leak, they call this a Leak??? last time there was a LEAK like this... Noah built hiself a boat!!!
WASHINGTON - Allegations of a veiled network of CIA prisons overseas have added another chapter to the story of US detention policies in the post-9/11 age - and resulted in furious reactions from Eastern Europe to Washington's Capitol Hill.
Romania and other ex-Soviet bloc nations have hurriedly denied they know anything about such secret jails, while in the US the CIA and top congressional Republicans want to find out who leaked the story in the first place.
If nothing else, this flurry of activity serves to keep the words "detention" and "America" linked in news reports around the world. In the US, the government faces the prospect of an internal investigation only weeks after vice presidential staffer I. Lewis Libby was indicted in another leak case. "When you get into investigations around here, where does it end?" asked Sen. Trent Lott (R) of Mississippi on Tuesday.
On Nov. 3, the Washington Post reported that the CIA had set up a covert network of prisons overseas to hold high-value terrorism suspects. At times the web contained as many as eight sites, said the Post - some of them in now- democratic East European countries.
The news story did not name the countries in question. The nongovernment organization Human Rights Watch, however, issued a statement last week saying that it had information that CIA airplanes traveling from Afghanistan in 2003 and 2004 made direct flights to remote airfields in Romania and Poland.
For instance, a Boeing 737 that the CIA had previously used for prisoner transport - registration number N313P - flew from Kabul to Poland's Szczytno-Szymany airport on Sept. 22, 2003, Human Rights Watch said. Polish intelligence maintains a large installation near that location.
The N313P plane landed at Mihail Kogalniceanu military airfield in Romania the next day, said Human Rights Watch. The plane then went on to Morocco, and ultimately Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
From the US point of view, the most important legal aspect of the network itself may not be the existence of the prison, but the conduct of the jailers inside them.
Its legality "depends on what happens in the prison camps," says Alfred Rubin, a professor of international law at the Fletcher School at Tufts University.
Any nation hosting the prison, however, may at least risk domestic political problems. Romanian President Traian Basescu said Tuesday that his country had received no request from the US to site a secret CIA prison on its territory. Slovakia has also denied involvement.
The Council of Europe, whose membership includes all nations of the continent except Belarus, has said it will investigate the alleged prisons, with an eye to debating the issue at its next meeting, scheduled for Bucharest, Romania, on Nov. 25.
On the question of who leaked the story, the US Justice Department will undertake a preliminary inquiry, per an official request from the CIA. It's at least possible that this inquiry could grow into a full-scale investigation, similar to that which has ensnared Mr. Libby.
On Capitol Hill, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are calibrating how far to push leak investigations - and how much damage the White House has already sustained because of them.
In a joint letter to the House and Senate intelligence committees, Speaker Dennis Hastert and Senate majority leader Bill Frist called the leak an "egregious disclosure" that will imperil efforts to protect the American people.
They asked the committees to conduct a probe.
This call for a rare bicameral investigation came as a surprise to the GOP chairmen of the intelligence panels, as well as to the Democratic leadership.
"This is only a play to the press; that's all this is.... They're trying to change the direction of what's going on here a little bit," said Democratic leader Harry Reid, after meeting with the Democratic Caucus on Tuesday.
Have this investigation and clear this up !
Email your Rep and tell them to get off their butts !!
We found wmd including nerve and mustard agents, undeclared bio, proscribed missles and uavs and a start up nuke program, including 1.7 tons of enriched uranium and 500 tons of yellowcake and the confessed intent to resume full production once sanctions were lifted.
What we didn't find were large stockpiles that he admitted he had in 1996. We were supposed to believe him when he said that he inilaterally desroyed them in the desert and can't remember where.
Amazing how on one hand the MSM plays up Wilson-Plame as the guardians of freedom and the American way while on the other hand, the MSM willingly, almost gleefully, exposes and destroys the true purposes of the Agency with leaks of their own.
I hope heads roll.
leak, they call this a Leak??? last time there was a LEAK like this... Noah built hiself a boat!!!Republicans would do well to ignore them and investigate that which they feel is important to the country.
This investigation is a bad idea because it confirms the secret prisons.. it won't be long before the media will be making comparisons with nasty regimes that we don't want mentioned in the same sentence with the U.S.A.
I wonder if Red Cross already knew about the prisons... I hope we have had some kind of Red Cross oversight - they are pretty good at keeping quiet and that will go a long way to allow us to claim the prisons were acceptably humanitarian.
One thing is for sure if Dana got it from a Conservative we would have known that in the first sentence of her article.
So looks like everyone with clearance need be put under oath in public, kinda of like that 9/11 soviet style Commission!!!!
The Demo/Reds want to leave Poland holding the bag on behalf of Russian interests to remain the totem pole in the region.
The self interested un-American citizens are our worst enemy and many of them are inside the beltway.
Dear Jane,
It's time to get "with it." It's time to deal with today's problems, rather than yesterday's problems.
My vote is for the one whose last name starts with "Mc" and ends with "n".
"These things aren't happening at Guantanamo because it's gotten too hot for them," she said, referring to U.S. authorities responsible for interrogating recalcitrant al Qaeda terrorism suspects captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
This quote is from Ellen Tauscher on 6/28/05. It is on her website which also sites the SF Chron article. Can't remember how to post a link but you can cut and paste http://www.ellentauscher.com/what/index.asp?ID=156
I hope the Senate and House will get going on this investigation really soon. Did not McClain introduce a piece of legislation to protect reporters from having to testify about their sources? Hummmmmmmmm!!! Wonder who leaked the information to a Washington Post reporter about all this stuff?????? Say it ain't so, Johnny boy!!!
Know who did it, don'cha, Janey....
40 . TORTURE MUST NOT BE CONDONED BY THE U.S. <- Text of WaPo Article
15 . NATIONAL DEFENSE AUTHORIZATION ACT FOR FISCAL YEAR 2006
23 . FOREIGN OPERATIONS, EXPORT FINANCING, AND RELATED ...
19 . VETERANS DAY 2005
Levin and Feinstein are calling for hearings into the "black sites." Senator Dayton is on about the same page, with this ...
[Congressional Record: November 10, 2005 (Senate)]
[Page S12645-S12648]Mr. DAYTON. In response to the Post story, Republican congressional leaders sent a letter to the chairmen of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees requesting them to ``immediately initiate a joint investigation into the possible release of classified information to the media alleging that the United States Government may be detaining and interrogating terrorists at undisclosed locations abroad. As you know, if accurate, such an egregious disclosure could have long-term and far-reaching damaging and dangerous consequences, and would imperil our efforts to protect the American people and our homeland from terrorist attacks.''
Well, with all due respect, I say that the Republican leaders have the right idea but the wrong focus. There ought to be a congressional investigation, but it ought to be on the existence of those secret prisons, on who is being held there, why, for how long, and how are they being treated, whether torture is being used, and why these ``black sites'' are being hidden from Congress. I know my colleague, the distinguished Senator from Massachusetts, Mr. Kerry, has just proposed an amendment to this legislation that would require disclosure of these secret sites.
I ask unanimous consent to be added as a cosponsor of his amendment.