The CIA has been holding and interrogating al-Qaeda captives at a secret facility in Eastern Europe, part of a covert prison system established after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Washington Post reported yesterday.
The system has, at various times, included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents, the paper said.
The hidden global internment network is a central element in the CIA's unconventional war on terrorism, the Post said. It depends on the cooperation of foreign intelligence services, and on keeping even basic information about the system secret from the public, foreign officials and nearly all members of Congress charged with overseeing the CIA's covert actions.
The Post said the existence and locations of the facilities were known only to a handful of officials in the US and, usually, only to the president and a few top intelligence officers in each host country. The CIA has not acknowledged the existence of a secret network, the paper said.
Thailand denied it was host to such a facility.
"There is no fact in the unfounded claims," government spokesman Surapong Suebwonglee said.
Thailand's security cooperation with the US would have to be done "in an open and legitimate manner," he said.
The prisons are referred to as "black sites" in classified US documents and virtually nothing is known about who the detainees are, how they are interrogated or about decisions on how long they will be held, the report said.
About 30 major terrorism suspects have been held at black sites while more than 70 other detainees, considered less important, were delivered to foreign intelligence services under a process known as "rendition," the paper said, citing US and foreign intelligence sources.
The top 30 al-Qaeda prisoners are isolated from the outside world, they have no recognized legal rights and no one outside the CIA is allowed to talk with or see them, the sources told the paper.
The Post, citing several former and current intelligence and other US government officials, said the CIA used such detention centers abroad because in the US it is illegal to hold prisoners in such isolation.
But the revelations of widespread prisoner abuse in Afghanistan and Iraq by the US military have increased concern among lawmakers, foreign governments and human-rights groups about the opaque CIA system.
Those concerns escalated last month, when Vice President Dick Cheney and CIA Director Porter Goss asked Congress to exempt CIA employees from legislation that would bar cruel and degrading treatment of any prisoner in US custody.
Since then, the arrangement has been increasingly debated within the CIA, where considerable concern lingers about the legality, morality and practicality of holding even unrepentant terrorists in such isolation and secrecy.
EUROPEAN TARGETS: The planned Munich center would support TSMC’s European customers to design high-performance, energy-efficient chips, an executive said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest contract chipmaker, yesterday said that it plans to launch a new research-and-development (R&D) center in Munich, Germany, next quarter to assist customers with chip design. TSMC Europe president Paul de Bot made the announcement during a technology symposium in Amsterdam on Tuesday, the chipmaker said. The new Munich center would be the firm’s first chip designing center in Europe, it said. The chipmaker has set up a major R&D center at its base of operations in Hsinchu and plans to create a new one in the US to provide services for major US customers,
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday said that it would redesign the written portion of the driver’s license exam to make it more rigorous. “We hope that the exam can assess drivers’ understanding of traffic rules, particularly those who take the driver’s license test for the first time. In the past, drivers only needed to cram a book of test questions to pass the written exam,” Minister of Transportation and Communications Chen Shih-kai (陳世凱) told a news conference at the Taoyuan Motor Vehicle Office. “In the future, they would not be able to pass the test unless they study traffic regulations
‘A SURVIVAL QUESTION’: US officials have been urging the opposition KMT and TPP not to block defense spending, especially the special defense budget, an official said The US plans to ramp up weapons sales to Taiwan to a level exceeding US President Donald Trump’s first term as part of an effort to deter China as it intensifies military pressure on the nation, two US officials said on condition of anonymity. If US arms sales do accelerate, it could ease worries about the extent of Trump’s commitment to Taiwan. It would also add new friction to the tense US-China relationship. The officials said they expect US approvals for weapons sales to Taiwan over the next four years to surpass those in Trump’s first term, with one of them saying
‘COMING MENACINGLY’: The CDC advised wearing a mask when visiting hospitals or long-term care centers, on public transportation and in crowded indoor venues Hospital visits for COVID-19 last week increased by 113 percent to 41,402, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said yesterday, as it encouraged people to wear a mask in three public settings to prevent infection. CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said weekly hospital visits for COVID-19 have been increasing for seven consecutive weeks, and 102 severe COVID-19 cases and 19 deaths were confirmed last week, both the highest weekly numbers this year. CDC physician Lee Tsung-han (李宗翰) said the youngest person hospitalized due to the disease this year was reported last week, a one-month-old baby, who does not
RSS