A prison/torture chamber for six can probably be set up in the basement of a modest-sized private house. A somewhat isolated location–a farm, for instance–and some sound insulation and you are in business. Remember that weird business early on in Afghanistan with the supposed private bounty hunter and his private dungeon in Kabul? The Afghans arrested the guy?

If you have more inmates than six, you probably have to have more sanitation, more guards, more construction–towers, razor wire and the rest. The neighbors notice. The local police have to discourage curious outsiders. Everything gets very visible and very embarassing for the host country.

A real prison, secret or not, would make the inmates much more traceable. Remember that the black rendition flights were spotted and tracked almost immediately by plane spotters. We knew where they landed, as you note in the Lithuania case. For the black sites to work, the trail had to stop at the airport. A private house in the vicinity would serve the purpose. An actual camp would not.

The discussion here prompts a lot of thought, a lot of information to digest.

The information on the CODEL is a great find, instructive if you ponder the meaning behind “Coalition of the Willing.” What may be evident here is the covert and overt sides of that meaning. When a fairly high powered CODEL arrives in a country that doesn’t get all that many official visitors — after all, the places they went were not lush with golf courses, and they were not Paris — and everyone eats very well, drinks the best of spirits, and smokes the forbidden on US Soil, Cubans, and friendly bits of information or disinformation get dropped, some folk get a little more willing.

It may be this operated on two critical levels — the volunteer willingness to send some kids to form a unit and march into Iraq, and fly their national flag at the HQ of Willing — there were lots of Americans who bought the yarn that Figi military contribution meant something. But the other side of it — the covert side, is that the “Willing” were told enough about rough interrogation and secret black sites, some of which they provided, so as to share around a little of the weight of international treaty and law breaking. Some of these “willing” probably had their chests poked out for months, given that they had been included in some of the margins of a great secret.

I think this has been particularly true of some of the E. European Nations that switched sides and joined NATO in the years after 1989. It isn’t all that much about form of government or ideology — it is about the need to be included in, identify with, something powerful. World over, it is one of the common conditions of many a politician. It is also a major factor in why alienated young men join up with an al-Qaeda or a Taliban outfit. One aspect of Thomas’s history of Mossad I found interesting was his treatment of motivation for joining up with Israeli Intelligence Operations. He has fairly detailed discussions of what is called “the pitch” (Recruitment Tale) in these circles used to recruit teen aged Palestian kids, but also international Billionaire Figures such as Robert Maxwell into their web. In form, not all that different from how you gain the trust and love of “the willing” pol’s from places such as Poland or Macedonia, and get them to risk life and limb to service your interests.

MaryCH says…

“So the US and Brits were within spitting distance or closer to ‘leasing’ a few islands in the archipelago? I guess that in the context of using Abu Graib etc. this is unexceptional, but it still makes me shake my head.”

Yea — and I think you are onto something very important in dealing with this “high secret” stuff. I think it is why we hear so many comparisons to Stalin or Hitler, or Nazi stuff and all. There is a certain degree of secret admiration in power circles for these examples of brutal power as it was acquiared and exercised. You can just imagine Cheney happily rubbing his hands at the thought of being able to create and manage a nice Stalinist style Gulag for disagreeable congresscritters. Whoever it was in the Bush orbit who told Ron Suskind, that as an Empire we “make our own reality” had the theory of propaganda from Joseph Goebbels down pretty well. Secretly they want to replay that theatrical snd take starring or leading roles.

Mary Says….

“Obviously we had “blacksites” where the prior to Yoo and post Yoo torture was going on, as well as proxy sites, all before Foggo would have been approached. So why do two guys show up on his doorstep in 2003 asking him to set up blacksites – why Foggo, why new/different sites etc.”

I rather think the key to when the “blacksites” notion began to evolve — and I think all these ideas evolved, rather than sprang all created in detail, was in the first day or so after 9/11 as described by Richard Clarke in the instance of giving Ashcroft directions for rounding up Arabs and sticking them, without charges or lawyers, in various jails under his auspices through Immigration and Naturalization. It was at that point that Clarke determined that Ashcroft was just plain dumb, because he didn’t catch on to the guidence he was being given all that fast. But I think once this act was committed, with several thousand rounded up and put in cells with no means for communicating with family or friends, the basic form was on the table — and the rest of the story is just different details. Getting the US Attorney General to use his authorities to commit these acts gives them considerable legitimacy. It took the courts a couple of years to unwind a little. And in form, not all that different from the manner a recruit to service with a clandestine agency is dealt with in a classical “pitch.”

As to how many black sites, and why so many were needed — Well, if Thomas is correct, and a number of security and intelligence services were in on this thing, they probably wanted to compartmentalize many parts of it. This would be standard practice. CIA might not have wanted to work on the same turf as Mossad, or MI6 might have wanted to avoid teams from French Intelligence, or Turkish Intelligence. Operating in small compartments is standard practice for any intelligence outfit. Serves the theory of “Need to Know” very well.

Thomas says that Pakistani and CIA found KSM’s Karachi safe house before they arrested KSM by some months. Now that doesn’t comporte with the narrative we’ve been given, but I assume that narrative is pretty ragged. None the less, Thomas says that in the Safe House they found over a hundred Hard Drives (no details on size), but at some point prior to KSM’s arrest someone in DC would have been looking at the content of 100 plus hard drives — and following up on that data.

Within the KSM data library, they found a plan to set off Hirshoima sized Nuclear bombs in seven or eight US cities at the same time, and this included a plan for breaking down the weapons so they could be shipped to the US in containers, and re-assembled. Apparently most of the material was from the former Soviet Union stockpiles. The Hard Drives held considerable information about the personnel involved in this plan, and as suggested by Thomas, Mossad used their teams of assassins (called Kidon) to liquidate all they could identify. Far-fetched? Yep, but then so was knocking down the WTC.

Thomas also says OBL is not in Pakistan or Afghanistan, but since late 2004 or early 05, he has been in Western China. It strikes me that the current great effort to take out the Taliban in Western Pakistan — the FATA — may have much to do with finding and safeing the Nuclear Material as opposed to finding and killing OBL. Thomas doesn’t say this — it is just a surmise on my part. He does suggest some sort of deal whereby China keeps him more or less under house arrest and without communications in exchange for efforts on his part to tone down the Chinese Muslims influenced by al-Qaeda. I wonder if the recent Uighur revolt and violent put-down by the Chinese Army changes that deal?

Anyhow, I have no idea whether Thomas’s stories are true. I suspect he has excellent access, and connections not only with MI6 and Mossad, but with a few other services, particularly the French. He is fairly critical of Mossad — but also of CIA. He admires the Chinese services. Most dirty of all, BOSS — the Apartheid era South African service, (many of whom, now pensioned off, got hired by the British and Americans for Iraq. I seem to remember that Blackwater hired a good number of them. Pakistan apparently got many South African Nuclear Scientists and Missile techs.

Need a mite of humor — Obama got me laughing today during his VFW speech, given that I was in the midst of Thomas’s dense stories, looking at his footnotes, and cross checking other books all in a heap on the living room floor. BO told the vets that among the irrelevant military contracts he had canceled was the new Presidential Helicopter, which among other things had a full service kitchen on board. He actually got a laugh from the VFW for the line — “if there is a Nuclear Attack, I can assure you that I’ll have other things to do besides whip up some snacks.” Maybe the best thing to do — if any of this is true, is find a mite of humor.

I’ve read his book Journey into Madness, which documents the Ewen Cameron “psychic driving” story in some detail. Having talked with individuals intimately involved with the Cameron case, I can say that Thomas was mostly correct in that book.

In a later, recent book, Secrets and Lies, Thomas revisited the Cameron story and rewove it with the Frank Olson story. He claims William Buckley, the CIA station chief that was kidnapped and murdered in Lebanon, as a source. The book is fascinating, but I’m not sure how much to believe everything Thomas says, even as he takes up the issue of the Korean POW “confessions” in a way that gibes with my own research on the subject.

I haven’t read his Mossad book, but with this new edition out, and the material you mention on the CIA prisons, I’ll have to get it.

As for Goss, one can’t believe anything he says. In fact, that goes for much of the CIA, not least because misinformation and misdirection is their business. But also because it’s clear they are riven with cliques, each trying to spin their own story. The latter is made more intense because of the (unfortunately distant) possibility of further torture investigations and prosecutions.

Great catch, Marcy. I think you’re onto something here. Hopefully things will be clearer if the Durham investigation ever comes public with indictments, or at least a report.

I don’t get the “Cat’s Eye” = “racial insensitivity” thing. The “Cat’s Eye” isn’t a particularly sensitive term in Thailand and refers to a lot of things (gemstones, a fruit, a symbol of truth), but not to people, For another – this was a code name so who outside a small group in the agency would even know of it. Perhaps others were briefed? Maybe Korean-American Torture LAwyer John Yoo had a hissy-fit about it. Which would be the ultimate irony, methinks.

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (WVLT) –” Presidents Bush and Obama asked, so he stayed on a little longer than he expected.

“But former Knoxville Mayor Victor Ashe is planning to come home to Tennessee after resigning as Ambassador to Poland.

“Via e-mail, he told the Associated Press that his resignation is effective September 26th, the same day the Vols play Ohio at Neyland.”

More.

And there’s more here

Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, raised as much hell as he could from quite a long time back about the handoffs to Uzbekistan- an area that has not received very much attention.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/poli…..npolicy.uk

“People come to me very often after being tortured. Normally this includes homosexual and heterosexual rape of close relatives in front of the victim; rape with objects such as broken bottles; asphyxiation; pulling out of fingernails; smashing of limbs with blunt objects; and use of boiling liquids including complete immersion of the body. This is not uncommon. Thousands of people a year suffer from this torture at the hands of the authorities.”

…
In October 2002, Murray made a speech to his fellow diplomats and Uzbekistani officials at a human rights conference in Tashkent in which he became the first western official for four years to state publicly that “Uzbekistan is not a functioning democracy”, and to highlight the “prevalence of torture in Uzbekistani prisons” in a system where “brutality is inherent”. Highlighting a case in which two men were boiled to death, he added: “All of us know that this is not an isolated incident.”
…
He wrote to his superiors in London on the day in which he watched Bush talk of “dismantling the apparatus of terror” and “removing the torture and rape rooms” in Iraq, pointing out that “when it comes to the Karimov regime, systematic torture and rape appear to be treated as peccadilloes, not to effect the relationship and to be downplayed in the international fora … I hope that once the present crisis is over we will make plain to the US, at senior level, our serious concern over their policy in Uzbekistan.”

Still, I find it odd that after already having a black sites program run by the US in place, and already having and extratorturary rendition program to any number of other countries (Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, etc.) they act as if Foggo was approached in 2003 to create something new. That makes me wonder if perhaps at some point around about then, there had been a determination to permanently disappear the torture victims, perhaps due to a bit of waffling on the issue of how much coverage the 2002 memo really gave them, perhaps to continue the human expermientation on the learned helplessness front, or if it is all just oddly worded.

Obviously we had “blacksites” where the prior to Yoo and post Yoo torture was going on, as well as proxy sites, all before Foggo would have been approached. So why do two guys show up on his doorstep in 2003 asking him to set up blacksites – why Foggo, why new/different sites etc.

Just makes me wonder.

Polish Military Intelligence then approached three other former Soviet states, Uzbekistan, Moldova and later, Romania to determine if the former KGB sites were still in tact. They Were. The link was an old Soviet unit called GROM — died with the Warsaw Pact, but MI6 and the Poles reactivated it for this purpose.

So the US and Brits were within spitting distance or closer to ‘leasing’ a few islands in the archipelago? I guess that in the context of using Abu Graib etc. this is unexceptional, but it still makes me shake my head.

BTW, great thread — Marcy & friends have gathered so many that each additional seems to jostle a new spider or two.