Friday 10 April 2009 01.41 BST
The head of the CIA moved yesterday to formalize the new Obama administration's break with the past in its approach to national security, when he ordered the final decommissioning of secret overseas sites where the US had held, and in some cases tortured, al-Qaida prisoners.
Leon Panetta told the agency's staff that he was overturning one of the causes of complaint of human rights groups about detentions of terrorist suspects under the Bush regime: the use of private contractors to secure prisoners. From now on private security firms will no longer have any role in the sites, a shift that has the added benefit of saving the CIA some $4m (£2.7m).
The rejection of the services of private security firms in itself marks a clean break with past practices. During the Bush era, contractors enjoyed a bonanza – particularly in Iraq, where they were used to perform many of the roles of the overstretched military.
Panetta said that the sites – which are now empty, having received no new detainees since he took over the agency in February – would be decommissioned under the auspices of the agency itself. His announcement puts into practice the signal given by President Obama on the second day of his administration that he would have the facilities closed.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/10/cia-panetta-closes-rendition-sitesrelated:
Apr 8, 2009
What happened to terror suspects Washington turned over to foreign governments? The CIA quietly moved scores of detainees out of its own "black site" prisons in recent years and turned them over to foreign governments, refusing to provide the International Red Cross any information about their treatment or whereabouts, according to a report made public this week.
Although President Bush made a brief public allusion to the transfers in September 2006, the U.S. government has never offered any accounting of precisely how many detainees were moved and what became of them. The issue became a major bone of contention between the Red Cross and the CIA, according to little-noticed language in the Feb. 14, 2007, Red Cross report to CIA acting general counsel John Rizzo that was publicly posted on a magazine Web site this week.
There is substantial reason to believe that these "ghost detainees" included some high-profile suspects, including Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a Libyan-born jihadist captured in Afghanistan whose claims about ties between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were prominently used by top Bush administration officials to justify the war in Iraq, according to human-rights activists who have closely followed the issue. Following the U.S. invasion, al-Libi recanted those claims, saying he fabricated his story about Iraq-Qaeda ties in order to get his interrogators to stop their abusive treatment of him. After his recantation became known in 2004, U.S. government officials dropped all public references to him and he was never heard from again—even though he was once hailed as the U.S. military's first big "catch" after the 9/11 attacks.
When Red Cross officials later pressed for information about what happened to such "ghost" detainees, U.S. government officials insisted they were returned to their country of origin under assurances they would be given "humane" treatment, the report states. But the Red Cross was never given access to the detainees—nor told anything about what happened to them after they were sent back Nor were U.S. State Department officials given details of the transfers or details about the nature of the "assurances" of humane treatment provided by foreign intelligence services to the CIA, according to a former top Bush administration official who was aware of the transfers but who asked not to be publicly identified because the issue remains highly classified. "This issue has been hiding in plain sight—but nobody has connected the dots," said the former official.
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http://www.newsweek.com/id/193107
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