Blackwater and CIA
Renditions
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The Dark Side: Secret
Prisons for Torture
“The agency, as
Cheney said that morning, went
over to ‘the dark side.’ On
Monday, September 17, President Bush
issued a fourteen-page top-secret
directive to Tenet and the CIA,
ordering the agency to hunt, capture,
imprison, and interrogate suspects
around the world. It set no limits on
what the agency could do. It was
the foundation for a system of secret
prisons where CIA officers and
contractors used techniques that
included torture…
New Extraordinary
Authority:
Turn Kidnapped
Suspects Over to
Foreign Security
Services for
Torture
“Bush gave the
agency a new and extraordinary
authority: to turn kidnapped suspects
over to foreign security services for
interrogation and torture, and to
rely on the confession they
extracted…
“Under
Bush’s order, the CIA began
to function as a global military
police, throwing hundreds of suspects
into secret jails in Afghanistan,
Thailand, Poland, and inside the
American military prison in
Guantanamo, Cuba. It handed over
hundreds more prisoners off to the
intelligence services in Egypt,
Pakistan, Jordan, and Syria for
interrogations.” Tim Weiner,
Pulitzer Prize Winner of the New York
Times for his work on secret national
security programs, Legacy to
Ashes: the History of the CIA. New
York: Doubleday, 2007, p. 481.
[Emphasis mine].
Covert Ops Relies
Heavily on
Private Contractors
‘The covert
operations Black organized
immediately after 9/11 relied
heavily on private contractors, answering
directly to him, rather than
active-duty military forces.”
–Blackwater, 270. Recruiting
from former Delta Force, ex-SEALS,
and other Special Forces operators as
Independent Contractors, shortly
Black had 1,200 men working for him.
The Camelot of Counter
Terrorism
“It was the
Camelot of counter terrorism,’ a
former counter terrorism official
told the Washington Post. ‘We
didn’t have a mess with
others-and it was fun.’ People
were abducted from Afghanistan,
Pakistan, and other hot spots and
flown to the U.S. prison camps at
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba - most held
without charge for years, designated
as enemy combatants and denied access
to any legal system. Others were kept
at hellish prison camps inside
Afghanistan and other
countries.” –Blackwater,
270, 271.
Rendition Group
Procedures
“As part of this
new ‘operational
flexibility,’ the CIA carried
out ‘extraordinary
renditions’ of prisoners –
shipping them to countries with
questionable or blatantly horrible
human rights records, where they were
sometimes psychologically or
physically tortured. The Washington
Post reported that Black’s
CTC heavily utilized its
‘Rendition Group, made up of
case workers, paramilitaries,
analysts and psychologists. Their job
is to figure out how to snatch
someone off a city street, or a
remote hillside, or a secluded corner
of an airport where local
authorities wait.’ According to
the Post’s Dana Priest:
Members of the
Rendition Group follow a simple but
standard procedure: Dressed head
to toe in black, including masks,
they blindfold and cut the clothes
off their new captives, then
administer an enema and sleeping
drugs. They outfit detainees in a
diaper and jumpsuit for what can be a
daylong trip. Their destinations:
either a detention facility operated
by cooperative countries in the
Middle East and Central Asia,
including Afghanistan, or one of the CIA’s
own secret prisons – referred
to in classified documents as ‘black
sites.’ which at various
times have been operated in eight
countries, including several in
Eastern Europe. –Dana Priest,
“Wrongful Imprisonment: Anatomy
of a CIA Mistake German Citizen
Released After Months in
‘Rendition,”’ the Washington
Post, December 4, 2005.
“Black played an
integral role from the very beginning
in the use of ‘extraordinary
renditions’ in the war on
terror.” –Blackwater, 272.
With the initial capture of alleged
Al Qaeda trainer Ibn al-shayk al-Libi
in November 2001, the FBI agent Jack
Cloonan counseled his FBI agents to
proceed just as if it were handled
out of his New York FBI office:
“Do yourself a favor, read the
guy his rights.” But this did
not sit well with the CIA, which
wanted to use other methods.
“The CIA Afghanistan station
chief asked Black, then counter
terrorism chief, to arrange for
agency to take control of Libi. Black
in turn asked CIA Director George
Tenet, who got permission for the
rendition from the White House over
the objections of FBI Director Robert
Mueller.
White House Lawyers
Work to
Develop Legal
Justification for
Ultraviolet Policies
‘The White House,
meanwhile, had its lawyers feverishly
working to develop legal
justification for these ultraviolet
policies. I ‘formally’ told
the CIA it couldn’t be
prosecuted for ‘torture
lite’ techniques that did not
result in ‘organ failure’
or ‘death.’ [Evan Thomas
and Michael Hirsh, ‘Torture and
Terror: Interrogators Have Pondered
the Uses of Torture for Centuries and
in the wake of 9/11 the US Has
Embraced So-called Torture
Lite,’ Newsweek, November
22, 2005.] Black had quickly earned
an insider’s pass to the White
House after 9/11, and his former
colleagues said he would return from
meetings at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
‘inspired and talking in
missionary terms.’ [Dana Priest,
“Wrongful Imprisonment Anatomy
of a CIA Mistake German Citizen
Released After Months in
‘Rendition,’” the Washington
Post, December 4, 2005.]”
– Blackwater, 272, 273.
The Torture Papers
The memos created to
justify torture would be released in
the massive 1,249 pages The
Torture Papers: The Road to Abu
Ghraib, ed. Karen J. Greenberg
and Joshua L. Dratel. New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Torture
The Pen of
Inspiration records:
“Dignitaries of the church
studied, under Satan their master, to
invent means to cause the greatest
possible torture and not end the life
of the victim.” GC 569.
“’Physical
pain amounting to torture,’
Assistant Attorney General Jay S.
Bybee advised the Counsel to the
President, Alberto Gonzales, ‘
must be equivalent in intensity to
the pain accompanying serious
physical injury such as organ
failure, impairment of bodily
function or even death.’”
–Bybee to Gonzales, Anthony
Lewis in the Introduction to The
Torture Memos, xiii.
In other words,
according to Bybee’s last
definition, torture is not to be
considered torture until the pain to
the person is equivalent in intensity
to pain causing death.
Ghost Prisoners
“Fanning out
across Europe, Africa, and Asia,
working with friendly foreign
intelligence service on earth, CIA
officers snatched and grabbed more
than three thousand in more than one
hundred countries in the year after
9/11.” –Legacy of Ashes,
485. As few as 14 were high-ranking
authority figures within al Qaeda and
its affiliates. Hundreds were
nobodies who ‘became ghost
prisoners in the war on terror.”
-Legacy of Ashes, 485.
Black: Coordinator for
Counter Terrorism
In 2002, the CIA
suddenly fired Black, kicked him out,
and barred him from entering CIA
headquarters. [UPI, July 28, 2004].
Black was humiliated and restricted
to an agency satellite location at
Tysons Corner. However, “On
October 10, 2002, President Bush
appointed him as his coordinator for
counter terrorism, with the rank of
at-large ambassador at the State
Department.” [White House Press
Release, October 10, 202.]”
–Blackwater, 273.
Blackwater Hires
Black: Direct
Access to CIA and
Intelligence
World
February 4, 2005,
Blackwater would hire Black, a man
whom few could rival as having their
hands deeply into the inner workings
of U.S. covert operations in the post
9/11 world. Soon Black became a
‘godfather of sorts to the
mercenary community as it refined its
rebranding campaign. Potential
Blackwater clients could now assume
they were getting direct access to
the resources of the CIA and
intelligence world from ‘a
leadership team drawn from senior
levels of the United States
government’ – something few
other private firms could boast or
imply…He [Black] would soon take
the lead in promoting Blackwater as a
privatized peacekeeping force that
could deploy at a moment’s
notice in places like Darfur, Sudan,
or domestically in U.S. Homeland
Security operations.” –Blackwater,
280.
Total Intelligence
Solutions Run
By Among the Best
of the CIA’s
Officers
By 2007, Black set up
Total Intelligence Solutions.
“Founded in
February 2007, Total Intel
[that’s total Intelligence
Solutions] was run by Cofer Black
– the chief of the CIA’s
counter terrorist center on 9/11. His
partners were Robert Richer, who had
been the number two man at the
clandestine service, and Enrique
Prado, Black’s chief of counter
terrorism operations. All three
had decamped from the Bush
administration’s war on terror
in 2005 to join Blackwater USA, the
politically wired private security
company that served, among many other
things, as the Praetorian Guard for
Americans in Baghdad. They learned
the tricks of the
government-contracting trade at
Blackwater, and within little more
than a year Black and company were
running Total Intel. These were
among the best of the CIA’s
officers.” – Legacy
of Ashes, 512, 513. [Emphasis
mine.]
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