By Meteor Blades
Secret prisons holding unnamed prisoners in underground cells in unnamed places for undetermined time periods out of reach of any country’s law or of international law without any oversight by human rights groups or anyone but the jailers.
You read something as chilling as that and you want to squeeze your eyes tight shut and desperately avoid learning what you already know from the headlines: The dungeons described are American, even though they aren’t on U.S. soil, even though only a handful of our elected leaders were told about them, even though they violate every tenet of civilized behavior that we’ve been told we’re fighting to defend in the so-called war on terror. The prisoners are held incommunicado somewhere in Eastern Europe, apparently in an old Soviet compound. Why there? Well, for one thing, secret prisons are illegal in America.
So much for Ronald Reagan’s purloined but poignant “America is a shining city upon a hill whose beacon light guides freedom-loving people everywhere.” Rather, a new gulag for a new era. Another wonderful victory in the war on terror.
And exactly how is that war going these days? Shitty, according a new book on the subject:
Washington (Reuters) - U.S. terrorism experts Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon have reached a stark conclusion about the war on terrorism: the United States is losing.Despite an early victory over the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan, the two former Clinton administration officials say President George W. Bush's policies have created a new haven for terrorism in Iraq that escalates the potential for Islamic violence against Europe and the United States.
America's badly damaged image in the Muslim world could take more than a generation to set right. And Bush's mounting political woes at home have undermined the chance for any bold U.S. initiatives to address the grim social realities that feed Islamic radicalism, they say.
It's been fairly disastrous," said Benjamin, who worked as a director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council from 1994 to 1999.
"We have had some very important successes getting individual terrorists. But I think the broader story is really quite awful. We have done a lot to fuel the fires, and we have done a lot to encourage people to hate us," he added in an interview.
Their prescription?
U.S. fortunes could improve, the authors say, if Washington took a number of politically challenging steps, like bolstering public diplomacy with trade pacts aimed at expanding middle-class influence in countries such as Pakistan.Washington also needs to do more to ease regional tensions that feed Muslim grievances across the globe, from Thailand and the Philippines to Chechnya and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In a Muslim world of 1.2 billion people, as many as three-in-four hold negative views of the United States.
Because anti-U.S. rhetoric often appeals strongly to impressionable youth, Benjamin and Simon believe many of today's young Muslims will harbor grievances against the United States for the rest of their lives.
I can attest. In Tripoli, as recently as five years ago, my Libyan stepdaughter tells me, even though there was plenty of visceral support for Palestinians and considerable anger over the U.S. embargo even among Khadafi haters, you never saw extremist young men with long beards calling for jihad. Now you do. Despite everything, there was no real anti-Americanism five years ago. Now there is. One might mistakenly perceive this antipathy as ironic, given that Khadafi and the U.S. are pals, but it's nothing of the sort. The widely hated Khadafi is now seen as a U.S. puppet.
Simon and Benjamin’s view that the U.S. is making matters worse ain’t exactly new. We’ve heard this in one form or another from a host of sources, from Richard Clarke to Zbigniew Brzezinski, from Larry Johnson to Michael Scheuer, who, in his book Imperial Hubris, wrote: "U.S. forces and policies are completing the radicalisation of the Islamic world, something Osama bin Laden has been trying to do with substantial but incomplete success since the early 1990s."
The Defense Science Board’s report on ”Strategic Communication” declared 14 months ago that when it comes to “the war of ideas or the struggle for hearts and minds, American efforts have not only failed, they may also have achieved the opposite of what they intended.”
There are many others who began such criticisms long ago. But Simon’s and Benjamin’s voices are certainly welcome because it seems to be taking most legislators and most Americans an insufferably long time to get the message and try to do something about it.
Ten months ago, the Washington Post first let us know of the secret prison within a prison at Guantanamo. Before that we learned of rendition, in which suspected terrorists like Abu Omar are grabbed off the street and disappear into a country whose intelligence apparatus’ sensibilities about torture are, conveniently, state secrets. Now, we’ve learned there's a “black” prison where? Georgia? Romania? Bulgaria? Poland? The Post knows, but as EZ Writer complains, the Post has been talked out of telling us where by the very same Administration that has been lying and concealing and manipulating about its war on terrorism for the past four years. Doesn’t matter. I’ll guess and say everybody will know where that prison is by Monday, latest.
Some will say that secret prisoners in secret prisons in secret places are better than the alternative that was discussed and discarded: whacking al Qaeda leaders in a campaign of assassination. Presumably the people who make such distinctions don’t have the problem I have: my marrow quivers at the thought that “my” government set up these prisons and would have concealed them forever if it could have. Crazy me. I thought being a shining city on a hill meant doing our utmost to dismantle all the world’s secret prisons, not build new ones.
It bothered me then, and it bothers me now. Elections come and go, but this guy has put a hurt on America that will last.
Posted by: DemFromCT | November 02, 2005 at 08:41
Did anyone miss the symbolism of this?
Saddam was our biggest enemy, so we took over his jail and ran it as badly as he did.
The Soviet Union was our biggest enemy, so we took over their jail, and are running it worse than they did.
What's next? A terrorist jail in Vietnam?
Posted by: emptywheel | November 02, 2005 at 08:58
Even as we express our horror, we become habituated to the reality that this is us.
Posted by: janinsanfran | November 02, 2005 at 11:17
emptywheel: my exact thought. This is slightly different than Abu Ghraib in that it's almost certainly not a prison with much symbolic meaning for the people there and the society from which they come. But geeze, how many ex-dictatorships' infrastructure do we have to use?
It's a good think that Auschwitz is occupied as a museum and Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek, Chelmo and Belzec were destroyed. Lets at least hope that the gate of the prison isn't emblazoned with the phrase "Arbeit Macht Frei."
Posted by: DHinMI | November 02, 2005 at 11:33
Perhaps, perhaps not. The prisons I'm most familiar with from the Communist era (the Czech ones) are in urban places. But Poland (which is a much more likely location for this prison anyway, either there or Bulgaria) had some illustrious people imprisoned in fairly remote locations that would be perfect locations for the US' secret dungeon.
Posted by: emptywheel | November 02, 2005 at 12:00
I wonder what Dick Durbin thought when he read that article.
Posted by: Mike S | November 02, 2005 at 12:06
I wonder what John McCain thought of what Harry Reid and Dick Durbin did yesterda when he read that article.
Secret prison? Secret session. Easy as pie, John. Just find a friend to second you.
Posted by: Kagro X | November 02, 2005 at 12:27
"Some will say that secret prisoners in secret prisons in secret places are better than the alternative that was discussed and discarded: whacking al Qaeda leaders in a campaign of assassination. "
Just what do you think happens when it is decided that someone no longer needs to be detained in a secret prison? I can't see them being released, and I can't see them being allowed to take up space.
Posted by: Njorl | November 02, 2005 at 12:42
"Some will say that secret prisoners in secret prisons in secret places are better than the alternative that was discussed and discarded: whacking al Qaeda leaders in a campaign of assassination."
I don't know that the "secret prisoners" would agree. The conditions in secret prisons are certain to be worse than the conditions in semi-secret prisons such as GITMO. Here is the headline for a recent WAsh. Post story: "Guantanamo Desperation Seen in Suicide Attempts."
Posted by: muledriver | November 02, 2005 at 12:52
When men and women named Bush, Rumsfeld, Rove, Rice, Cheney and Wolfowitz want a prison and you know it will be some ex-wwii ss prison, because is it ever really ex. Is it my imagination or do most of them have german surnames?
Posted by: DeadB0y | November 02, 2005 at 16:21
Also the Washington Post refused to name the East European countries because the military (US) asked them not too. Again newspapers show us that they do not print for us, John Q.
Posted by: hal | November 02, 2005 at 17:38
The neocons think they're Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men.
Posted by: lovable liberal | November 02, 2005 at 17:56
One of the saddest aspects of this is the Bush criminalization of our military. Just the thought that if my children were younger, one, or more, of them could be a guard, a torturer, a gestapo in one of these hellholes.
Posted by: DJean | November 02, 2005 at 18:04
At some point, the rest of the world has to tell the Bush administration -- enough! Smarten up! Not only are you dragging your own country into the mother of all quagmires, but you are dragging your allies into this mess as well.
Posted by: CathiefromCanada | November 03, 2005 at 01:27
Follow the aircraft and not the money!
Both the UK Independent and Times are reporting that the secret prisons are most likely located in Poland and Roumania. From the Independent:
The Bush administration has been accused of operating secret detention facilities beyond the reach of the law and outside official oversight at bases in two eastern European countries. The facilities - said to be located in Poland and Romania - are part of a larger "gulag" used by the US to hold prisoners seized in the so-called war on terror.
Using the flight logs of a plane used by the CIA for transporting prisoners and other unspecified information, a leading human rights group said it believed the facilities were located in the two former Soviet bloc countries and first used in 2003.
Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch told The Independent: "These are the areas we are highly confident about, based on the flights logs and other information we have."
The investigation by the New York-based group has focused on the logs of a Boeing 757 jet with the tailgate marker N313P. This plane has been widely identified as being used by the CIA for the transportation and "renditioning" of terror suspects outside the US. Until recently, it was registered to a Massachusetts-based company believed to be a front for the CIA.
Using this data Human Rights Watch discovered that, in September 2003, it flew directly from Kabul to Szymany airport, near the remote Polish town of Szczytno, north of Warsaw, home to a training facility for the Polish intelligence service.
From there, the plane flew directly to Mihail Kogalniceanu air base, close to the Romanian city of Constanta on the Black Sea coast. The Pentagon is involved in negotiations to take over the airbase's operation. Throughout 2004, the plane made a number of other visits to Kogalniceanu, on which the US has spent at least $3m upgrading facilities in preparation for taking it over.
The Independent also has a 'puff piece' about Poland and Roumania entitled "Former Soviet satellites look to US as a role model." The problem is they seem to have adopted some of the worst parts of the model.
The Times site sometimes charges for non-UK users.Also posted in the comments at Kos.
Posted by: blowback | November 03, 2005 at 11:45
Human Rights Watch says the prisons are probably in Poland and Romania, at a minimum.
Posted by: Nell | November 03, 2005 at 12:26
Sorry -- hadn't refreshed before commenting, so missed blowback's update.
Posted by: Nell | November 03, 2005 at 12:28