Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Black Sites

The Washington Post has a harrowing story up this morning with an interview of Marwan Jabour, an alleged Al-queda paymaster who spent 2 years "disappeared" inside the CIA's network of illegal black sites.
On his last day in CIA custody, Marwan Jabour, an accused al-Qaeda paymaster, was stripped naked, seated in a chair and videotaped by agency officers. Afterward, he was shackled and blindfolded, headphones were put over his ears, and he was given an injection that made him groggy. Jabour, 30, was laid down in the back of a van, driven to an airstrip and put on a plane with at least one other prisoner.

snip

After 28 months of incarceration, Jabour -- who was described by a counterterrorism official in the U.S. government as "a committed jihadist and a hard-core terrorist who was intent on doing harm to innocent people, including Americans" -- was released eight months ago. U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism officials confirmed his incarceration and that he was held in Pakistan and Afghanistan. They would not discuss conditions inside black sites or the treatment of any detainee.

snip

Jabour spent five weeks there, chained to a wall and prevented from sleeping more than a few hours at a time. He said he was beaten nightly by Pakistani guards after hours of questions from U.S. interrogators. Then he and others were whisked off to CIA-run sites. Some sites were in Eastern Europe; Jabour went to one in Afghanistan. Interrogators -- whom he described as Americans in their late 20s and early 30s -- told Jabour he would never see his three children again.

Human Rights Watch has identified 38 people who may have been held by the CIA and remain unaccounted for. Intelligence officials told The Post that the number of detainees held in such facilities over nearly five years remains classified but is higher than 60. Their whereabouts have not been publicly disclosed.

Right. He couldn't have been that dangerous, or else they wouldn't have released him. How many other people are still lost in that nightmare? I have no doubt that America has enemies, after all, we've been busily creating them the last 5 years, but behaving like a fascist South American dictatorship is not the answer. Some days I am completely ashamed of my country.

Article is here: New LIght Shed on CIA's "Black Site" Prisions

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Could the WaPo be publishing right-wing-soothing dreck like Kurtz's Michelle Malkin piece and the Victoria Toensing op-ed, in order to "balance" their real journalism?

Real journalism like Dana Priest's expose of Walter Reed's neglect of veterans, and now this piece on Black sites.

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. But what a horrible disgrace to face with my morning coffee.

four legs good said...

I dunno. You have to remember that there are different areas in the paper, and different editors for each section.

WAPO still has some very fine reporters. It's just that their wankers are so very wankiferous.