Dafna Linzer reports on the CIA's secret "black sites" and finds that the administration has, um, not be truthful.
"There are now no terrorists in the CIA program," the president said, adding that after the prisoners held were determined to have "little or no additional intelligence value, many of them have been returned to their home countries for prosecution or detention by their governments."
The report details the treatment of Marwan Jabour. But Jabour and the 14 prisoners Bush admitted were being held -- in "black sites" -- are only the tip of the iceberg. There are "scores more" whose whereabouts are unknown.
His account of life in that system, which he described in three interviews with The Washington Post, offers an inside view of a clandestine world that held far more prisoners than the 14 men President Bush acknowledged and had transferred out of CIA custody in September.
...Jabour's experience -- also chronicled by Human Rights Watch, which yesterday issued a report on the fate of former "black site" detainees -- often does not accord with the portrait the administration has offered of the CIA system, such as the number of people it held and the threat detainees posed. Although 14 detainees were publicly moved from CIA custody to the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, scores more have not been publicly identified by the U.S. government, and their whereabouts remain secret. Nor has the administration acknowledged that detainees such as Jabour, considered so dangerous and valuable that their detentions were kept secret, were freed.
The Supreme Court ruled that the Geneva Conventions apply to prisoners like Jabour. And there were many like him. There's something eerie about a president who can lie and defy the Supreme Court and get away with it. Impeachment is the political solution. But isn't there a judicial solution in a matter of this kind?
After 28 months of incarceration, Jabour -- who was described by a counterterrorism official in the U.S. government as "a committed jihadist and a hard-core terrorist who was intent on doing harm to innocent people, including Americans" -- was released eight months ago. U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism officials confirmed his incarceration and that he was held in Pakistan and Afghanistan. They would not discuss conditions inside black sites or the treatment of any detainee.
