The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.
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.
The existence and locations of the facilities -- referred to as "black sites" in classified White House, CIA, Justice Department and congressional documents -- are known to only a handful of officials in the United States and, usually, only to the president and a few top intelligence officers in each host country.
The CIA and the White House, citing national security concerns and the value of the program, have dissuaded Congress from demanding that the agency answer questions in open testimony about the conditions under which captives are held. Virtually nothing is known about who is kept in the facilities, what interrogation methods are employed with them, or how decisions are made about whether they should be detained or for how long.
While the Defense Department has produced volumes of public reports and testimony about its detention practices and rules after the abuse scandals at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and at Guantanamo Bay, the CIA has not even acknowledged the existence of its black sites. To do so, say officials familiar with the program, could open the U.S. government to legal challenges, particularly in foreign courts, and increase the risk of political condemnation at home and abroad.
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
The demand for the rule of law is a conservative demand in normal times but quickly turns into a radical call in times of 'emergency.' It is because of the fact that in the U.S. there are no conservatives left in politics that radicals must fill the vacuum. (A non-trivial question for radicals interested in the history of the U.S. ruling class is: Who was the last conservative? Perhaps Robert Taft.) It is the weakness of the left that we must be the conservatives demanding that these rulers of our lives keep to some minimum of the rule of law and provide basic due process.
I propose to use the occasion of the elite media's acknowledgment of secret prisons, and the exposure of an international CIA gulag, to make a small comment on the affair of Valerie Plame. The connection between the Plame Affair and CIA secret prisons, may seem a bit odd but it I think they are thematically the same story. It is an indication of the ideological weakness of the U.S. left that the responses to the Plame affair has been limited to schadenfreude. We are happy that the likes of Karl Rove and Scooter Libby have been caught out in the cold of their own hypocrisy and lies. We would be happier still if they were sent to jail, but that seems to me unlikely. But is this the limit of our contribution to the Plame affair? Is it possible that Rove and Libby were engaged in an unwitting service to democracy by their exposure of a covert operative?
It seems to me completely unnecessary to further expose the pro-war propaganda campaign that the United States Government and the Bush regime engaged in during the lead up to the invasion of Iraq. It was obvious at the time. Those who believed the Bush-Blair propaganda campaign need to look into themselves and ask what made themselves so susceptible to nationalist fantasy. They should make amends by becoming anti-war activists. The lesson that the left should be teaching is simple skepticism of those in power. We should be pointing out that there has rarely been a war advocated by a powerful state that has been justified in retrospect. Yet, all wars are justified at the time by the propaganda of the state and the rulers and war propaganda more often than not turns out to be cooked. The role of a well functioning intelligence agency is to prop calls of war made by the rulers with the necessary scenery of enemy atrocities and threats. At times, the intelligence agency will also engage in covert operations that are elaborate stage productions aimed to convince the true enemies of the rulers of the U.S., in this case the U.S. people, that war is necessary and inevitable. For those of us who oppose the war drums of the latest imperialist adventures the ideological enemy is patriotism, nationalism, jingoism and racism. One purpose of intelligence agencies and the state in general in the lead up to a war is to lie to the domestic population, producing enough fear and hatred of the target country among the people that the frenzy of jingoism overwhelms reason. When the state and its intelligence agencies fulfill its purpose we on the left should not be surprised. Our duty is to educate people in the historical fact that this is always the way powerful states act in the lead up to the war. Powerful rulers lie and fix the facts in order to get the domestic population to tolerate what the rulers want.
Given this general historical viewpoint we should view the framing of the facts and the propaganda campaign as revealed in the Plame affair as politics as usual except for one fact that the affair highlights: A section of the U.S. ruling class and its elite bureaucrats in the intelligence agencies were not cooperating with the Bush regime, led by Chaney and Rove. I think that we can conclude from this that the Bush regime is a relatively narrow clique of the ruling class. One of the reason for the rampant irrationalism of its rhetoric is that a narrow regime has to constantly whip up the various groups of its base. Most of the rhetoric of the Bush regime and many of its actions, political appointments, etc. should be interpreted from the point of view of the narrowness of the Bush regime within the ruling class as a whole. The reason the exposure of Plame is significant, and the only reason it has become an "affair", is that with Plame the Bush regime proclaimed that it has contempt for a portion of the ruling elite that is important to imperial domination. As Nicholas Lemann put it in a recent New Yorker article:
[T]he conservative foreign-policy position generated a vigorous subculture. Life inside it had many charms, one of which was the unassailability of the conservatives’ ideas .... Conservatives were smarter, bolder, more strategic-minded, and more historically aware than moderate Republicans, being less vitiated by the need to appease interest groups and by the grind of running bureaucracies. When the Central Intelligence Agency or the State Department ... was mentioned in conversation with a foreign-policy conservative, the reference would usually draw a derisive chuckle or a rolling of the eyes: those organizations had been captured by the appeasers, and could be counted on to respond insufficiently to threats.
TELLING SECRETS - How a leak became a scandal by NICHOLAS LEMANN The New Yorker Issue of 2005-11-07, Posted 2005-10-31
The ideological battle of the right wing neo-conservatives has always been aimed against the entrenched bureaucracies of "liberal" imperialism, which they look at as a brake on the expansion of U.S. state and corporate power. Thus, attacking people such as Joseph Wilson (a career State Department official) and his wife Valerie Plame, was simply attacking the representatives of the liberal foreign policy bureaucracy. Such attacks are just part of the game for the extreme reactionaries of the Bush Admnistration. And the fact that this is the way that they play the game, without regard for usual ruling class solidarity, is what separates them from the more 'conservative' elements of the U.S. ruling elite. But when powerful people undermine other powerful people an "affair" or a "scandal" will ensue. This is the simple lesson of the Watergate and the Iran-Contra scandals. (See FN 1)
But this does not mean that we who consider ourselves radicals and internationalists should simply parrot those who wish to drive "the affair" for their own interests. Scandals such as the Plame Affair are most useful if we can use them to expose the usual workings of the state and the ruling class. But they are also useful to expose the hypocrisy of the application of "the rule of law." Thus once again I come back to the beginning of this comment.
Let me make a thematic connection between the Valerie Plame Affair and the CIA archipelago of secret prisons. Let us be clear: The law that gave Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald a mandate to investigate the Valerie Plame Affair is an anti-democratic law meant to protect the national security state against exposures of its 'secret' atrocities. The law is known as Intelligence Identities Protection Act (IIPA) and it was past in order to protect the criminals at the CIA from exposure. The secrecy of CIA operations is aimed at the domestic population. We are the ones who are not supposed to know the history of subversion of democratic movements of our government. The CIA is not simply an intelligence organization it is also an organization that bribes foreign officials, undermines foreign elections, overthrows foreign governments, fosters foreign secret security agencies and trains them in torture and death-squad operations - in short the CIA is an organization meant to inspire fear in foreign civilian peoples through the use of violence and propaganda. In short, by definition, the CIA is engaged in terrorism. Exposing the CIA, its operations and its operatives is a democratic duty that we must fight to make a 'right.' The Intelligence Identities Protection Act was passed in the early 1980s and was aimed at Philip Agee and the Covert Action Information Bulletin (CAIB). Agee made his own separate peace by defecting from the CIA to the multitude. He published CIA Diary: Inside the Company in 1975 and soon after teamed up to publish CAIB. In both his book and in CAIB he exposed CIA operations and operatives. It was Agee's and CAIB's civic activism in exposing CIA secrets that led to the passage of IIPA. The activities exposed by Agee were largely illegal activities which are condemned (with much usual nation-state hypocrisy) by international norms. Agee, no matter what his motivations, was a whistle blower and IIPA is an anti-Whistle Blower law that will be used mainly against the left. In the usual misapplication of the rule of law those who harm the ruling class will be prosecuted and those who benefit the ruling class will not be prosecuted under this law.
Which brings us back to the CIA run secret prisons.
If a CIA agent with a conscience knows where these prisons are located, if she knows the CIA operatives who run those prisons, if she knows the conditions of those prisons and the names of the people in the prisons, if she then reports on the activities of the CIA wardens and their hirelings who run these prisons, and if this person of conscience exposes all of the above, I would celebrate such a person. In my mind she should be considered a courageous fighter for democratic openness. The law that would put such a person in jail should be repealed. All secret security agencies should be exposed to the light of day.
This is not a mere hypothetical. Think of Dana Priest's article exposing the CIA secret prisons. She wrote it without naming names. But she must have sources somewhere in order to write the article in the first place and those sources must know names. The names of the people running those secret CIA prisons are engaging in crimes against humanity and the names of the CIA prison wardens and their accomplices should be exposed to democratic sunlight. Perhaps one reason that they are not so exposed is the threat of jail under Intelligence Identities Protection Act.
I am cynical enough to hope that despicable hypocrites, such as Carl Rove and Scooter Libby, will betray the norms of their class and expose covert agents, even if they do so only to further their very narrow political interests. In the end, if the Intelligence Identities Protection Act is consistently violated by those who rule this country, perhaps the act will become a dead letter. This is a mere modest proposal in favor of ruling class wolves eating their own puppies. In reality only an active and organized radical democratic left, which has its own organizations willing to expose the crimes and atrocities of the U.S. government and its secret agencies can put some content into the notion of the "rule of law" and someday make such notions of law into a flexible instrument of pragmatic democratic justice.
Jerry Monaco
New York City
2 November 2005
[FN 1] Note that this internecine war between ruling class elite sectors is partially represented by the battle inside the intelligence agencies. Thus Dana Priest reports
The secret detention system was conceived in the chaotic and anxious first months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when the working assumption was that a second strike was imminent.
Since then, the arrangement has been increasingly debated within the CIA, where considerable concern lingers about the legality, morality and practicality of holding even unrepentant terrorists in such isolation and secrecy, perhaps for the duration of their lives. Mid-level and senior CIA officers began arguing two years ago that the system was unsustainable and diverted the agency from its unique espionage mission.
"We never sat down, as far as I know, and came up with a grand strategy," said one former senior intelligence officer who is familiar with the program but not the location of the prisons. "Everything was very reactive. That's how you get to a situation where you pick people up, send them into a netherworld and don't say, 'What are we going to do with them afterwards?' "
Put aside the official media-speak of these paragraphs and what you see is that the CIA has stepped outside its usual role and the "old hands" do not like it very much. In the good old days of the U.S. imperialism the CIA trained other people to do their dirty work. The vision of the Bush regime sees a more active role for the CIA in torture and oppression, mainly because as U.S. military might has increased, it has lost political control over many of its foreign clients and servants. I suppose that one of the results of the reorganization of the intelligence agencies is to bring them under direct political control by the Bush Regime.
Jerry Monaco
New York City
Originally Published 2 November 2005
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
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