U.S. running secret prison in East Europe

Today’s WaPo has a very disturbing story by Dana Priest in which she reveals new details about the globe-circling gulag that the CIA has run since September 2001.
At least one branch of this gulag is in a Soviet-era compound in a newly ‘democratic’ country of Eastern Europe, she writes. She adds,

The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.
The hidden global internment network … depends on the cooperation of foreign intelligence services, and on keeping even basic information about the system secret from the public, foreign officials and nearly all members of Congress charged with overseeing the CIA’s covert actions.
The existence and locations of the facilities — referred to as “black sites” in classified White House, CIA, Justice Department and congressional documents — are known to only a handful of officials in the United States and, usually, only to the president and a few top intelligence officers in each host country.
The CIA and the White House, citing national security concerns and the value of the program, have dissuaded Congress from demanding that the agency answer questions in open testimony about the conditions under which captives are held. Virtually nothing is known about who is kept in the facilities, what interrogation methods are employed with them, or how decisions are made about whether they should be detained or for how long.
While the Defense Department has produced volumes of public reports and testimony about its detention practices and rules after the abuse scandals at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison and at Guantanamo Bay, the CIA has not even acknowledged the existence of its black sites. To do so, say officials familiar with the program, could open the U.S. government to legal challenges, particularly in foreign courts, and increase the risk of political condemnation at home and abroad.

Addendum, 9:40 a.m.: Of course, it is the mistreatment that the CIA can give to its detainees that Dick Cheney is currently trying to protect, by seeking a special exemption for the CIA from the anti-torture legislation now being considered by Congress. I heard a radio interview with Sen. John McCain yesterday in which he sounded very confident that the Senate would continue to uphold the principle of no special exemptions for the CIA or anyone else from the anti-torture provision. Let’s hope so…
Priest gives a lot of details about how, starting in the days immediately after 9/11, this program of completely secret, off-the-books detentions grew rapidly, and without either oversight or much planning. Some of the detention sites previously used in it were closed down, for various reasons. (That included the “super-secret” CIA unit at Guantanamo, though as we know the military-run portion of the prison there continues to hold hundreds of detainees.)
She writes:

“We never sat down, as far as I know, and came up with a grand strategy,” said one former senior intelligence officer who is familiar with the program but not the location of the prisons. “Everything was very reactive. That’s how you get to a situation where you pick people up, send them into a netherworld and don’t say, ‘What are we going to do with them afterwards?’ ”
It is illegal for the government to hold prisoners in such isolation in secret prisons in the United States, which is why the CIA placed them overseas, according to several former and current intelligence officials and other U.S. government officials. Legal experts and intelligence officials said that the CIA’s internment practices also would be considered illegal under the laws of several host countries, where detainees have rights to have a lawyer or to mount a defense against allegations of wrongdoing.
Host countries have signed the U.N. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, as has the United States. Yet CIA interrogators in the overseas sites are permitted to use the CIA’s approved “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques,” some of which are prohibited by the U.N. convention and by U.S. military law. They include tactics such as “waterboarding,” in which a prisoner is made to believe he or she is drowning…

So where are these helpful “host” countries? As described by Priest, one is still Afghanistan, where the CIA has run a secret detention camp called the “Salt Pit” at various different locations since 2001. Another was previously Thailand, where high-ranking Qaeda captives Abu Zubaida and Ramzi Binalshibh were both taken during 2002. “But after published reports revealed the existence of the site in June 2003, Thai officials insisted the CIA shut it down, and the two terrorists were moved elsewhere, according to former government officials involved in the matter.” (It is of course quite possible that the place held more those two CIA prisoners at the time.)
And which is the East European country that’s still involved in the program?
By my best reading of Priest’s report, it seems that while there may in the past have been more than one such country involved, at present there is at least one. She writes:

The Washington Post is not publishing the names of the Eastern European countries involved in the covert program, at the request of senior U.S. officials. They argued that the disclosure might disrupt counterterrorism efforts in those countries and elsewhere and could make them targets of possible terrorist retaliation.

If I were a democrat in such a country and I suspected that my government was allowing the CIA to run such a prison system on the national soil , I would demand that my government cease its cooperation with this scheme immediately.
Let’s get this straight. As Priest writes straightforwardly and quite correctly, “It is illegal for the government to hold prisoners in such isolation in secret prisons in the United States” (which was why they felt they had to seek sites not on US soil, in the first place.) So in order to save the appearance of the rule of law inside the US, the CIA has been quite happy to export its besmirchment to other, much more vulnerable countries.
For what it’s worth, if I were a democrat in Hungary, I would start asking a lot of questions about whether the CIA is running one of its “black” prisons in my country. Hungary, you will recall, was the place where in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, the government rapidly acceded to US requests that it open up a training center for Ahmad Chalabi’s alleged thousands of supporters who needed some quick military training. (Fewer than 800 of them ever showed up.)
According to Dana Priest, the “black sites” have hosted the detention of “More than 100 suspected terrorists” take from various places– though she immediately notes that that number does not include prisoners picked up in Iraq. So if any significant portion of the detainees picked up in Iraq are put into the black system– as quite possibly happens to a large proportion of the non-Iraqis taken prisoner there– then the number of detainees may be quite a lot higher than simply 100.
Of the 100, Priest notes that more than 70 came to be deemed of less than high “significance”– hey, maybe some of them were completely innocent; we may never know– and those ones were “rendered” over to the untender mercies of other compliant governments.
She makes a couple of intriguing references in her piece to the emergence of some disquiet about the system among serving and former CIA officers familiar with it. (Which is no doubt what motivated some of them to seek her out and talk a little both about the program and about their doubts regarding it.)
Here’s how she concludes the piece:

Several former and current intelligence officials, as well as several other U.S. government officials with knowledge of the program, express frustration that the White House and the leaders of the intelligence community have not made it a priority to decide whether the secret internment program should continue in its current form, or be replaced by some other approach.
Meanwhile, the debate over the wisdom of the program continues among CIA officers, some of whom also argue that the secrecy surrounding the program is not sustainable.
“It’s just a horrible burden,” said the intelligence official.

Look at that second paragraph there. Some CIA officers argue that the secrecy surrounding the program “is not sustainable.” What are their precise fears? That if the truth came out, the program would have to be ended? Or, that anyone who had been involved in administering it might be liable to prosecution under the laws of the countries they’ve been working in?
… At a broad level, though, you really have to wonder at the twisted logic of all the people involved in designing and running such programs. In the name of “democracy” you subvert the rule of law in other countries? In the name of “freedom” you deny even the most basic habeas corpus protections to detainees– quite possibly, for the entire rest of their lives?
Of course, it is not the “democrats” inside Hungary or any other non-American place who need to take the lead in ending this system. It should be all adherents of (small-d) democracy right here in the belly of the beast, here in the USA.