CIA has al-Qaeda suspects hidden

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.