General Discussion

kpete

(71,984 posts) Sat Dec 13, 2014, 12:47 PM Dec 2014

Nearly 1 in 4 Detainees Kidnapped and Tortured by CIA Did Nothing At All

The Senate Democratic staff members who wrote the 6,000-page report counted 119 prisoners who had been in C.I.A. custody. Of those, the report found that 26 were either described in the agency’s own documents as mistakenly detained, or released and given money, evidence of the same thing.

The C.I.A. told the Senate in its formal response that the real number of wrongful detentions was “far fewer” than 26 but did not offer a number. Human rights advocates who have tracked the C.I.A. program believe that considerably more than 26 were wrongfully detained.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/13/us/politics/amid-details-on-torture-data-on-26-held-in-error-.html?_r=1

Mohamed Bashmilah, left, in 2008. A Senate report acknowledges Mr. Bashmilah’s 19 months of detention as wrongful.

The CIA held Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah in several different cells when he was incarcerated in its network of secret prisons known as “black sites.” But the small cells were all pretty similar, maybe 7 feet wide and 10 feet long. He was sometimes naked, and sometimes handcuffed for weeks at a time. In one cell his ankle was chained to a bolt in the floor. There was a small toilet. In another cell there was just a bucket. Video cameras recorded his every move. The lights always stayed on — there was no day or night. A speaker blasted him with continuous white noise, or rap music, 24 hours a day.

The guards wore black masks and black clothes. They would not utter a word as they extracted Bashmilah from his cell for interrogation — one of his few interactions with other human beings during his entire 19 months of imprisonment. Nobody told him where he was, or if he would ever be freed.

Bashmillah wasn't "freed." After the Americans brutalized him he was he was transferred at the U.S. request to Yemen, where he was "convicted" on a trumped up charge of forgery (the allegedly "forged" document was never produced). He was sentenced to nine additional months but released based on "time served." In the meantime, Bashmilah learned that his father had died during his imprisonment, never knowing whether his son was alive or what was being done to him.

As the Times article shows, Bashmilah's case is in no way unique. The incompetent and overzealous CIA would imprison the wrong people with the same last name, or, more often, based on "friendly" but notoriously unreliable intelligence agencies. One unfortunate man “was subjected to ice water baths and 66 hours of standing sleep deprivation before being released because the C.I.A. discovered he was not the person he was believed to be.”

And there were many more:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/13/us/politics/amid-details-on-torture-data-on-26-held-in-error-.html?_r=1