Free Republic

We’ve all heard the stories about how China is making people disappear in their reeducation camps in the western reaches of their nation, particularly the Uyghurs. But are they engaged in similar tactics in other countries? That’s the claim being made by one Chinese woman who says that she was detained in a secret black site in Dubai for more than a week. The woman claims to have been held without access to legal counsel or the ability to contact her family. She also was reportedly forced to sign legal documents incriminating her own fiance’ who is still back in...

“We did call her Bloody Gina. Gina was always very quick and very willing to use force. Gina and people like Gina did it, I think, because they enjoyed doing it. They tortured just for the sake of torture, not for the sake of gathering information.”-John Kirakou I would take anything John Kirakou says with a grain from the salt pit.  I question his credibility. What does anyone really know about Gina Haspel, President Trump's nominee to be the next director of the CIA? Not a heck of a lot. So far what we have is media and ideology-driven hysteria:...

'Waterboarding broke al Qaeda captive in 35 seconds,' says former CIA agent defending tortureUse of the interrogation technique known as "waterboarding" was approved by the White House and gets results, a former CIA agent admitted yesterday. The technique - which simulates drowning - was used against Al Qaeda captives with success, John Kiriakou told a U.S. TV network. The one-time CIA interrogator is the first to speak out about the "torture" methods that have earned President George Bush's administration worldwide condemnation. The White House has denied torture is used on terror suspects, but Mr Kiriakou said waterboarding "broke" one stubbornly...

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director Gina Haspel is personally blocking the declassification and release of key Russiagate documents in the hopes that President Donald Trump will lose his re-election bid, multiple senior U.S. officials told The Federalist. The officials said Haspel, who served under former CIA Director John Brennan as the spy agency’s station chief in London in 2016 and 2017, is concerned that the declassification and release of documents detailing what the CIA was doing during the 2016 election and the 2017 transition could embarrass the CIA and potentially even implicate Haspel herself. “Haspel and [FBI Director Christopher] Wray...

Senate Democrats and President Obama have moved up to a whole new level of desperate. On Tuesday, Democrats in the Senate, who will lose control of the chamber in just three weeks, released a report focused on interrogation techniques — during the administration of George W. Bush. Yes, Mr. Obama is all about transparency, as long as it’s not about his administration. Despite warnings from top Obama officials, including Secretary of State John Kerry, that release of the once-classified report would endanger Americans abroad, the president demanded that the United States explain its actions to — terrorists. In some ways,...

ABC News is reporting that Current and former CIA officers speaking to ABC News on the condition of confidentiality say the United States scrambled to get all the suspects off European soil before Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived there today. The officers say 11 top al Qaeda suspects have now been moved to a new CIA facility in the North African desert. The disgrunted intelligence officers even disclosed an actual list of 12 high-value targets allegedly held by the CIA, and ABC is reporting it : Abu Zubaydah: Held first in Thailand then Poland Ibn Al-Shaykh al-Libi: Held in...

In October Paula Broadwell told an audience that the CIA in Benghazi "had taken a couple of Libyan militia members prisoner" at its secret annex. The CIA flatly denied the claim, saying that the agency "has not had detention authority since January 2009, when Executive Order 13491 was issued. Any suggestion that the Agency is still in the detention business is uninformed and baseless." Marc Thiessen of the American Enterprise Institute points out that the denial is factually incorrect because while Obama ordered the closure of all CIA detention facilities (i.e. “Black Sites”), the order states that it "does not...

This image from the FBI website shows Anas al-Libi. Gunmen in a three-car convoy seizedNazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai, known by his alias Anas al-Libi, an al-Qaeda leader connected to the1998 embassy bombings in eastern Africa and wanted by the U.S. for more than a decade outside hishouse Saturday in the Libyan capital, his relatives said. (AP Photo/FBI) In a time when the current administration appears to favor kills over capture as well as "catch and release", last Saturday Abu Anas al-Libi (Zawahiri's man in Libya) survived President Obama's kill list to be captured instead of droned upon: Since President Obama stepped...

With two Pulitzer Prizes to her name, Dana Priest is one of the Washington Post’s most celebrated reporters. Until Monday, when the Post published the first installment of a bombshell series on post-9/11 intelligence industrial complex, national security blogger William Arkin was hardly known to the paper’s readers. But from a media perspective, Arkin’s role as co-author of the series might be the more important. It marks the first time one of the Post’s bloggers – lately the cause of controversy because they sometimes blur opinion and reporting — has had a byline in one of the paper’s big, investigative...

Covertly taken photos of CIA interrogators that were shown by defense attorneys to al Qaeda inmates at the Guantanamo Bay prison represent a more serious security breach than the 2003 outing of CIA officer Valerie Plame, the agency's former general counsel said Wednesday. John Rizzo, who was the agency's top attorney until December, said in an interview that he initially requested the Justice Department and CIA investigation into the compromise of CIA interrogators' identities after photographs of the officers were found in the cell of one al Qaeda terrorist in Cuba. "Well I think this is far more serious than...

From Bloomberg: Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian who faces terrorism charges for his role in the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies, asked a judge to order U.S. prosecutors to surrender information about “black sites” where he was held. Ghailani faces federal charges over the bombings of U.S. embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya, that killed 224 people, including 12 Americans. Ghailani had been held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, since 2006, before being transferred to the U.S. in June. He is the first detainee from Guantanamo Bay to be tried in a U.S. civilian court. In a...

EXCLUSIVE: CIA Secret 'Torture' Prison Found at Fancy Horseback Riding Academy ABC News Finds the Location of a "Black Site" for Alleged Terrorists in Lithuania By BRIAN ROSS and MATTHEW COLE Nov. 18, 2009 — The CIA built one of its secret European prisons inside an exclusive riding academy outside Vilnius, Lithuania, a current Lithuanian government official and a former U.S. intelligence official told ABC News this week. Where affluent Lithuanians once rode show horses and sipped coffee at a café, the CIA installed a concrete structure where it could use harsh tactics to interrogate up to eight suspected al-Qaeda...

Facing budget cuts like every other agency, the CIA is hoping to sell equipment from the now defunct Black Sites to recoup whatever revenue possible. Intelligence gathering and interrogation tools are being sold by CIA operatives at yard sales throughout the Eastern Bloc. Of particular popularity are the water-boarding setups, which are being sold as above ground pools. A high school in Richmond, VA, even ordered one from the CIA’s Craigslist posting to use in their production of The Crucible.

....With the help of the American trauma surgeon, Abu Zubaydah's captors nursed him back to health. He was moved at least twice, first, reportedly, to Thailand; then, he believes, to Afghanistan, probably Bagram. In a safe house in Thailand the interrogation began: "I woke up, naked, strapped to a bed, in a very white room. The room measured approximately [13 feet by 13 feet]. The room had three solid walls, with the fourth wall consisting of metal bars separating it from a larger room. I am not sure how long I remained in the bed. After some time, I think...

SNIPPET: "The detentions would be temporary."

President Obama on Thursday will order the closure of so-called black sites, where CIA and European security services have interrogated terrorist suspects, under executive orders dismantling much of the Bush admistration's architecture for the war on terror, according to four individuals familiar with a draft executive order. Mr. Obama will shutter "all permanant detention facilities overseas," the draft said, according to the individuals who asked not to be named because the orders have not yet been signed. There are at least eight such prisons, according to published reports. The Bush administration never revealed the number or location of the facilities,...

Dana Priest Responds to Criticism of Secret Prisons Story By E&P Staff Published: April 27, 2006 4:40 PM ET NEW YORK Ever since she earned a widely-expected Pulitzer Prize earlier this month for her Washington Post exclusive on CIA "secret prisons" in Europe, Dana Priest has been attacked by conservative commentators for supposedly turning classified information into a vehicle for undermining the war on terror. Bill Bennett, among others, not only said she did not deserve the Pulitzer, but should be brought up on charges and possibly sent to jail. Then she was drawn into the controversy surrounding fired CIA...

The Fourth Branch of Government Needs to be Pruned Two days ago the Washington Post came out with a story that released classified information on the existence of so called, "Black Sites," where Al Queda prisoners are being held and interrogated. These prisons are not only within American controlled territory but in foreign countries as well. The fact that the United States has secret sites for interrogation doesn't upset me, because I suspected that America probably did have such sites all along. They only make sense. First of all, we need a place to keep these individuals. Each of these...