The CIA no longer operates any secret overseas prisons, Director Leon Panetta said yesterday, and has not detained anyone since he became chief in February. Panetta's statement, contained in a message to the CIA workforce, also said the agency will no longer use contractors to conduct interrogations or to provide security for remaining detention sites.Referring to "black sites," as the secret prisons were known, Panetta said the agency has a plan "to decommission the remaining sites," an apparent reference to facilities still in existence but no longer operational. He said that "Agency personnel" will take charge of that process and that any outside contracts still involved in site security will be "promptly terminated."
The CIA has never revealed the locations where it secretly held and interrogated as many as 100 high-level al-Qaeda and other terrorism suspects captured overseas after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. News reports have said the sites were in Thailand, Romania and Poland, among other places. Panetta's statement was the first public acknowledgement that some of the sites still exist.
Under executive orders issued Jan. 22, President Obama ordered the closure of the secret CIA sites, along with the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and banned interrogation techniques not authorized by the U.S. Army Field Manual.
Obama did not prohibit the process known as "extraordinary rendition," under which prisoners are secretly transferred from their place of capture to another country outside the United States. Panetta said that the CIA "retains the authority to detain individuals on a short-term transitory basis" but that no such detentions "have occurred since I have become director."
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence last month launched a review of the CIA's detention and interrogation program that it said will "run parallel to a White House review to be conducted as part of President Obama's Executive Orders on detention and interrogation."
| They'll conclude that 1) everything Bush did was wrong and 2) they have to keep doing it. |