A Window Into CIA's Embrace of Secret Jails

NY Times reports:
In March 2003, two C.I.A. officials surprised Kyle D. Foggo, then the chief of the agency’s main European supply base, with an unusual request. They wanted his help building secret prisons to hold some of the world’s most threatening terrorists.

Kyle D. Foggo, who helped build jails for the C.I.A. in the campaign against terrorism, after his arraignment in San Diego in 2007.

Brent R. Wilkes, right, with his lawyer, Mark Geragos, arriving for a 2007 arraignment connected to dealings with Mr. Foggo.

Mr. Foggo, nicknamed Dusty, was known inside the agency as a cigar-waving, bourbon-drinking operator, someone who could get a cargo plane flying anywhere in the world or quickly obtain weapons, food, money — whatever the C.I.A. needed. His unit in Frankfurt, Germany, was strained by the spy agency’s operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, but Mr. Foggo agreed to the assignment.

“It was too sensitive to be handled by headquarters,” he said in an interview. “I was proud to help my nation.”

With that, Mr. Foggo went on to oversee construction of three detention centers, each built to house about a half-dozen detainees, according to former intelligence officials and others briefed on the matter. One jail was a renovated building on a busy street in Bucharest, Romania, the officials disclosed. Another was a steel-beam structure at a remote site in Morocco that was apparently never used. The third, another remodeling project, was outside another former Eastern bloc city. They were designed to appear identical, so prisoners would be disoriented and not know where they were if they were shuttled back and forth. They were kept in isolated cells.

The existence of the network of prisons to detain and interrogate senior operatives of Al Qaeda has long been known, but details about them have been a closely guarded secret. In recent interviews, though, several former intelligence officials have provided a fuller account of how they were built, where they were located and life inside them.

Mr. Foggo acknowledged a role, which has never been previously reported. He pleaded guilty last year to a fraud charge involving a contractor that equipped the C.I.A. jails and provided other supplies to the agency, and he is now serving a three-year sentence in a Kentucky prison.

The C.I.A. prisons would become one of the Bush administration’s most extraordinary counterterrorism programs, but setting them up was fairly mundane, according to the intelligence officials.

Mr. Foggo relied on C.I.A. finance officers, engineers and contract workers to build the jails. As they neared completion, he turned to a small company linked to Brent R. Wilkes, an old friend and a San Diego military contractor.

The business provided toilets, plumbing equipment, stereos, video games, bedding, night vision goggles, earplugs and wrap-around sunglasses. Some products were bought at Target and Wal-Mart, among other vendors, and flown overseas. Nothing exotic was required for the infamous waterboards — they were built on the spot from locally available materials, the officials said.

Mr. Foggo, 55, would not discuss classified details about the jails. He was not charged with wrongdoing in connection with the secret prisons, but instead accused of steering other C.I.A. business to Mr. Wilkes’ companies in exchange for expensive vacations and other favors. Before leaving the C.I.A. in 2006, he had become its third-highest official, and his plea was an embarrassment for the agency.

After the 2001 terrorist attacks, the intelligence world’s embrace of dark-of-night snatch-and-grabs, hidden prisons and interrogation tactics that critics condemned as torture has stained the C.I.A.’s reputation and led to legal challenges, investigations and internal divisions that may take years to resolve. The Justice Department is now considering opening a criminal investigation, with much of the attention focused on the agency’s network of secret prisons, which have become known as the “black sites.”

From Fringes to Spotlight

The demands of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had transformed Mr. Foggo from a fringe player into the C.I.A.’s indispensable man. Before the 9/11 attacks, the Frankfurt base was a relatively sleepy resupply center, running one or two flights a month to outlying stations. Within days of the attacks, Mr. Foggo had a budget of $7 million, which quickly tripled.

He managed dozens of employees, directing nearly daily flights of cargo planes loaded with pallets of supplies, including saddles, bridles and horse feed for the mounted tribal forces that the spy agency recruited. Within weeks, he emptied the C.I.A.’s stockpile of AK-47s and ammunition at a Midwest depot.

He was a logical choice for the prison project: aggressive, resourceful, patriotic, ready to dispense a favor; some inside the C.I.A. jokingly compared him to Milo Minderbinder, the fictional character who rose from mess hall officer to the black-market magnate of Joseph Heller’s World War II novel “Catch-22.”

Early in the fight against Al Qaeda, agency officials relied heavily on American allies to help detain people suspected of terrorism in makeshift facilities in countries like Thailand. But by the time two C.I.A. officials met with Mr. Foggo in 2003, that arrangement was under threat, according to people briefed on the situation. In Thailand, for example, local officials were said to be growing uneasy about a black site outside Bangkok code-named Cat’s Eye. (The agency would eventually change the code name for the Thai prison, fearing it would appear racially insensitive.) The C.I.A. wanted its own, more permanent detention centers.

Eventually, the agency’s network would encompass at least eight detention centers, including one in the Middle East, one each in Iraq and Afghanistan and a maximum-security long-term site at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that was dubbed Strawberry Fields, officials said. (It was named after a Beatles song after C.I.A. officials joked that the detainees would be held there, as the lyric put it, “forever.”)

The C.I.A. has never officially disclosed the exact number of prisoners it once held, but top officials have put the figure at fewer than 100.

At the detention centers Mr. Foggo helped build, several former intelligence officials said, the jails were small, and though they were built to house about a half-dozen detainees they rarely held more than four.

The cells were constructed with special features to prevent injury to the prisoners during interrogations: nonslip floors and flexible, plywood-covered walls to soften the impact of being slammed into the wall.

The detainees, held in cells far enough apart to prevent communication with one another, were kept in solitary confinement 23 hours a day. For their one hour of daily exercise, they were taken out of their cells by C.I.A. security officers wearing black ski masks to hide their identities and to intimidate the detainees, according to the intelligence officials.

Just like prisons in the United States, the jailers imposed a reward and punishment system: well-behaved detainees received books, DVDs and other forms of entertainment, which were taken away if they misbehaved, the officials said.

C.I.A. analysts served 90-day tours at the prison sites to assist the interrogations. But by the time the new prisons were built in mid-2003 or later, the harshest C.I.A. interrogation practices — including waterboarding — had been discontinued.

Winning a Promotion

Mr. Foggo’s success in Frankfurt, including his work on the prisons, won him a promotion back in Washington. In November 2004, he was named the C.I.A.’s executive director, in effect its day-to-day administrative chief.

The appointment raised some eyebrows at the agency. “It was like taking a senior NCO and telling him he now runs the regiment,” said A. B. Krongard, the C.I.A.’s executive director from 2001 to 2004. “It popped people’s eyes.”

Mr. Foggo soon became embroiled in agency infighting. The C.I.A. was reeling from criticism that it had exaggerated Iraq’s weapons programs. Mr. Foggo came to Washington as part of a new team that almost immediately began firing top C.I.A. officials, causing anger among veteran clandestine officers. Mr. Foggo’s fast rise and blunt approach unsettled some headquarters officials, according to Brant G. Bassett, a former agency officer and friend who served with Mr. Foggo.

“Dusty went in there with a blowtorch,” Mr. Bassett said. “Some people were overjoyed, but there were a few others who said, we’ve got to take this guy down.”

In 2005, before he came under investigation, Mr. Foggo and other officials, including John Rizzo, the agency’s top lawyer, paid a rare visit to some of the prison sites, assuring C.I.A. employees that their activities were legal, according to former intelligence officials. Mr. Foggo also met with representatives of Eastern European security services that had helped with the prisons. He expressed gratitude and offered assistance — a gesture the officials politely declined.

In February 2007, Mr. Foggo and Mr. Wilkes were indicted. Prosecutors believed that the C.I.A. had paid an inflated price to Archer Logistics, a business connected to Mr. Wilkes that had a $1.7 million C.I.A. supply contract. In return, the prosecutors claimed, Mr. Wilkes had taken Mr. Foggo on expensive vacations, paid for his meals at expensive restaurants and promised him a lucrative job when he retired.

“I was taking a trip with my best friend,” Mr. Foggo said in his defense. “It looked bad, but we had been taking trips together since we were 17 years old.”

Mr. Foggo said he had turned to Mr. Wilkes’ companies to bypass the cumbersome C.I.A. bureaucracy, not to provide a sweetheart deal to his oldest friend. “I needed something done by someone I trusted in private industry,” Mr. Foggo said.

Downfall in Court

Mr. Wilkes maintains his innocence, but he was eventually convicted in a bribery scandal involving former Representative Randall Cunningham of California. Mr. Foggo pleaded guilty and is serving a sentence on the fraud count, but he still maintains that he was unfairly prosecuted.

His lawyer, Mark J. MacDougall, said he believed that Mr. Foggo’s legal problems stemmed in part from controversies over his stint as executive director. “Nobody ever accused Dusty Foggo of putting a dime in his pocket, failing to do his job, or compromising national security,” Mr. MacDougall said. “Dusty may have made some mistakes, but this case was driven by professional animosity at C.I.A. and personal ambition.”

When Mr. Foggo’s lawyers tried unsuccessfully to obtain access to agency files about his role in the prison program, prosecutors complained that he was trying to disclose a secret program. Mr. Foggo claimed that he was reluctant to divulge his role in classified programs and pleaded guilty, in part, to avoid revealing his secrets.

In an Aug. 1, 2007, letter, a C.I.A. lawyer informed Mr. Foggo’s lawyers that they could not review any classified files related to the prisons. The agency’s letter concluded, “In light of the president’s statements regarding the extraordinary value and sensitivity of the C.I.A. terrorist detention and interrogation program, the C.I.A. denies your request in its entirety.”

2 U.S. Architects of Harsh Tactics in 9/11's Wake

NY Times reports:
Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen were military retirees and psychologists, on the lookout for business opportunities. They found an excellent customer in the Central Intelligence Agency, where in 2002 they became the architects of the most important interrogation program in the history of American counterterrorism.

Dr. Bruce Jessen joined his Air Force colleague to build a thriving business that made millions of dollars selling interrogation and training services to the C.I.A.

A former Air Force explosives expert and a natural salesman, Dr. Jim Mitchell and his colleague had no expertise on Al Qaeda and had never conducted an actual interrogation. But they had psychological credentials and an intimate knowledge of a brutal treatment regimen used decades ago by Chinese Communists.

They had never carried out a real interrogation, only mock sessions in the military training they had overseen. They had no relevant scholarship; their Ph.D. dissertations were on high blood pressure and family therapy. They had no language skills and no expertise on Al Qaeda.

But they had psychology credentials and an intimate knowledge of a brutal treatment regimen used decades ago by Chinese Communists. For an administration eager to get tough on those who had killed 3,000 Americans, that was enough.

So “Doc Mitchell” and “Doc Jessen,” as they had been known in the Air Force, helped lead the United States into a wrenching conflict over torture, terror and values that seven years later has not run its course.

Dr. Mitchell, with a sonorous Southern accent and the sometimes overbearing confidence of a self-made man, was a former Air Force explosives expert and a natural salesman. Dr. Jessen, raised on an Idaho potato farm, joined his Air Force colleague to build a thriving business that made millions of dollars selling interrogation and training services to the C.I.A.

Seven months after President Obama ordered the C.I.A. interrogation program closed, its fallout still commands attention. In the next few weeks, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is expected to decide whether to begin a criminal torture investigation, in which the psychologists’ role is likely to come under scrutiny. The Justice Department ethics office is expected to complete a report on the lawyers who pronounced the methods legal. And the C.I.A. will soon release a highly critical 2004 report on the program by the agency’s inspector general.

Col. Steven M. Kleinman, an Air Force interrogator and intelligence officer who knows Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen, said he thought loyalty to their country in the panicky wake of the Sept. 11 attacks prompted their excursion into interrogation. He said the result was a tragedy for the country, and for them.

“I feel their primary motivation was they thought they had skills and insights that would make the nation safer,” Colonel Kleinman said. “But good persons in extreme circumstances can do horrific things.”

For the C.I.A., as well as for the gray-goateed Dr. Mitchell, 58, and the trim, dark-haired Dr. Jessen, 60, the change in administrations has been neck-snapping. For years, President George W. Bush declared the interrogation program lawful and praised it for stopping attacks. Mr. Obama, by contrast, asserted that its brutality rallied recruits for Al Qaeda; called one of the methods, waterboarding, torture; and, in his first visit to the C.I.A., suggested that the interrogation program was among the agency’s “mistakes.”

The psychologists’ subsequent fall from official grace has been as swift as their rise in 2002. Today the offices of Mitchell Jessen and Associates, the lucrative business they operated from a handsome century-old building in downtown Spokane, Wash., sit empty, its C.I.A. contracts abruptly terminated last spring.

With a possible criminal inquiry looming, Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen have retained a well-known defense lawyer, Henry F. Schuelke III. Mr. Schuelke said they would not comment for this article, which is based on dozens of interviews with the doctors’ colleagues and present and former government officials.

In a brief e-mail exchange in June, Dr. Mitchell said his nondisclosure agreement with the C.I.A. prevented him from commenting. He suggested that his work had been mischaracterized.

“Ask around,” Dr. Mitchell wrote, “and I’m sure you will find all manner of ‘experts’ who will be willing to make up what you’d like to hear on the spot and unrestrained by reality.”

A Career Shift

At the time of the Sept. 11 attacks, Dr. Mitchell had just retired from his last military job, as psychologist to an elite special operations unit in North Carolina. Showing his entrepreneurial streak, he had started a training company called Knowledge Works, which he operated from his new home in Florida, to supplement retirement pay.

But for someone with Dr. Mitchell’s background, it was evident that the campaign against Al Qaeda would produce opportunities. He began networking in military and intelligence circles where he had a career’s worth of connections.

He had grown up poor in Florida, Dr. Mitchell told friends, and joined the Air Force in 1974, seeking adventure. Stationed in Alaska, he learned the art of disarming bombs and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in psychology.

Robert J. Madigan, a psychology professor at the University of Alaska who had worked closely with him, remembered Dr. Mitchell stopping by years later. He had completed his doctorate at the University of South Florida in 1986, comparing diet and exercise in controlling hypertension, and was working for the Air Force in Spokane.

“I remember him saying they were preparing people for intense interrogations,” Dr. Madigan said.

Military survival training was expanded after the Korean War, when false confessions by American prisoners led to sensational charges of communist “brainwashing.” Military officials decided that giving service members a taste of Chinese-style interrogation would prepare them to withstand its agony.

Air Force survival training was consolidated in 1966 at Fairchild Air Force Base in the parched hills outside Spokane. The name of the training, Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, or SERE, suggests its breadth: airmen and women learn to live off the land and avoid capture, as well as how to behave if taken prisoner.

In the 1980s, Dr. Jessen became the SERE psychologist at the Air Force Survival School, screening instructors who posed as enemy interrogators at the mock prison camp and making sure rough treatment did not go too far. He had grown up in a Mormon community with a view of Grand Teton, earning a doctorate at Utah State studying “family sculpting,” in which patients make physical models of their family to portray emotional relationships.

Dr. Jessen moved in 1988 to the top psychologist’s job at a parallel “graduate school” of survival training, a short drive from the Air Force school. Dr. Mitchell took his place.

The two men became part of what some Defense Department officials called the “resistance mafia,” experts on how to resist enemy interrogations. Both lieutenant colonels and both married with children, they took weekend ice-climbing trips together.

While many subordinates considered them brainy and capable leaders, some fellow psychologists were more skeptical. At the annual conference of SERE psychologists, two colleagues recalled, Dr. Mitchell offered lengthy put-downs of presentations that did not suit him.

At the Air Force school, Dr. Mitchell was known for enforcing the safety of interrogations; it might surprise his later critics to learn that he eliminated a tactic called “manhandling” after it produced a spate of neck injuries, a colleague said.

At the SERE graduate school, Dr. Jessen is remembered for an unusual job switch, from supervising psychologist to mock enemy interrogator.

Dr. Jessen became so aggressive in that role that colleagues intervened to rein him in, showing him videotape of his “pretty scary” performance, another official recalled.

Always, former and current SERE officials say, it is understood that the training mimics the methods of unscrupulous foes.

Mark Mays, the first psychologist at the Air Force school, said that to make the fake prison camp realistic, officials consulted American P.O.W.’s who had just returned from harrowing camps in North Vietnam.

“It was clear that this is what we’d expect from our enemies,” said Dr. Mays, now a clinical psychologist and lawyer in Spokane. “It was not something I could ever imagine Americans would do.”

Start of the Program

In December 2001, a small group of professors and law enforcement and intelligence officers gathered outside Philadelphia at the home of a prominent psychologist, Martin E. P. Seligman, to brainstorm about Muslim extremism. Among them was Dr. Mitchell, who attended with a C.I.A. psychologist, Kirk M. Hubbard.

During a break, Dr. Mitchell introduced himself to Dr. Seligman and said how much he admired the older man’s writing on “learned helplessness.” Dr. Seligman was so struck by Dr. Mitchell’s unreserved praise, he recalled in an interview, that he mentioned it to his wife that night. Later, he said, he was “grieved and horrified” to learn that his work had been cited to justify brutal interrogations.

Dr. Seligman had discovered in the 1960s that dogs that learned they could do nothing to avoid small electric shocks would become listless and simply whine and endure the shocks even after being given a chance to escape.

Helplessness, which later became an influential concept in the treatment of human depression, was also much discussed in military survival training. Instructors tried to stop short of producing helplessness in trainees, since their goal was to strengthen the spirit of service members in enemy hands.

Dr. Mitchell, colleagues said, believed that producing learned helplessness in a Qaeda interrogation subject might ensure that he would comply with his captor’s demands. Many experienced interrogators disagreed, asserting that a prisoner so demoralized would say whatever he thought the interrogator expected.

At the C.I.A. in December 2001, Dr. Mitchell’s theories were attracting high-level attention. Agency officials asked him to review a Qaeda manual, seized in England, that coached terrorist operatives to resist interrogations. He contacted Dr. Jessen, and the two men wrote the first proposal to turn the enemy’s brutal techniques — slaps, stress positions, sleep deprivation, wall-slamming and waterboarding — into an American interrogation program.

By the start of 2002, Dr. Mitchell was consulting with the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center, whose director, Cofer Black, and chief operating officer, Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., were impressed by his combination of visceral toughness and psychological jargon. One person who heard some discussions said Dr. Mitchell gave the C.I.A. officials what they wanted to hear. In this person’s words, Dr. Mitchell suggested that interrogations required “a comparable level of fear and brutality to flying planes into buildings.”

By the end of March, when agency operatives captured Abu Zubaydah, initially described as Al Qaeda’s No. 3, the Mitchell-Jessen interrogation plan was ready. At a secret C.I.A. jail in Thailand, as reported in prior news accounts, two F.B.I agents used conventional rapport-building methods to draw vital information from Mr. Zubaydah. Then the C.I.A. team, including Dr. Mitchell, arrived.

With the backing of agency headquarters, Dr. Mitchell ordered Mr. Zubaydah stripped, exposed to cold and blasted with rock music to prevent sleep. Not only the F.B.I. agents but also C.I.A. officers at the scene were uneasy about the harsh treatment. Among those questioning the use of physical pressure, according to one official present, were the Thailand station chief, the officer overseeing the jail, a top interrogator and a top agency psychologist.

Whether they protested to C.I.A. bosses is uncertain, because the voluminous message traffic between headquarters and the Thailand site remains classified. One witness said he believed that “revisionism” in light of the torture controversy had prompted some participants to exaggerate their objections.

As the weeks passed, the senior agency psychologist departed, followed by one F.B.I. agent and then the other. Dr. Mitchell began directing the questioning and occasionally speaking directly to Mr. Zubaydah, one official said.

In late July 2002, Dr. Jessen joined his partner in Thailand. On Aug. 1, the Justice Department completed a formal legal opinion authorizing the SERE methods, and the psychologists turned up the pressure. Over about two weeks, Mr. Zubaydah was confined in a box, slammed into the wall and waterboarded 83 times.

The brutal treatment stopped only after Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen themselves decided that Mr. Zubaydah had no more information to give up. Higher-ups from headquarters arrived and watched one more waterboarding before agreeing that the treatment could stop, according to a Justice Department legal opinion.

Lucrative Work

The Zubaydah case gave reason to question the Mitchell-Jessen plan: the prisoner had given up his most valuable information without coercion.

But top C.I.A. officials made no changes, and the methods would be used on at least 27 more prisoners, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times.

The business plans of Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen, meanwhile, were working out beautifully. They were paid $1,000 to $2,000 a day apiece, one official said. They had permanent desks in the Counterterrorist Center, and could now claim genuine experience in interrogating high-level Qaeda operatives.

Dr. Mitchell could keep working outside the C.I.A. as well. At the Ritz-Carlton in Maui in October 2003, he was featured at a high-priced seminar for corporations on how to behave if kidnapped. He created new companies, called Wizard Shop, later renamed Mind Science, and What If. His first company, Knowledge Works, was certified by the American Psychological Association in 2004 as a sponsor of continuing professional education. (A.P.A. dropped the certification last year.)

In 2005, the psychologists formed Mitchell Jessen and Associates, with offices in Spokane and Virginia and five additional shareholders, four of them from the military’s SERE program. By 2007, the company employed about 60 people, some with impressive résumés, including Deuce Martinez, a lead C.I.A. interrogator of Mr. Mohammed; Roger L. Aldrich, a legendary military survival trainer; and Karen Gardner, a senior training official at the F.B.I. Academy.

The company’s C.I.A. contracts are classified, but their total was well into the millions of dollars. In 2007 in a suburb of Tampa, Fla., Dr. Mitchell built a house with a swimming pool, now valued at $800,000.

The psychologists’ influence remained strong under four C.I.A. directors. In 2006, in fact, when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her legal adviser, John B. Bellinger III, pushed back against the C.I.A.’s secret detention program and its methods, the director at the time, Michael V. Hayden, asked Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen to brief State Department officials and persuade them to drop their objections. They were unsuccessful.

By then, the national debate over torture had begun, and it would undo the psychologists’ business.

In a statement to employees on April 9, Leon E. Panetta, President Obama’s C.I.A. director, announced the “decommissioning” of the agency’s secret jails and repeated a pledge not to use coercion. And there was another item: “No C.I.A. contractors will conduct interrogations.”

Agency officials terminated the contracts for Mitchell Jessen and Associates, and the psychologists’ lucrative seven-year ride was over. Within days, the company had vacated its Spokane offices. The phones were disconnected, and at neighboring businesses, no one knew of a forwarding address.


This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 15, 2009
An article on Wednesday about two former military psychologists who designed the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation program in 2002 misstated the credentials of an Air Force officer who criticized the interrogation methods but suggested that the two psychologists had acted out of patriotic motives. The officer, Steven M. Kleinman, is a career intelligence officer and former interrogator; he is not a psychologist and is not “Dr. Kleinman.” (He has master’s degrees in strategic intelligence and forensic sciences, but does not have a doctorate.)

Ex-CIA Official: Agency Brass Lied To Congress About Interrogations

"A CIA employee of two decades, McCarthy became convinced that 'CIA people had lied' in that briefing, as one of her friends said later, not only because the agency had conducted abusive interrogations but also because its policies authorized treatment that she considered cruel, inhumane or degrading," the Washington Post reported in May 2006.

At The Public Record, Jason Leopold writes:

Last week, former CIA Director Michael Hayden and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey sharply criticized President Obama’s decision to release four “torture” memos writing in an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal that the “disclosure of the techniques is likely to be met by faux outrage, and is perfectly packaged for media consumption.”

Buried in their column was the claim that the methods the CIA used against “high-value” detainees, such as waterboarding, beatings, and stress positions, “were disclosed repeatedly in more than 30 congressional briefings and hearings beginning in 2002, and open to all members of the Intelligence Committees of both Houses of Congress beginning in September 2006.”


“Any protestation of ignorance of those details, particularly by members of those committees, is pretense,” the former Bush officials wrote.

Several prominent Republicans, including Rep. John Boehner, (R- Ohio), and Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), the ranking Republican on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, have echoed Hayden’s claims, in an attempt to show Democrats were complicit because they did not protest when they were briefed about the “enhanced interrogation” program and the techniques CIA interrogators intended to use.

“It was not necessary to release details of the enhanced interrogation techniques, because members of Congress from both parties have been fully aware of them since the program began in 2002,” Hoekstra wrote in an op-ed also published in the Wall Street Journal Thursday. “We believed it was something that had to be done in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks to keep our nation safe. After many long and contentious debates, Congress repeatedly approved and funded this program on a bipartisan basis in both Republican and Democratic Congresses.”

On Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who had been the ranking minority member of the House Intelligence Committee, vehemently denied that she was told the CIA planned on waterboarding detainees or intended to use other brutal techniques to try and extract information from “war on terror” prisoners.

"My colleague [Porter Goss], the chairman of the committee, has said 'if they say that it's legal you have to know they are going to use them,'" Pelosi said Thursday. "Well, his experience is that he was a member of the CIA, later went on to head the CIA and maybe his experience is that if they tell you one thing they may mean something else. My experience is that they did not tell us they were using that. Flat out. And any -- any contention to the contrary is simply not true.

“They told us they had opinions from the [Justice Department’s] Office of Legal Counsel that they could, but not that they were' using enhanced techniques, 'and that if and when they were used, they would brief Congress at that time. As a member of Intelligence, I thought I was being briefed. I realized that was not true when I became ranking member.”

Questions about what the Democrats knew about the CIA’s torture program were raised two years ago when it was revealed that the CIA had destroyed 92 interrogation videotapes in November 2005 and that the agency had informed Democratic lawmakers about its plans.

Following that disclosure, Rep. Harman’s office released a February 2003 letter she wrote to the CIA advising the agency against destroying the videotapes. The CIA declassified Harman's letter at the congresswoman's request.

“You discussed the fact that there is videotape of [high-level al-Qaeda operative] Abu Zubaydah following his capture that will be destroyed after the Inspector General finishes his inquiry,” Harman wrote. “I would urge the Agency to reconsider that plan. Even if the videotape does not constitute an official record that must be preserved under the law, the videotape would be the best proof that the written record is accurate, if such record is called into question in the future. The fact of destruction would reflect badly on the Agency.”

Harman's letter did not raise concerns or express disapproval about the CIA's use of so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques." Instead, her letter advised the agency against destroying the videotapes were made out of concern the footage CIA agents captured "would be the best proof that the written record is accurate, if such record is called into question in the future.”

Still, claims that Democrats were fully briefed on the Bush administration’s torture program have been leveled as recently as last December by Vice President Dick Cheney and in books by former Bush officials such as John Yoo, the former Deputy Assistant Attorney General at the OLC who helped draft one of the four memos released last week.

But the veracity of those assertions have been called into question by former CIA official Mary O. McCarthy, who said senior agency officials lied to members of Congress during an intelligence briefing in 2005 when they said the agency did not violate treaties that bar, cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment of detainees during interrogations, according to a May 14, 2006, front-page story in The Washington Post.

"A CIA employee of two decades, McCarthy became convinced that 'CIA people had lied' in that briefing, as one of her friends said later, not only because the agency had conducted abusive interrogations but also because its policies authorized treatment that she considered cruel, inhumane or degrading," the Washington Post reported.

"In addition to CIA misrepresentations at the session last summer, McCarthy told the friends, a senior agency official failed to provide a full account of the CIA's detainee-treatment policy at a closed hearing of the House intelligence committee in February 2005, under questioning by Rep. Jane Harman (California), the senior Democrat," The Washington Post reported.

"McCarthy also told others she was offended that the CIA's general counsel had worked to secure a secret Justice Department opinion in 2004 authorizing the agency's creation of "ghost detainees" - prisoners removed from Iraq for secret interrogations without notice to the International Committee of the Red Cross - because the Geneva Conventions prohibit such practices."

In 2004, McCarthy was tapped by the CIA's Inspector General John Helgerson to assist him with internal investigations about the agency’s interrogation methods. The report Helgerson prepared remains classified, but the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to have it released publicly.

"McCarthy was not an ideologue, her friends say, but at some point fell into a camp of CIA officers who felt that the Bush administration's venture into Iraq had dangerously diverted US counterterrorism policy. After seeing - in e-mails, cable traffic, interview transcripts and field reports - some of the secret fruits of the Iraq intervention, McCarthy became disenchanted, three of her friends say," the Post reported.

In May 2005, just a few months after the CIA briefed Congress on interrogation methods, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, requested “to see over a hundred documents referred to in [Helgerson’s] report on detention inside the black prison sites," New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer wrote in her book, The Dark Side. "Among the items Rockefeller specifically sought was a legal analysis of the CIA's interrogation videotapes.

"Rockefeller wanted to know if the intelligence agency's top lawyer believed that the waterboarding of [alleged al-Qaeda operative Abu] Zubaydah and [alleged 9/11 mastermind] Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, as captured on the secret videotapes, was entirely legal. The CIA refused to provide the requested documents to Rockefeller.

"But the Democratic senator's mention of the videotapes undoubtedly sent a shiver through the Agency, as did a second request he made for these documents to [former CIA Director Porter] Goss in September 2005."

The May 2005 request from Rockefeller took place during the same month that Steven Bradbury, the former head of the OLC, wrote three legal opinions reinstating the torture techniques his predecessor, Jack Goldsmith, had withdrawn.

Bradbury’s memos, released last Thursday, include several footnotes to Helgerson’s report one of which states that the CIA used waterboarding “with far greater frequency than initially indicated” and used “large volumes of water” as opposed to the smaller amount the CIA said it intended to use. In fact, Bradbury's memos, while authorizing brutal techniques, also disputes the conclusions of Helgerson's still classified report that the interrogation techniques violated the Convention Against Torture.

According to a November 9, 2005 story in the New York Times published the same month 92 interrogation videotapes were destroyed, Helgerson’s report “raised concern about whether the use of the techniques could expose agency officers to legal liability.”

"They said the report expressed skepticism about the Bush administration view that any ban on cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment under the treaty does not apply to CIA interrogations because they take place overseas on people who are not citizens of the United States," the Times reported. "The officials who described the report said it discussed particular techniques used by the CIA against particular prisoners, including about three dozen terror suspects being held by the agency in secret locations around the world.”

Mayer reported that Helgerson’s report “known as a 'special review,' was tens of thousands of pages long and as thick as two Manhattan phone books. It contained information, according to one source, that was simply 'sickening.'"

“The behavior it described, another knowledgeable source said, raised concerns not just about the detainees but also about the Americans who had inflicted the abuse, one of whom seemed to have become frighteningly dehumanized. The source said, ‘You couldn't read the documents without wondering, 'Why didn't someone say, "Stop!'""

Mayer wrote that Vice President Dick Cheney stopped Helgerson from fully completing his investigation. That proves, Mayer contends, that as early as 2004 "the Vice President's office was fully aware that there were allegations of serious wrongdoing in The [interrogation] Program."

"Helgerson was summoned repeatedly to meet privately with Vice President Cheney" before his investigation was "stopped in its tracks." Mayer said that Cheney's interaction with Helgerson was "highly unusual."

As a result, McCarthy "worried that neither Helgerson nor the [CIA’s] Congressional overseers would fully examine what happened or why," according to the Post report.

McCarthy told a friend, according to the Post’s account: "She had the impression that this stuff has been pretty well buried. In McCarthy's view and that of many colleagues, friends say, torture was not only wrong but also misguided, because it rarely produced useful results."

In April 2006, 10 days before she was due to retire, McCarthy was fired from the CIA for allegedly leaking classified information to the media, a CIA spokeswoman told reporters at the time.

In October 2007, Hayden ordered an investigation into Helgerson’s office, focusing on internal complaints that the inspector general was on “a crusade against those who have participated in controversial detention programs.”

The CIA said McCarthy had spoken with numerous journalists, including The Washington Post's Dana Priest, who in November 2005 exposed the CIA's secret prison sites, where in 2002 the CIA videotaped its agents interrogating a so-called high-level detainee, Abu Zubaydah.

Following news reports of her dismissal from the CIA, McCarthy, through her attorney Ty Cobb, vehemently denied leaking classified information to the media. McCarthy, who is now in private practice as an attorney, did not return calls for comment.

The CIA said she failed a polygraph test after the agency launched an internal investigation in late 2005. The agency said the investigation was an attempt to find out who provided The Washington Post and The New York Times with information about its covert activities, including domestic surveillance, and it promptly fired her.

After Hayden ordered launched an investigation into Helgerson’s work, the Washington Post reported, citing unnamed sources, that in 2002 Pelosi, Sen. Bob Graham, D-FL, and Rep. Jane Harman, D-CA, and a handful of Republican lawmakers, were “given a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make the prisoners talk.”

“Among the techniques described [to the lawmakers], said two officials present, was water-boarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill,” the Post reported. “But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two US officials said.”

The Post story also made identical claims that Hayden and Mukasey leveled in their Wall Street Journal column last week: that Pelosi and other Democratic leaders were privately briefed at least 30 times. Those briefings, according to the Post, “included descriptions of [water-boarding] and other harsh interrogations methods.”

But Graham disputed claims that he and other members of Congress were briefed about the interrogation program.

“Speaking for myself as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee from mid-2001 to the end of 2002, I was not briefed on these interrogation techniques,” Graham told National Public Radio Thursday . “[I] am frankly very frustrated that there are these allegations made that everybody knew about it. I think the policy of the Bush administration was to try to bring as many people into the net when they were going to engage in some questionable activity in order to give them cover. In this case, I was not in the net.”

A declassified narrative released Wednesday by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence says about the politics of the Bush administration’s torture program says Intelligence Committee chairs in both Houses were briefed about the interrogation program in 2002 and 2003. What they were told, however, remains a mystery.

In an interview with Newsweek last month, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who now chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee and has launched a “review” and “study” of the CIA’s interrogation methods, said, “"I now know we were not fully and completely briefed on the CIA program.”

Feinstein was reacting to a secret report by the International Committee of the Red Cross that was leaked, which described, in shocking detail, the techniques used to interrogate 14 “high-value” detainees.

Interestingly, the magazine quoted an unnamed “U.S. Official” who disputed the charge, and claimed, in language nearly identical to what Hayden wrote in the Wall Street Journal and what was leaked to the Washington Post, “that members of Congress received more than 30 briefings over the life of the CIA program and that Congressional intel panels had seen the Red Cross report.”

Whether that unnamed official was Hayden is unknown. A representative for the former CIA chief did not return calls for comment.

CIA Chief Leon Panetta Orders Closure of Secret Rendition Sites

The Guardian reports:

The head of the CIA moved yesterday to formalise the new Obama administration's break with the past in its approach to national security, when he ordered the final decommissioning of secret overseas sites where the US had held, and in some cases tortured, al-Qaida prisoners.

Leon Panetta told the agency's staff that he was overturning one of the causes of complaint of human rights groups about detentions of terrorist suspects under the Bush regime: the use of private contractors to secure prisoners. From now on private security firms will no longer have any role in the sites, a shift that has the added benefit of saving the CIA some $4m (£2.7m).

The rejection of the services of private security firms in itself marks a clean break with past practices. During the Bush era, contractors enjoyed a bonanza – particularly in Iraq, where they were used to perform many of the roles of the overstretched military.

Panetta said that the sites – which are now empty, having received no new detainees since he took over the agency in February – would be decommissioned under the auspices of the agency itself. His announcement puts into practice the signal given by President Obama on the second day of his administration that he would have the facilities closed.

The overseas detention sites, in Afghanistan, eastern Europe, Thailand and elsewhere, became one of the most potent symbols of George Bush's controversial reign in the White House. Human rights groups protested that they were used for "renditions" of suspects to locations where they were withheld habeas corpus and subjected to harsh interrogations, in some cases amounting to torture.

Up to 100 suspects were held in the sites, about a third of whom were put through interrogation methods that were toughened up after 9/11 well beyond the limitations previously laid down in the army field manual. That included the technique known as water-boarding in which the prisoner has water poured over a cloth placed over his face, inducing the sensation of drowning.

In his email statement to CIA employees, Panetta also made clear that suspects would no longer be "renditioned" to foreign security forces in order for them to be tortured outside the ethical rules set by the US. Under the Bush administration, several suspects are understood to have been flown to countries such as Syria and put at the mercy of their interrogators.

"CIA officers do not tolerate, and will continue to promptly report, any inappropriate behaviour or allegations of abuse. That holds true whether a suspect is in the custody of an American partner or a foreign liaison service," he said.

This week the Red Cross issued a report in which it said that CIA doctors had been used to monitor the health impacts of torture, which it condemned as a "gross breach of medical ethics".

Waterboarding aside, the methods used included slamming prisoners heads against walls and making them stand naked with arms above their heads for two or three days.

Intelligence Officials On Both Sides Of The Atlantic Question Al Qaeda Role in Bhutto Killing

Scotland Yard Says They’re Not Investigating Assassination

Detailed Timeline of the Assassination

Raw Story reports:

The assassination of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto last December may never be solved, because Pakistani officials refused to demand an autopsy and hosed away evidence at the scene of her killing.

Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf, President Bush, CIA Director Michael Hayden, and news reports have all claimed that al Qaeda was responsible. However, some current and former US and British intelligence officials now say the evidence points instead to Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence Agency (ISI), the country’s security services.

Moreover, both Scotland Yard and a spokesman for MI6 told RAW STORY this week that British investigators are not examining the question of who killed Benazir Bhutto. They were only charged with identifying the cause of her death.

“The investigation is primarily a matter for the Pakistan authorities,” said Nev Johnson, the Press Officer for the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office, which oversees security and the MI6 intelligence service.

Bhutto, the leader of the opposition Pakistan People’s Party, was shot in Rawalpindi, Pakistan on Dec. 27, 2007. Following her death, a bomb detonated, killing 25 people.

Almost immediately, differences emerged in the official story of her death, with a Musharraf spokesman saying she had been killed as a result of hitting her head against a lever on the sunroof of her bulletproof LandRover.

In a 45-minute interview given exclusively to the Washington Post Friday, CIA Director Hayden blamed members of al Qaeda and Baitullah Mehsud, a Pakistani tribal leader.

However, when asked about the allegations that Mehsud, and thus al Qaeda, is behind the assassination, one former high-ranking CIA case officer replied, “That is total bullshit.”

“Mehsud is an ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence] asset. It is ridiculous to think he acted unilaterally. What [the Pakistanis] have [as evidence] is an intercepted conversation, but it is not conclusive that Mehsud is speaking or that he is admitting a role in the assassination. There is some sort of congratulations, but that call could have been made at any time about any topic.”

Another US intelligence source said that it would be impossible to determine who was behind the attacks because the crime scene was “hosed down and there was no autopsy.”

The role of Scotland Yard

Pakistani President Musharraf initially declined the services of the famed Metropolitan Police Services (MPS) – or, as they are more commonly known, Scotland Yard – when they were offered by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown However, with public pressure mounting, Musharraf agreed. The MPS team, which arrived in Pakistan Jan. 3, concluded Thursday that Bhutto was killed by a bullet wound to the head.

US intelligence officials were concerned from the outset that the MPS investigation would be limited and kept in line with the official Musharraf position, because of the delicate diplomatic relationship that both Britain and the US have with Pakistan. Musharraf has publicly stated that Taliban tribal leader Baitullah Mehsud was the mastermind of the attack and that Mehsud's close relationship to al Qaeda implicates the terrorist group.

A current US official, who wishes to remain anonymous due to the sensitive nature of the subject, told RAW STORY Wednesday that “[Mehsud] is not formally part of the Taliban or al Qaeda, but he’s linked to both, and it is, at times, difficult to say where one organization ends and the other begins.”

Sources close to Scotland Yard say their role is not to identify who killed Mrs. Bhutto, but only to determine how she was killed. According to British intelligence, they are not directing their investigation to point to any single group or person.

Reached early Thursday, a Scotland Yard spokeswoman said that the role of MPS investigators is to “assist the local authorities” in Pakistan.

"At the request of the Pakistan Government, New Scotland Yard's Counter Terrorism Command (SO15) [has deployed] a team of investigators to support the Pakistan Law Enforcement Agencies responsible for investigating the death of Benazir Bhutto,” the spokeswoman said.

“The principal purpose of the SO15 deployment is to assist the local authorities in providing clarity regarding the precise cause of Ms Bhutto's death… The primacy and responsibility for the investigation remains with the Pakistan authorities.”

Asked about recent news reports that Scotland Yard investigators have concluded al Qaeda was behind the murder of Mrs. Bhutto, Nev Johnson, the Press Officer for the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office said that “as the investigation is still underway, it would not be appropriate for the Metropolitan Police to comment. The same thing applies to the FCO.”

“The investigation is primarily a matter for the Pakistan authorities,” he added.

While neither the British Foreign & Commonwealth Office nor Scotland Yard is publicly discussing the investigation, someone appears to be leaking information suggesting that al Qaeda is behind the assassination of Mrs. Bhutto. A recent article, “Scotland Yard believes al Qaeda assassinated Benazir Bhutto,” claims that Mehsud had associations with al Qaeda but quotes no one from the service actually fingering al Qaeda in the attack.

US intelligence officials and some foreign intelligence officers are concerned that leaking anything about the case could ignite a firestorm in the region. Some privately take issue with Scotland Yard’s decision to be part of the investigation to begin with, as it puts the British in an untenable position.

Shootings atypical for al Qaeda

US intelligence officials believe that the use of guns against multiple targets distinctly points away from al Qaeda, whose standard methods of operation are designed to minimize the cost to the organization by causing the most damage possible from a single resource. Typically, that would mean either a suicide bomber or multiple bombings at the same time, using single assets for each attack.

Although there have been several attempts on Mrs. Bhutto’s life, the most recent prior to the fatal shooting was on December 8, 2007, when gunmen attacked a PPP office and killed three Bhutto supporters.

Late on the morning of Dec. 27, 2007, just hours before Mrs. Bhutto was assassinated in Rawalpindi, snipers attacked the followers of another opposition leader – former Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, head of the Pakistan Muslim League-N (PML-N) party, who was also scheduled to speak in Rawalpindi – injuring 16 and killing 4.

The use of snipers and gunmen as assassins, say intelligence sources, does not support the theory that al Qaeda was behind the attacks. These sources added that if Mehsud was involved, it could have only been on contract through the ISI.

One US official concluded that if “Mehsud is in fact behind this, then it would be more of an indictment against the ISI than against al Qaeda.”

The ISI, the Taliban, and al Qaeda all have strong ties to one another. It is this complex relationship that confuses the players and the issues and prevents what many professional intelligence officers believe to be a much needed public understanding of what is terrorism and what is not.

In the case of the Bhutto assassination, these sources view the shooting as an act of murder, not an act of terrorism. As previously reported by Raw Story, they believe that the bombing that followed the shooting was aimed at eliminating the shooter and removing evidence of the assassination.

According to a former high ranking US intelligence official, who wishes to remain anonymous due to the delicate nature of the information, the US intelligence community understands the gunman to have been killed in the blast following Mrs. Bhutto's assassination.

“He was killed, probably not knowing that the suicide bomber was there,” said this source. “We don't know for sure if the two men arrived together. We do know that the assassin died in the explosion, and was probably meant to.”

Several other US intelligence officials concur that the bomber was likely “inserted” to “clean up” evidence of the shooting, including eliminating the gunman.
The real question for most of these sources is not “who,” but rather “how.” All of them are inclined to believe that factions of the ISI, either with or without the knowledge and backing of Musharraf, were involved in the assassination at the management level. It is those people who pose a continued danger, say US intelligence officials, to the Pakistani people and to nations in the region, as well as to the US.

A state within a state

The Pakistan Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence has been described as the shadow government of Pakistan or as “a state within a state.”

Although the ISI has existed since the 1940s, it became truly a world player during the Afghan-Soviet war, when many groups of foreign fighters – the Mujahedeen – worked as proxy warriors for Western nations against the Russians and were managed through the ISI. The ISI recruited, trained, and even housed many of these young fighters as they were readied for battle. For its efforts, the ISI was paid by the West as well, as by other nations in the region, including Saudi Arabia and Israel.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, some of the Mujahedeen went home, some were absorbed into the ISI, and others splintered off to become al Qaeda and the Taliban, with the direct help of both elements within the ISI and Saudi Arabia. Although it remains a matter of debate just how much influence the ISI continues to exert over its al Qaeda and Taliban offspring, there is no question that there are certain individuals – and even small but powerful factions – within the ISI that have a very close relationship with terrorists and militants.

The Story Behind CIA Tapes' Destruction

Official Had Implicit Approval, Lawyer Says

Jose A. Rodriguez Jr. is a key figure in the CIA tape case. (AP)

The Washington Post reports:

In late 2005, the retiring CIA station chief in Bangkok sent a classified cable to his superiors in Langley asking if he could destroy videotapes recorded at a secret CIA prison in Thailand that in part portrayed intelligence officers using simulated drowning to extract information from suspected al-Qaeda members.

The tapes had been sitting in the station chief's safe, in the U.S. Embassy compound, for nearly three years. Although those involved in the interrogations had pushed for the tapes' destruction in those years and a secret debate about it had twice reached the White House, CIA officials had not acted on those requests. This time was different.

The CIA had a new director and an acting general counsel, neither of whom sought to block the destruction of the tapes, according to agency officials. The station chief was insistent because he was retiring and wanted to resolve the matter before he left, the officials said. And in November 2005, a published report that detailed a secret CIA prison system provoked an international outcry.

Those three circumstances pushed the CIA's then-director of clandestine operations, Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., to act against the earlier advice of at least five senior CIA and White House officials, who had counseled the agency since 2003 that the tapes should be preserved. Rodriguez consulted CIA lawyers and officials, who told him that he had the legal right to order the destruction. In his view, he received their implicit support to do so, according to his attorney, Robert S. Bennett.

In a classified response to the station chief, Rodriguez ordered the tapes' destruction, CIA officials say. The Justice Department and the House intelligence committee are now investigating whether that deed constituted a violation of law or an obstruction of justice. John A. Rizzo, the CIA's acting general counsel, is scheduled to discuss the matter in a closed House intelligence committee hearing scheduled for today.

According to interviews with more than two dozen current and former U.S. officials familiar with the debate, the taping was conducted from August to December 2002 to demonstrate that interrogators were following the detailed rules set by lawyers and medical experts in Washington, and were not causing a detainee's death.

The principal motive for the tapes' destruction was the clandestine operations division's worry that the tapes' fate could be snatched out of their hands, the officials said. They feared that the agency could be publicly shamed and that those involved in waterboarding and other extreme interrogation techniques would be hauled before a grand jury or a congressional inquiry -- a circumstance now partly unfolding anyway.

"The professionals said that we must destroy the tapes because they didn't want to see the pictures all over television, and they knew they eventually would leak," said a former agency official who took part in the discussions before the tapes were pulverized. The presence of the tapes in Bangkok and the CIA's communications with the station chief there were described by current and former officials.

Congressional investigators have turned up no evidence that anyone in the Bush administration openly advocated the tapes' destruction, according to officials familiar with a set of classified documents forwarded to Capitol Hill. "It was an agency decision -- you can take it to the bank," CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said in an interview on Friday. "Other speculations that it may have been made in other compounds, in other parts of the capital region, are simply wrong."

Many of those involved recalled conversations in which senior CIA and White House officials advised against destroying the tapes, but without expressly prohibiting it, leaving an odd vacuum of specific instructions on a such a politically sensitive matter. They said that Rodriguez then interpreted this silence -- the absence of a decision to order the tapes' preservation -- as a tacit approval of their destruction.

"Jose could not get any specific direction out of his leadership" in 2005, one senior official said. Word of the resulting destruction, one former official said, was greeted by widespread relief among clandestine officers, and Rodriguez was neither penalized nor reprimanded, publicly or privately, by then-CIA Director Porter J. Goss, according to two officials briefed on exchanges between the two men.

"Frankly, there were more important issues that needed to be focused on, such as trying to preserve a critical [interrogation] program and salvage relationships that had been damaged because of the leaks" about the existence of the secret prisons, said a former agency official familiar with Goss's position at the time.

Rodriguez, whom the CIA honored with a medal in August for "Extraordinary Fidelity and Essential Service," declined requests for an interview. But his attorney said he acted in the belief that he was carrying out the agency's stated intention for nearly three years. "Since 2002, the CIA wanted to destroy the tapes to protect the identity and lives of its officers and for other counterintelligence reasons," Bennett said in a written response to questions from The Washington Post.

"In 2003 the leadership of intelligence committees were told about the CIA's intent to destroy the tapes. In 2005, CIA lawyers again advised the National Clandestine Service that they had the authority to destroy the tapes and it was legal to do so. It is unfortunate," Bennett continued, "that under the pressure of a Congressional and criminal investigation, history is now being revised, and some people are running for cover."

Recorded on the tapes was the coercive questioning of two senior al-Qaeda suspects: Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Hussein, known as Abu Zubaida, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who were captured by U.S. forces in 2002. They show Zubaida undergoing waterboarding, which involved strapping him to a board and pouring water over his nose and mouth, creating the sensation of imminent drowning. Nashiri later also underwent the same treatment.

Some CIA officials say the agency's use of waterboarding helped extract information that led to the capture of other key al-Qaeda members and prevented attacks. But others, including former CIA, FBI and military officials, say the practice constitutes torture.

The destruction of the tapes was not the first occasion in which Rodriguez got in trouble for taking a provocative action to help a colleague. While serving as the CIA's Latin America division chief in 1996, he appealed to local Dominican Republic authorities to prevent a childhood friend, and CIA contractor, who had been arrested in a drug investigation, from being beaten up, according to a former CIA official familiar with the episode.

Such an intervention was forbidden by CIA rules, and so Rodriguez was stripped of his management post and reprimanded in an inspector general's report. But shortly after the reprimand, he was named station chief in Mexico City and, after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, was promoted to deputy director of the fast-expanding counterterrorism center. He served under the center's director then, J. Cofer Black, who had been his subordinate in the Latin America division.

When Black -- who played a key role in setting up the secret prisons and instituting the interrogation policy -- left the CIA in December 2002, Rodriguez took his place. Colleagues recall that even in the deputy's slot, Rodriguez was aware of the videotaping of Zubaida, and that he later told several it was necessary so that experts, such as psychologists not present during interrogations, could view Zubaida's physical reactions to questions.

By December 2002, the taping was no longer needed, according to three former intelligence officials. "Zubaida's health was better, and he was providing information that we could check out," one said.

An internal probe of the interrogations by the CIA's inspector general began in early 2003 for reasons that have not been disclosed. In February of that year, then-CIA General Counsel Scott W. Muller told lawmakers that the agency planned to destroy the tapes after the completion of the investigation. That year, all waterboarding was halted; and at an undisclosed time, several of the inspector general's deputies traveled to Bangkok to view the tapes, officials said.

In May 2004, CIA operatives became concerned when a Washington Post article disclosed that the CIA had conducted its interrogations under a new, looser Bush administration definition of what legally constituted torture, several former CIA officials said. The disclosure sparked an internal Justice Department review of that definition and led to a suspension of the CIA's harsh interrogation program.

The tapes were discussed with White House lawyers twice, according to a senior U.S. official. The first occasion was a meeting convened by Muller and senior lawyers of the White House and the Justice Department specifically to discuss their fate. The other discussion was described by one participant as "fleeting," when the existence of the tapes came up during a spring 2004 meeting to discuss the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, the official said.

Those known to have counseled against the tapes' destruction include John B. Bellinger III, while serving as the National Security Council's top legal adviser; Harriet E. Miers, while serving as the top White House counsel; George J. Tenet, while serving as CIA director; Muller, while serving as the CIA's general counsel; and John D. Negroponte, while serving as director of national intelligence.

Hayden, in an interview, said the advice expressed by administration lawyers was consistent. "To the degree this was discussed outside the agency, everyone counseled caution," he said. But he said that, in 2005, it was "the agency's view that there were no legal impediments" to the tapes' destruction. There also was "genuine concern about agency people being identified," were the tapes ever to be made public.

Hayden, who became CIA director last year, acknowledged that the questions raised about the tapes' destruction, then and now, are legitimate. "One can ask if it was a good idea, or if there was a better way to do it," he said. "We are very happy to let the facts take us where they will."

CIA Coverups and American Injustice

How the Bush administration's policies in the war on terror are coming back to haunt us.

At Salon.com, Hina Shamsi writes:

The news last week that the CIA had destroyed interrogation videotapes of two prisoners in its secret detention program had particular resonance at Guantánamo Bay, where I was attending a U.S. military tribunal hearing as a human rights observer. The destroyed tapes reportedly were evidence of the CIA's brutal treatment, in secret prisons abroad, of two alleged high-level al-Qaida operatives, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nahsiri. Both men are now in U.S. military custody in Guantánamo, together with 13 other former CIA prisoners the government refers to as "high-value detainees."

Evidence from three of the other "high-value detainees" was a key issue in the hearing I attended, and showed how the Bush administration's authorization of illegal detention and brutal prisoner treatment has tainted all aspects of its existing framework for handling key terrorist suspects. With the administration's stubborn refusal to return to the rule of law, how can it be surprising that, in Washington, D.C., the CIA's likely crimes have led to a coverup?

More light may be shed on the CIA's destruction of evidence in the coming weeks, with congressional committees pursuing investigations. A test of new Attorney General Michael Mukasey's leadership will be whether he appoints an investigator into the CIA's wrongdoing who is independent of the Department of Justice. Not only has the DOJ been demoralized by scandal and accusations of partisanship, it was also responsible for writing legal memos that justified the CIA's unlawful interrogation and detention program.

Just last month, the government told the American Civil Liberties Union that the DOJ had three memos, written in May 2005, that relate to CIA interrogation tactics. We know from news reports that at least two of these memos authorized the CIA to use harsh treatment, including waterboarding, freezing temperatures and head slaps, with the promise of impunity for interrogators. The disclosure was part of a court filing in ACLU v. Department of Defense, a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, seeking the government's release of the memos. A federal judge is expected to decide the issue early in 2008, but in the meantime, the CIA's destruction of the interrogation tapes falls afoul of two existing court orders in the same case.

In Guantánamo, the destruction of CIA evidence loomed large as proceedings continued in the case of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, allegedly a driver and bodyguard for Osama bin Laden. At issue in Hamdan's hearing was whether under the Military Commissions Act the government had the authority to try Hamdan as an "unlawful enemy combatant." Congress passed the law in October 2006, under pressure from the Bush administration, on the eve of the midterm elections. The law circumvents due process safeguards that are a hallmark of American justice, in both the military's own court-martial system and in the federal courts. For the more than 300 men held in Guantánamo for over six years, the Military Commissions Act stripped their right to challenge detention without charge through the ancient writ mechanism of habeas corpus. (The prisoners' challenge to this provision was before the Supreme Court last Wednesday.)

The first thing that happened when I and the other three human rights observers went through security for Hamdan's hearing was an apt metaphor for the rest of the two-day proceeding: We were forbidden from bringing the law into the courtroom. We could not bring in our copies of the Military Commissions Act, the rules of procedure, or even the military's own charges against Hamdan. Apparently the military feared that such basic but essential documents posed some sort of security risk. We were each permitted to bring in only a notepad and a pen.

Hamdan's hearing was the first time the government publicly presented evidence to support its "unlawful enemy combatant" charge, and the defense had the chance to refute the government's case. The playing field was not level, however. For example, the defense wanted to call five Guantánamo prisoners, including three "high-value detainees," Khalid Sheik Mohammed, Ramzi Bin al-Shib and Abu Faraj al-Libi, as witnesses. According to defense lawyers, these potential witnesses, and especially the "high-value detainees," could refute the government's charge that Hamdan had engaged in a conspiracy with senior members of al-Qaida to attack and murder civilians.

The judge permitted testimony from one of the detainees (and the defense and prosecution are negotiating the possible testimony of another), but refused to let the three "high-value detainees" testify, on the basis that the defense request was not timely in the proceedings. Government lawyers argued that the three were part of a highly classified special access program -- a situation of the government's own making, of course -- and that only those with top secret clearance had access to them, which took time.

On the flight back from Guantánamo on Friday night, I asked Hamdan's lead military defense lawyer, Lt. Brian Mizer, what it would take to get access. Lt. Mizer told me that, in fact, he had that top secret clearance and had been "read into" other special access programs on national security cases. It took about 20 minutes to get access, he said, but only if the government was willing. It has been widely reported that Muhammad, al-Shib, and al Libi have each been subjected to extreme cruelty, if not torture, in CIA custody. But the government takes the position that their treatment is classified and cannot be disclosed as a matter of the highest national security. But the credibility of that position has been destroyed along with the deliberate destruction of the CIA tapes.

Torture will also be an issue in any trial of any other "high-value detainees." The government has said that it intends to try at least some of these men in military commission proceedings. But this is where Bush administration policies will come back to haunt us with a vengeance: Unlike the majority of Guantánamo detainees who appear to be low-level players or even innocent, Khalid Sheik Mohammed and others did likely engage in serious and heinous crimes. If so, they should be prosecuted and sentenced -- but based on lawfully obtained evidence in full and fair proceedings that comport with the best traditions of American justice.

Instead, there's no doubt that government torture and cruelty -- and the question of what other evidence might exist or have been destroyed -- will be an issue in their trials. Given the CIA's destruction of the interrogations tapes, it will now be even harder to take government assurances of fair play and transparency at face value. There's also the danger that information obtained through torture will be introduced in the military commissions, in violation of more than 200 years of American law and values. For the first time in U.S. history, and under pressure from the Bush administration, in the Military Commissions Act, Congress explicitly authorized an American tribunal to permit evidence obtained through "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment" as long as it was obtained before Dec. 31, 2005. Even though the Military Commissions Act prohibits evidence obtained through torture, it could still come in because of this cruel treatment loophole, combined with the other provisions that permit secret evidence and evidence from second- and third-hand sources.

After 9/11, the Bush administration created a legal black hole in the name of national security -- and six years later, we're still trying to crawl out of it. The question now is, which direction will we take? At stake is nothing less than a return to the rule of law, the heart of American justice from which we have strayed so far.

The government could still choose to pull itself out of the morass it created by using two proven systems for detention and trial: either military courts-martials or the civilian criminal justice system.

Instead, it looks as if we're on the verge of creating a different, but equally dubious approach. Over the summer, academics, policymakers and others have begun calling for another entirely new system: a national security court, with fewer procedural and substantive safeguards, to oversee the detention (possibly indefinitely, without criminal charge) and trial of terrorism suspects. Attorney General Mukasey indicated his willingness to consider such a system in a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed in August. And in June, Secretary of Defense Gates asked Congress to provide "a statutory basis for holding prisoners who should never be released and who may or may not be able to be put on trial." We face the risk that, instead of repealing the Military Commissions Act, Congress could compound its mistake and enact a new, second-tier system of secondary justice.

Among other justifications, proponents argue that our existing military or civilian criminal justice systems are too protective of individual rights. They add that regular courts could give defendants access to sensitive national security information for their own defense, and that the threshold for evidence obtained from battlefields is too high. But none of these arguments addresses specifically why, if existing laws are inadequate, the better approach is not to identify flaws and amend them, rather than create a new system designed to circumvent core protections of constitutional due process.

The United States' strength lies in its values, enshrined in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and in military and civilian criminal justice systems that reflect those values. It is because the Bush administration ignored and continues to ignore this that we are so far from having an effective and lawful arrangement for detaining and trying terrorism suspects.

Hill Briefed on Waterboarding in 2002

In Meetings, Spy Panels' Chiefs Did Not Protest, Officials Say

The Washington Post reports:

In September 2002, four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.

Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.

CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said in an interview two months ago that he had informed congressional overseers of "all aspects of the detention and interrogation program." (By Charles Dharapak -- Associated Press)

"The briefer was specifically asked if the methods were tough enough," said a U.S. official who witnessed the exchange.

Congressional leaders from both parties would later seize on waterboarding as a symbol of the worst excesses of the Bush administration's counterterrorism effort. The CIA last week admitted that videotape of an interrogation of one of the waterboarded detainees was destroyed in 2005 against the advice of Justice Department and White House officials, provoking allegations that its actions were illegal and the destruction was a coverup.

Yet long before "waterboarding" entered the public discourse, the CIA gave key legislative overseers about 30 private briefings, some of which included descriptions of that technique and other harsh interrogation methods, according to interviews with multiple U.S. officials with firsthand knowledge.

With one known exception, no formal objections were raised by the lawmakers briefed about the harsh methods during the two years in which waterboarding was employed, from 2002 to 2003, said Democrats and Republicans with direct knowledge of the matter. The lawmakers who held oversight roles during the period included Pelosi and Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) and Sens. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) and John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), as well as Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.) and Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan).

Individual lawmakers' recollections of the early briefings varied dramatically, but officials present during the meetings described the reaction as mostly quiet acquiescence, if not outright support. "Among those being briefed, there was a pretty full understanding of what the CIA was doing," said Goss, who chaired the House intelligence committee from 1997 to 2004 and then served as CIA director from 2004 to 2006. "And the reaction in the room was not just approval, but encouragement."

Congressional officials say the groups' ability to challenge the practices was hampered by strict rules of secrecy that prohibited them from being able to take notes or consult legal experts or members of their own staffs. And while various officials have described the briefings as detailed and graphic, it is unclear precisely what members were told about waterboarding and how it is conducted. Several officials familiar with the briefings also recalled that the meetings were marked by an atmosphere of deep concern about the possibility of an imminent terrorist attack.

"In fairness, the environment was different then because we were closer to Sept. 11 and people were still in a panic," said one U.S. official present during the early briefings. "But there was no objecting, no hand-wringing. The attitude was, 'We don't care what you do to those guys as long as you get the information you need to protect the American people.'"

Only after information about the practice began to leak in news accounts in 2005 -- by which time the CIA had already abandoned waterboarding -- did doubts about its legality among individual lawmakers evolve into more widespread dissent. The opposition reached a boiling point this past October, when Democratic lawmakers condemned the practice during Michael B. Mukasey's confirmation hearings for attorney general.

GOP lawmakers and Bush administration officials have previously said members of Congress were well informed and were supportive of the CIA's use of harsh interrogation techniques. But the details of who in Congress knew what, and when, about waterboarding -- a form of simulated drowning that is the most extreme and widely condemned interrogation technique -- have not previously been disclosed.

U.S. law requires the CIA to inform Congress of covert activities and allows the briefings to be limited in certain highly sensitive cases to a "Gang of Eight," including the four top congressional leaders of both parties as well as the four senior intelligence committee members. In this case, most briefings about detainee programs were limited to the "Gang of Four," the top Republican and Democrat on the two committees. A few staff members were permitted to attend some of the briefings.

That decision reflected the White House's decision that the "enhanced interrogation" program would be treated as one of the nation's top secrets for fear of warning al-Qaeda members about what they might expect, said U.S. officials familiar with the decision. Critics have since said the administration's motivation was at least partly to hide from view an embarrassing practice that the CIA considered vital but outsiders would almost certainly condemn as abhorrent.

Information about the use of waterboarding nonetheless began to seep out after a furious internal debate among military lawyers and policymakers over its legality and morality. Once it became public, other members of Congress -- beyond the four that interacted regularly with the CIA on its most sensitive activities -- insisted on being briefed on it, and the circle of those in the know widened.

In September 2006, the CIA for the first time briefed all members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, producing some heated exchanges with CIA officials, including Director Michael V. Hayden. The CIA director said during a television interview two months ago that he had informed congressional overseers of "all aspects of the detention and interrogation program." He said the "rich dialogue" with Congress led him to propose a new interrogation program that President Bush formally announced over the summer

"I can't describe that program to you," Hayden said. "But I would suggest to you that it would be wrong to assume that the program of the past is necessarily the program moving forward into the future."

Waterboarding as an interrogation technique has its roots in some of history's worst totalitarian nations, from Nazi Germany and the Spanish Inquisition to North Korea and Iraq. In the United States, the technique was first used five decades ago as a training tool to give U.S. troops a realistic sense of what they could expect if captured by the Soviet Union or the armies of Southeast Asia. The U.S. military has officially regarded the tactic as torture since the Spanish-American War.

In general, the technique involves strapping a prisoner to a board or other flat surface, and then raising his feet above the level of his head. A cloth is then placed over the subject's mouth and nose, and water is poured over his face to make the prisoner believe he is drowning.

U.S. officials knowledgeable about the CIA's use of the technique say it was used on three individuals -- Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks; Zayn Abidin Muhammed Hussein Abu Zubaida, a senior al-Qaeda member and Osama bin Laden associate captured in Pakistan in March 2002; and a third detainee who has not been publicly identified.

Abu Zubaida, the first of the "high-value" detainees in CIA custody, was subjected to harsh interrogation methods beginning in spring 2002 after he refused to cooperate with questioners, the officials said. CIA briefers gave the four intelligence committee members limited information about Abu Zubaida's detention in spring 2002, but offered a more detailed account of its interrogation practices in September of that year, said officials with direct knowledge of the briefings.

The CIA provided another briefing the following month, and then about 28 additional briefings over five years, said three U.S. officials with firsthand knowledge of the meetings. During these sessions, the agency provided information about the techniques it was using as well as the information it collected.

Lawmakers have varied recollections about the topics covered in the briefings.

Graham said he has no memory of ever being told about waterboarding or other harsh tactics. Graham left the Senate intelligence committee in January 2003, and was replaced by Rockefeller. "Personally, I was unaware of it, so I couldn't object," Graham said in an interview. He said he now believes the techniques constituted torture and were illegal.

Pelosi declined to comment directly on her reaction to the classified briefings. But a congressional source familiar with Pelosi's position on the matter said the California lawmaker did recall discussions about enhanced interrogation. The source said Pelosi recalls that techniques described by the CIA were still in the planning stage -- they had been designed and cleared with agency lawyers but not yet put in practice -- and acknowledged that Pelosi did not raise objections at the time.

Harman, who replaced Pelosi as the committee's top Democrat in January 2003, disclosed Friday that she filed a classified letter to the CIA in February of that year as an official protest about the interrogation program. Harman said she had been prevented from publicly discussing the letter or the CIA's program because of strict rules of secrecy.

"When you serve on intelligence committee you sign a second oath -- one of secrecy," she said. "I was briefed, but the information was closely held to just the Gang of Four. I was not free to disclose anything."

Roberts declined to comment on his participation in the briefings. Rockefeller also declined to talk about the briefings, but the West Virginia Democrat's public statements show him leading the push in 2005 for expanded congressional oversight and an investigation of CIA interrogation practices. "I proposed without success, both in committee and on the Senate floor, that the committee undertake an investigation of the CIA's detention and interrogation activities," Rockefeller said in a statement Friday.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a former Vietnam War prisoner who is seeking the GOP presidential nomination, took an early interest in the program even though he was not a member of the intelligence committee, and spoke out against waterboarding in private conversations with White House officials in late 2005 before denouncing it publicly.

In May 2007, four months after Democrats regained control of Congress and well after the CIA had forsworn further waterboarding, four senators submitted written objections to the CIA's use of that tactic and other, still unspecified "enhanced" techniques in two classified letters to Hayden last spring, shortly after receiving a classified hearing on the topic. One letter was sent on May 1 by Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.). A similar letter was sent May 10 by a bipartisan group of three senators: Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.).

In a rare public statement last month that broached the subject of his classified objections, Feingold complained about administration claims of congressional support, saying that it was "not the case" that lawmakers briefed on the CIA's program "have approved it or consented to it."

Jordan's Spy Agency: Holding Cell for the CIA

The Washington Post reports:

Over the past seven years, an imposing building on the outskirts of this city has served as a secret holding cell for the CIA.

The building is the headquarters of the General Intelligence Department, Jordan's powerful spy and security agency. Since 2000, at the CIA's behest, at least 12 non-Jordanian terrorism suspects have been detained and interrogated here, according to documents and former prisoners, human rights advocates, defense lawyers and former U.S. officials.

In most of the cases, the spy center served as a covert way station for CIA prisoners captured in other countries. It was a place where they could be hidden after being arrested and kept for a few days or several months before being moved on to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, or CIA prisons elsewhere in the world.

Others were arrested while transiting through Jordan, including two detained during stopovers at Amman's international airport. Another prisoner, a microbiology student captured in Pakistan in the weeks after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has not been seen since he was flown to Amman on a CIA plane six years ago.
The most recent case to come to light involved a Palestinian detainee, Marwan al-Jabour, who was transferred to Jordan last year from a CIA-run secret prison, then released several weeks later in the Gaza Strip.

The General Intelligence Department, or GID, is perhaps the CIA's most trusted partner in the Arab world. The Jordanian agency has received money, training and equipment from the CIA for decades and even has a public English-language Web site. The relationship has deepened in recent years, with U.S. officials praising their Jordanian counterparts for the depth of their knowledge regarding al-Qaeda and other radical Islamic networks.

In the aftermath of Sept. 11, however, the GID was attractive for another reason, according to former U.S. counterterrorism officials and Jordanian human rights advocates. Its interrogators had a reputation for persuading tight-lipped suspects to talk, even if that meant using abusive tactics that could violate U.S. or international law.

"I was kidnapped, not knowing anything of my fate, with continuous torture and interrogation for the whole of two years," Al-Haj Abdu Ali Sharqawi, a Guantanamo prisoner from Yemen, recounted in a written account of his experiences in Jordanian custody. "When I told them the truth, I was tortured and beaten."

Sharqawi was captured in Karachi, Pakistan, in February 2002 in a joint Pakistani-U.S. operation. Although the Guantanamo Bay prison had just opened, the CIA flew him instead to Amman, where he was imprisoned for 19 months, according to his account and flight records. He was later taken to another CIA-run secret prison, his statement says, before he was finally moved to Guantanamo in February 2004.

Sharqawi said he was threatened with sexual abuse and electrocution while in Jordan. He also said he was hidden from officials of the International Committee for the Red Cross during their visits to inspect Jordanian prisons.

"I was told that if I wanted to leave with permanent disability both mental and physical, that that could be arranged," Sharqawi said in his April 2006 statement, which was released by a London-based attorney, Clive Stafford Smith, who represents Guantanamo inmates. "They said they had all the facilities of Jordan to achieve that. I was told that I had to talk, I had to tell them everything."

Bush administration officials have said they do not hand over terrorism suspects to countries that are likely to abuse them. For several years, however, the State Department has cited widespread allegations of torture by Jordan's security agencies in its annual report cards on human rights.

Independent monitors have become increasingly critical of Jordan's record. Since 2006, the United Nations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have issued reports on abuses in Jordan, often singling out the General Intelligence Department.

Former prisoners have reported that their captors were expert in two practices in particular: falaqa, or beating suspects on the soles of their feet with a truncheon and then, often, forcing them to walk barefoot and bloodied across a salt-covered floor; and farruj, or the "grilled chicken," in which prisoners are handcuffed behind their legs, hung upside down by a rod placed behind their knees, and beaten.

In a report released in January 2007, Manfred Nowak, the U.N. special investigator for torture, found that "the practice of torture is routine" at GID headquarters and concluded "that there is total impunity for torture and ill-treatment in the country."

Officials with the GID did not respond to a letter seeking an interview for this article. The Jordanian Foreign Ministry also did not respond to interview requests.

The CIA declined to comment on its relationship with the GID but defended in general the covert transfer of terrorism suspects to other countries, a practice known as rendition.

"The United States does not transfer individuals to any country if it believes they will be tortured there," said Paul Gimigliano, a CIA spokesman. "Setting aside the myths, rendition is, in fact, a lawful, effective tool that has been used over the years on a very limited scale, and is designed to take terrorists off the street."

'In Jordan, Nobody Asks'
Immediately after Sept. 11, the CIA had nowhere to hold terrorism suspects it had captured abroad. The military prison at Guantanamo did not open until January 2002. And it took the CIA until the spring of 2002 to get its own network of secret overseas prisons up and running.

Short on options, the CIA sought help from its counterparts in Jordan. Soon, CIA airplanes began carrying prisoners to Amman.

Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed, a Yemeni microbiology student, was captured in a U.S.-Pakistani operation in Karachi a few weeks after 9/11 on suspicion of helping to finance al-Qaeda operations. Witnesses reported seeing masked men take him aboard a Gulfstream V jet at the Karachi airport Oct. 24, 2001.

Records show that the plane was chartered by a CIA front company and that it flew directly to Amman. Mohammed has not been seen since. Amnesty International said it has asked the Jordanian government for information on his whereabouts but has not received an answer.

About the same time, Jamal Alawi Mari, another Yemeni citizen, was apprehended at his home in Karachi by Pakistani and U.S. agents. Records show that U.S. officials suspected him of working for Islamic charities that allegedly supported al-Qaeda.

Soon after, Mari was also flown by the CIA to Amman. "They never told me where I was going," he testified later before a U.S. military tribunal. "I found out later I was in Jordan."

Mari said he was imprisoned for four months in Jordan, out of sight of visiting Red Cross officials. In early 2002, he was taken to Guantanamo and remains imprisoned there.

Defense lawyers and human rights advocates in Amman said it wasn't a surprise that the CIA turned to Jordan's security agency for assistance.

"In America, people will ask about any breach of the law," said Younis Arab, a lawyer who has represented a CIA prisoner brought to Jordan. "Here in Jordan, nobody asks. So the Americans get the Jordanians to do the dirty work."

Other Jordanian lawyers cited unconfirmed reports that the CIA had transferred high-ranking al-Qaeda leaders to Jordan for interrogation. Although hard evidence is elusive, some former inmates have reported being detained in the same wing as Ramzi Binalshibh, a key planner in the Hamburg cell that carried out the Sept. 11 hijackings, said Abdulkareem al-Shureidah, an Amman lawyer.

"He was detained in Jordanian jails, definitely," Shureidah said of Binalshibh, who was kept in CIA custody in undisclosed locations from the time of his capture in Karachi in September 2002 until September 2006, when he was transferred to Guantanamo. "The U.S. brought all kinds of persons here from around the world."

Samieh Khreis, an Amman lawyer who has represented former Guantanamo inmates from Jordan, said testimony by former prisoners and others in Jordan reinforced a long-held suspicion that the CIA ran a satellite operation inside headquarters of the General Intelligence Department.

"Of course they had a jail here, a secret jail -- of course, no question," he said. "If they were to put me in that GID building over there, in my mind, it might as well be an American jail."

Khreis said the Jordanian spy service has a well-deserved reputation for using dubious tactics to force confessions. But he said the CIA sent prisoners to Amman primarily to take advantage of the GID's knowledge of Islamic radical groups.

"Torture is not the main reason," he said.

A Flat Denial
On June 26, 2006, just after 6 p.m., Nowak, the U.N. investigator, paid a surprise visit to GID headquarters in Amman.

The Jordanian government had previously agreed to give Nowak carte blanche to inspect any prison in the country, with no preconditions and unfettered access to inmates. As a new member of the U.N. Human Rights Council, Jordan was eager to win Nowak's seal of approval. GID officials permitted Nowak to tour its prison wing. But they refused to allow him to speak with prisoners in private. When Nowak asked about allegations that the CIA had used the building as a proxy jail, department officials said the reports were untrue.

"The response was just very flat, a simple denial, 'We don't know anything about that,' " Nowak recalled in an interview.

In interviews with former GID prisoners, Nowak said, he heard repeated, credible reports of inmates being subjected to electric shocks, sleep deprivation and various forms of beatings, including farruj and falaqa.

He said several inmates reported that their chief tormentor was Col. Ali Birjak, head of the GID's counterterrorism unit and one of the officials who had denied cooperating with the CIA. Based on those interviews, Nowak recommended in his report that Birjak be investigated by Jordanian authorities on torture charges.

In a written response to Nowak's findings on Oct. 10, 2006, the Jordanian government called the torture allegations "untrue" and noted that they were lodged by people with criminal records.

"It is common for prisoners to make false allegations about torture in a pathetic attempt to evade punishment and to influence the court," the government wrote.

In interviews with The Washington Post, however, former prisoners of the GID gave similar accounts of physical abuse.

Masaad Omer Behari, a Sudanese citizen, spent 86 days in the department's custody in early 2003 after he was arrested during a stopover at Amman's international airport.

Behari said his interrogators wanted to know about his activities in Vienna, where he had lived for more than a decade. He had been asked many of the same questions previously by the FBI and Austrian security officials about an alleged plot to bomb the U.S. Embassy in Vienna in 1998, he said, though he had denied any role and was never charged.

While he was in custody in Amman, Behari said, guards meted out a combination of falaqa and farruj. They struck the soles of his feet with batons while he was handcuffed and hanging upside down, then doused him with cold water and forced him to walk over a salt-strewn floor.

"I thought they were going to kill me," he said. "I said my prayers, thinking I was going to die."