CIA Black Sites: The Secret Prisons of the War on Terror

The Genesis of Black Sites

• ✈️ Following the 9/11 attacks, the CIA established secret prisons known as black sites to circumvent US laws and international treaties regarding prisoner interrogation.
• 🤝 These sites operated with the collaboration of at least 54 foreign governments, allowing for extraordinary rendition and interrogation outside of American legal jurisdiction.
• 🤫 The existence of these sites was so classified that even high-ranking US government officials were often kept in the dark.

Global Network of Secret Prisons

• 🇹🇭 The first foreign black site, codenamed Detention Site Green (nicknamed Cat's Eye), was an experimental center in Thailand, used to interrogate suspected 9/11 operative Abuz Aeda.
• 🇮🇶 Black sites were suspected in Afghanistan (Jalalabad, Assadabad) and Iraq (Abu Ghraib, Camp Buouah, Camp Craropper).
• 🌍 The US and UK collaborated on a black site at the naval base in Diego Garcia, an island territory in the Indian Ocean.
• 🇵🇱 A $15 million deal with Polish intelligence led to the creation of a secret prison codenamed Quartz, where detainees could earn rewards for good behavior.
• 🇪🇺 Other European locations included suspected sites in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Czechia, Georgia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Romania, Ukraine, Kosovo, and Macedonia.
• 🌍 Several prominent black sites were located in Africa, including suspected sites in Egypt, Morocco (Timara interrogation center), Libya, and Djibouti (Camp Lemonnier).

Mobile and Unconventional Black Sites

• 🚢 Beyond land-based facilities, the CIA utilized moving prison ships and rendition aircraft for transporting and detaining suspects.
• ✈️ Covert aircraft like N313P (Boeing 737) and N379P (Gulfstream 5) were crucial for moving prisoners across continents in secrecy.

Enhanced Interrogation and Legal Justifications

• ⚖️ The Bush administration argued that detainees were "unlawful enemy combatants," placing them outside the protections of the Geneva Convention.
• 🧠 Psychologists like James Mitchell and Bruce Jensen designed the CIA's "enhanced interrogation" program.
• 🩺 Doctors played a role in assessing detainees' fitness for torture and treating victims, sometimes even devising new methods.
• 📜 Lawyers from the Justice Department and CIA provided legal assessments for torture methods, ensuring they fit within an expanded definition of "enhanced interrogation," and granted legal immunity to those involved.
• 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Threatening a detainee's family was deemed legal if considered conditional, adding another layer of psychological torture.

The "Dark Prison" and Atrocity Production

• 🌑 The black site near Cabbell, Afghanistan, codenamed Salt Pit or Cobalt, known to detainees as the "dark prison," is described as one of the most disturbing.
• 🥶 Conditions included narrow cells with concrete floors, metal rings for chaining, sleep deprivation cells where prisoners were hanged by their wrists, and constant darkness and loud music.
• 💀 Gul Raman was found frozen to death in his cell in November 2002, less than 70 days after the facility opened, after enduring severe sleep deprivation, beatings, and torment.
• 🚫 The facility's design, with its extreme conditions and lack of oversight, is seen as an "atrocity producing situation," a "dark platonic ideal" of a CIA black site, which remained operational until 2021.