Secret Prisons... in Poland

The bombshell story today comes from Dana Priest at the Washington Post, who uncovers a secret network of worldwide, off-the-books prisons run by US intelligence to illegally hide, interrogate, and torture detainees:

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.

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 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.

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.

I haven't heard it yet, but I'm sure the reaction to this on the right will be something along the lines of "What's wrong, you lefties love the CIA now," or some such statement that misses the point. Our tax dollars are paying for secret prisons, dedicated to terrorizing and torturing people who have never had a trial, have never had the right to an attorney, have never been granted due process. We have no idea who these people are, and given that the Red Cross has determined that 70 to 90 percent of the detainees at Abu Ghraib had no connection to international terrorism or the homegrown insurgency, the government doesn't have such a good track record on this. Their past history includes beatings, sexual abuse, murders, hiding bodies from international inspectors, mass detainee suicides, denying due process despite a year-old Supreme Court decision mandating it, charging nobody above staff sergeant for the crimes, refusing to release evidence despite two judge's orders, lobbying on the floor of the Senate to keep torture as an option, and now this revelation.

By the way, you'll never guess where the prisons might be:

Hungary, Slovakia and Bulgaria rushed to issue denials of their involvement.

But Frantisek Bublan, the Czech Interior Minister, said last night that the US had approached his Government a month ago about holding suspects on Czech territory, but Prague had refused.

Human rights groups point at Poland and Romania as two eastern European countries that have taken in America’s “ghost detainees”. They also claimed that the US was running out of countries willing to host its terror suspects.

Boy, did we ever forget Poland. We forgot the legacy of Poland. Home of concentration camps. Home of Soviet-era gulags. We've refashioned them, slapped on a fresh coat of paint and welcomed the new batch of prisoners.

This is not only illegal but immoral and indefensible. As a taxpayer I'm as implicated as everyone else in this country. One year ago today there was an election. The participants neglected the horrors of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Bagram. The neglected the fact that viable intelligence cannot possibly be extracted by torture. They neglected our national loss of pride in our own humanity. They neglected the ceding of the moral high ground in favor of feeling good about "kicking some terrorist ass." They neglected how this all made us so much less safe: our soldiers are now subject to the same kinds of humiliations should they be captured, our citizens are increasingly at risk from the hundreds of thousands of more terrorists created as a result of this heinous series of acts.

All of it was neglected, swept under the rug. I was screaming last year, wondering why nobody was talking about Abu Ghraib. Not one mention of prisoner abuse in nearly 5 hours of debates. Not one advertisement about prisoner abuse. Not one mention in any stump speech.

And yet this is the issue that has destroyed our dignity and debased our country. Oh yeah, and it's completely illegal, by all federal and international writs of law.

I had to laugh, but wanted to cry, at Steven Hadley's response to these allegations:

National security adviser Stephen Hadley would not comment on the accuracy of a Washington Post report that top al Qaeda suspects were being held for questioning "at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe."

But he said President Bush has demanded that U.S. agents treat prisoners "in a way that is consistent with our values and principles."

In other words, "I'm not saying we're not doing it, but if we are, we're certainly NOT torturing anyone."

Real credible.

John McCain and those other 89 senators (all 45 Democrats, 45 Republicans) are taking a stand to take our country back from these brutes who would much rather throw out every principle this country holds dear. Unfortunately, it's too late; the damage has been done. I only hope we can recover from this great national wrong.