prisons maintained by the CIA outside the US.

The prisons run from Frankfurt included two that were located respectively in the Romanian capital of Bucharest and a remote part of Morocco. A third is alleged to have been in the Polish town of Kiejkuty, near the Szymany airport. A fourth prison was located in Lithuania.

The secret prisons were used to extort information from prisoners using methods of torture that would not have been possible in the US. The director of the Frankfurt CIA branch office at that time, Kyle D. Foggo, told the Times that these measures were organized from Frankfurt because “it was too sensitive to be handled by headquarters.”

In September 2006, then US president George W. Bush admitted the existence of secret prisons for the first time. These torture prisons were used to systematically subject those deemed to be terrorist suspects to sleep deprivation, waterboarding and beatings in order to obtain information or extort confessions.

British legal action charity Reprieve has condemned a stealth announcement by the Obama administration that the abduction and torture of suspects will continue under its “extraordinary renditions” programme: here.

Doctors had ‘central role’ in CIA abuse: rights group: here.

Doctors, nurses, psychologists, and other health care professionals complicit in the US torture program should be subject to an independent investigation, and those found to have violated professional ethics or the law should be prosecuted and/or lose their license and professional society memberships. That sentiment, from the nonprofit Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), may well mark the first time a doctors’ group has demanded true accountability of its professional peers: here.

C.I.A. Resists Disclosure of Records on Detention: here.