How US Prison Officials Rubberstamped a CIA Torture Chamber
Published on Wednesday, January 14, 2015
by Blog of Rights / ACLU
How US Prison Officials Rubberstamped a CIA Torture Chamber
by Carl Takei
The CIA's chief interrogator called it "the closest thing he has seen to a dungeon."
At the agency's COBALT detention site in Afghanistan – also known as the "Salt Pit" – detainees were kept in total darkness, shackled to the floors or walls of their cells, and given buckets to dispose of their own waste. One senior interrogator later told the CIA's inspector general that a detainee "could go for days or weeks without anyone looking at him." Studies have concluded that such isolation has profound psychological impacts. It's no surprise the interrogator said detainees "cowered" whenever their cell doors were opened. Even though the Salt Pit was closed in 2004, the horrors that took place there stand as examples of the CIA program's inhumanity.
In a little-noticed section of the executive summary of the Senate torture report released in December, Senate investigators described how the Federal Bureau of Prisons, which runs the federal prison system, gave a green light to this dungeon.
In November 2002, just a few months after it opened, the CIA invited a BOP inspection team to assess the facility. During one of the multiple days of the BOP's inspection, a CIA officer ordered that detainee Gul Rahman be partially stripped, then shackled overnight to the concrete floor of his cell. Left naked except for a sweatshirt, Rahman died of apparent hypothermia at the end of the BOP's visit, though it is unclear whether anyone from the team actually saw him. After the inspection, the BOP team commented that they were "WOW'ed" and had "never been in a facility where individuals are so sensory deprived."
Despite seeing the conditions that led to Rahman's death, BOP apparently never urged the CIA to make the Salt Pit less like a medieval torture chamber. Instead, the BOP inspectors gave the prison their blessing, concluding that "the detainees were not being treated in humanely (sic)" and the "staff did not mistreat the detainee(s)." In the years that followed, more than half of the 119 victims of the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program who were named in the Senate torture report spent time in the Salt Pit.
The BOP's rubberstamping of the Salt Pit is perhaps the most shocking example of how a domestic prison agency helped foster U.S. torture abroad. But it is hardly the only one.
More:
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/01/14/how-us-prison-officials-rubberstamped-cia-torture-chamber
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