THE BLACK SEA

THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO STRETCHES ACROSS a black sea, with “black sites” operated by the CIA, unbound by any law, with no constraint yet known [story]

The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.

WHOEVER CAME UP with this dark plan has no appreciation for irony.  A dark confederation of dunces sends captives behind the once fallen Iron Curtain now rebuilt for new interrogations.

The hidden global internment network is a central element in the CIA's unconventional war on terrorism. It depends on the cooperation of foreign intelligence services, and on keeping even basic information about the system secret from the public, foreign officials and nearly all members of Congress charged with overseeing the CIA's covert actions.

IF THE CIA cannot be questioned effectively, how can there be any oversight?  And if there is no oversight, who is in charge?  Nearly all members of Congress is an understatement.  A this time not even the entire Senate and House Intelligence oversight committees are allowed access to oversight information.  After September Eleventh in the climate of paranoia and an overriding need for secrecy, only the ranking minority members and the Republican chairman of those committees see what the CIA deems fit to show.  That's four people with no staff support permitted ( or is it invited) to comment on what is done in our name.

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.

NOTHING IS KNOWN but what is worse, not much was planned.  The policy evolved on the fly.  The situation is ripe for abuse.  As with the catch as catch can attack on terror, mistakes made are unlikely to be heard about.  We simply have no way of knowing what has been done in our name.

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.

OUR LAWS ARE BEING BROKEN and other countries’ laws as well.  The CIA might as well be a state and a law unto itself.  “Black sites,” small dots on a black sea unseen, darken our soul the longer they exist.

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[Marty Lederman/ Balkinization] It raises some very difficult questions about the extent to which intelligence operations can, and should, operate pursuant to a clandestine law, accountable only to four elected legislators, and characterized by practices that would be plainly unlawful -- even as to these high-level suspects -- if they occurred within the United States.

THE HERETIK RECALLS  a very public appearance by Stephen Cambone before the Senate Armed Services Committee, where he righteously announced the CIA would no longer be allowed to hold “ghost detainees” in Army prisons abroad. [Reuters]

The CIA will no longer be allowed to hold unregistered "ghost" detainees at U.S. military prisons such as Iraq's Abu Ghraib, the Pentagon's top intelligence official said on Thursday.

Stephen Cambone, undersecretary of defense for intelligence, assured the U.S. Senate that new interim rules on military interrogations eliminate the CIA's practice at Abu Ghraib of hiding detainees and subjecting them to separate interrogation methods that critics say were harsher than those employed by the military.

Army investigators who first disclosed that the CIA concealed dozens of unregistered detainees at Abu Ghraib blamed the spy agency's practices for a loss of accountability, abuse and a poisoned atmosphere at the infamous facility.

THE CIA CLEARLY got around these restrictions by finding its own prisons in other countries, not our own.

[Meteor Blades/The Next Hurrah] The prisoners are held incommunicado somewhere in Eastern Europe, apparently in an old Soviet compound. Why there? Well, for one thing, secret prisons are illegal in America.

So much for Ronald Reagan’s purloined but poignant “America is a shining city upon a hill whose beacon light guides freedom-loving people everywhere.” Rather, a new gulag for a new era. Another wonderful victory in the war on terror.

THE HERETIK NOTES the stretch between rhetoric and reality, what we profess and what we do is like an arc of islands low upon the sea, barely seen above a dark horizon on this black sea.  It seems language itself cannot contain, no metaphor will suffice for the cynicism and despair found in these prisons, in the twisting of means and purpose in the pursuit of “terrorists,” in the defense of “freedom.”  Orwell and Solzenhitzen meet with Koestler and Kafka and among them is only silence.

SHORT AND NOT SO SWEET
[Maha] Are we filling a niche vacated by the fall of the Soviet Union? And do we want to think real hard about what that niche might be? [Simian Brain] Your country is disappearing people.
[Avedon Carol] And you hardly know what to say about an administration that thinks it's more important to be able to torture people than to have the respect and cooperation of the world or even keep the Geneva Conventions around to protect our own troops.

A DARK FUTURE [Hilzoy/Obsidian Wings]  What will the next fascinating revelation about our treatment of detainees be? Some possibilities . .  .

THE HERETIK RECALLS cruelty age old only changes place.

AND A BIT MORE [Reddhedd/ Firedog Lake] Great, so the parameters were not narrowly drawn to serve a specific purpose but, rather, were writ in broadly sweeping terms by a President who could have given a rats ass about the long term moral, ethical and legal implications by comparison to his need for immediate revenge and the satisfaction of his need to "bring it on." Just great.

AND THE HERETIK IMAGINES he is on a boat on the sea silent, the water opaque and pulling light and love itself out of the sky.  But there are ripples now on the surface, hints of what leviathan lurk and feed below.

[Human Rights Watch] In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, the Bush administration has violated the most basic legal norms in its treatment of security detainees. Many have been held in offshore prisons, the most well known of which is at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. As we now know, prisoners suspected of terrorism, and many against whom no evidence exists, have been mistreated, humiliated, and tortured. But perhaps no practice so fundamentally challenges the foundations of U.S. and international law as the long-term secret incommunicado detention of al-Qaeda suspects in “undisclosed locations.”
ALSO: ["Disappearances" in Law and History]  [The Definition of “Forced Disappearances” in International Law]  [The Absolute Ban on “Disappearances”]  [Legal Prohibitions on Incommunicado Detention]

Comments

[Neil Shakespeare]

Yikes. Stalinesque now, are we? Great. Just fuckin' great. From the "Just when you thought we couldn't sink any lower" department...