http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/guantanamo/article4434603.html
[image, links in on-line article]
Senate report confirms CIA had ‘black site’ at Guantánamo, hid it from
Congress
By Carol Rosenberg
12/11/2014 6:55 PM
In 2004, as the U.S. Supreme Court was poised to let Guantánamo captives
consult lawyers for the first time, the CIA spirited some men who now
face death-penalty trials from a clandestine lockup at the U.S. Navy
base — and didn’t tell Congress.
Two years later, even as President George W. Bush announced at the White
House Rose Garden that the spy agency had transferred its most prized
captives to Guantánamo for trial, the alleged al-Qaida terrorists were
still under control of the CIA.
The release of 524 pages of the 6,700-page Senate Intelligence Committee
report confirms for the first time that the CIA used Guantánamo as a
black site — and continued to run the prison that held the alleged 9/11
mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and 13 other men even as the Pentagon
was charged to prosecute them.
It also offers graphic details that the U.S. government has hidden from
view in the pretrial hearings of six captives it seeks to execute —
about the sexual torture and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder of the
alleged USS Cole bomber and why a sickly looking accused 9/11
conspirator sits on a pillow at court proceedings.
But it does not resolve whether the spy agency that systematically hid
its prized interrogation program from court and congressional scrutiny
has ceded control to the U.S. military of the secret facility where the
men are imprisoned. And, if so, when?
“I would find it hard to believe that they let go. Throughout this
entire program, the CIA is running from the law at every turn,” says
Navy Cmdr. Brian Mizer. He calls the revelation that his client, Abd al
Rahim al Nashiri, the accused planner of the USS Cole bombing, “had a
tube inserted into his anus” tantamount to rape.
The CIA argues that there was a sound medical reason to use “rectal
rehydration” on its captives in 2004 at a secret site that the report
suggests was not Guantánamo. In one instance, the CIA “rectally infused”
a “food tray” of hummus, pasta with sauce, nuts, and raisins into
captive Majid Khan. Now at Guantánamo, he pleaded guilty to being an
unwitting courier of cash used to fund a terrorist bombing of a Marriott
Hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia, in exchange for the possibility of eventual
release.
In the instance of Nashiri, a footnote in the report says, his “rectal
feeding” was carried out in a secret site a month after he was taken
away from Guantánamo.
“They weren’t rehydrating him,” says Mizer of Nashiri’s tube insertion,
which was described as administered on a table with his feet raised
higher than his head. “He was being punished for being on a short-lived
hunger strike.”
Defense lawyers, some of whom have seen classified evidence in the USS
Cole and 9/11 cases, call this week’s disclosure “the tip of the
iceberg.” They want access to the entire report. But they argue that
what has been disclosed so far provides fodder for coming legal
challenges that ask Guantánamo judges, members of the U.S. military, to
either dismiss the case or downgrade it from a capital case on grounds
of outrageous government conduct or pretrial punishment — by the CIA.
Since the 2011 and 2012 arraignments, the death-penalty trials have been
grappling with how to handle the mostly hidden role of the CIA in the
cases — even as the agency tried to muzzle defense lawyers.
In an illustration of this, an agent outside the court remotely cut the
sound to the public in January 2013 when an attorney for the alleged
9/11 mastermind began to argue an unclassified motion seeking
information about the black sites described in this week’s Senate report.
Now the report shows that Guantánamo had two of those secret CIA black
sites — code named Maroon and Indigo — from September 2003 to April 2004
that held at least five detainees.
They were Nashiri, alleged 9/11 deputy Ramzi bin al Shibh, two
unidentified captives and, a fifth man who would subsequently die
mysteriously after being dropped off in Libya during Moammar Gaddafi’s
rule — a one-time U.S. military prisoner whose detention, unlike the
others, was disclosed to the International Red Cross.
A Libyan, his name was Ali Mohammed al Fakheri, but the CIA called him
Ibn Shaykh al Libi, the name he apparently used when captured by
Pakistani security forces, according to leaked Guantánamo detainee
profiles. He has been identified as a captive who was sent to Egypt for
interrogation, and under torture falsely linked Iraqi leader Saddam
Hussein to al-Qaida, something he recanted once in CIA custody.
The U.S. would go on to invade Iraq in 2003, with Fakheri’s tortured,
recanted statements as justification. In the same month that the first
photos of prisoners being abused at Abu Ghraib, Iraq, were broadcast by
60 Minutes, the five were flown from Guantanamo.
Why? As the report explains, there were elaborate internal Bush
administration talks, including consultation with the solicitor general
about the rights Guantánamo captives might receive once the Supreme
Court ruled in a case called Rasul v Bush that gave captives there
access to lawyers two months after the CIA cleared out its captives.
Fakheri would be repatriated to Libya sometime later. He died in a
Tripoli lockup in 2009 — the Libyans said he committed suicide — days
after refusing to talk to a Human Rights Watch investigator who
discovered him there.
Fourteen other CIA prisoners, including those who had been held there
before, were brought to Guantánamo for eventual trial in September 2006.
They “were housed in a separate building from other U.S. military
detainees and remained under the operational control of the CIA,”
according to the report.
A Pentagon spokesman disputed that on Thursday. “President Bush
announced on Sept. 6, 2006,” said Army Lt. Col. Myles Caggins III by
email, “that the high-value detainees were at Guantánamo under the
custody and control of the Defense Department.”
When not in pretrial hearings, they are segregated at Camp 7, a facility
so secret that its location on the base and even its cost of
construction are considered classified.
Navy Capt. Tom Gresback said Thursday that Rear Adm. Kyle Cozad, the
commander of prison operations, runs “all the detention facilities at
Guantánamo Bay” for the U.S. Southern Command, led by Marine Gen. John
Kelly.
Gresback would not say if the commanders answer to the CIA, too, or, if
not, when that changed. He also specifically declined to answer “due to
operational security” whether the U.S. military or CIA recently assigned
female soldiers to touch the former black site captives — a controversy
that has stirred unrest inside the secret prison.
In 2009, military spokesmen likewise could not say why a sickly looking
Saudi 9/11 defendant was sitting on a pillow at the war court. This
week, a footnote in the Senate report provided a possible answer.
In 2003 or 2004 CIA captive Mustafa al Hawsawi was diagnosed as
suffering “chronic hemorrhoids, an anal fissure and symptomatic rectal
prolapse” at an unidentified black site code-named Cobalt, and CIA
leadership was alerted to “excessive force” allegations in the use of
so-called rectal feedings of detainees.
Hawsawi defense attorney Walter Ruiz said Wednesday that Hawsawi had no
health problems before he was captured by the CIA in 2003 and held in a
system that, he noted, citing the report, used “sleep deprivation, diet
manipulation and found the use of rectal examinations to be effective as
a form of behavior control.”
He noted that one portion referenced a need for Hawsawi to get emergency
surgery while held in a secret CIA prison, and the host country would
not provide it. The attorney, a reserve Navy commander when called to
active duty, added that since Hawsawi got to Guantánamo in 2006 he has
“gotten no proper medical care since he’s been here in regards to that.”
While the CIA had its secret prisons at Guantánamo, according to the
Senate report time line, first Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller then Army
Brig. Gen. Jay Hood ran the detention operations.
Records maintained by the Miami Herald show that a number of prominent
members of Congress were on official visits at Guantánamo while the CIA
had its parallel prison operation: Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham and
John McCain on Dec. 10, 2003; Democratic Sen. Carl Levin on Feb. 19,
2004; Democratic Rep. Jane Harman with Republican Rep. Ray Lahood on
Oct. 13, 2003.
Also visiting was Florida Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson on Dec. 21, 2003.
He was the only one to respond to a Herald inquiry and said that he was
in the dark about the CIA facility at the time, didn’t inspect it and
wasn’t briefed on it. “No. I visited the temporary detention facility at
Gitmo,” the senator said Wednesday by email through an aide, Ryan Brown.
The report suggests all of Congress was kept in the dark about the dark
site.
“Because the Committee was not informed of the CIA detention site at
Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, no member of the Committee was aware that the U.S.
Supreme Court decision to grant certiorari in the case of Rasul v. Bush,
which related to the habeas corpus rights of detainees at Guantánamo
Bay, resulted in the transfer of CIA detainees from the CIA detention
facility at Guantánamo Bay to other CIA detention facilities.”
The CIA’s spokesman, Dean Boyd, also declined to say when — if ever —
the agency relinquished control of Guantánamo’s most secretive prison.
A footnote in the Senate report says that in early December 2006, three
months after the CIA brought its prisoners back to Cuba, then-Director
Michael Hayden visited Guantánamo’s “High-Value Detainee Detention
Facility” — something not reflected in the prison’s official list of
dignitary visits.
And there is no suggestion in the footnote that the CIA had relinquished
control of it.
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