Eli Lake reports:
President Obama's executive order closing CIA "black sites" contains a little-noticed exception that allows the spy agency to continue to operate temporary detention facilities abroad. The provision illustrates that the president's order to shutter foreign-based prisons, known as black sites, is not airtight and that the Central Intelligence Agency still has options if it wants to hold terrorist suspects for several days at a time.
Why does the CIA want to hold terrorist suspects, and why is the Obama administration reviewing whether to issue the CIA waivers for interrogation techniques above and beyond those listed in the Army Field Manual? Because waterboarding and other harsh methods of interrogation may amount to torture -- but they work. Or at least that's the verdict from one CIA official who has actually seen those methods in action but for some reason is rarely quoted in this debate:
A leader of the CIA team that captured the first major al Qaeda figure, Abu Zubaydah, says subjecting him to waterboarding was torture but necessary. In the first public comment by any CIA officer involved in handling high-value al Qaeda targets, John Kiriakou, now retired, said the technique broke Zubaydah in less than 35 seconds. "The next day, he told his interrogator that Allah had visited him in his cell during the night and told him to cooperate," said Kiriakou..."From that day on, he answered every question," Kiriakou said. "The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks."
The left spent years attacking the Bush administration for what was deemed to be Orwellian doubletalk on the most controversial elements of the war on terror. Rather than talk about torture, the left said, the administration referred to "enhanced interrogation techniques." Rather than talk about "mercenaries," in the parlance of the left, the Bush administration created an army of private contractors. And rather than talk about what the left perceived as a paring back of civil liberties, the Bush White House pushed the Patriot Act. And on and on. Well, now apparently it's the left's turn. Check out this quote in Lake's story from Ken Gude, the associate director of international rights and responsibilities at the Center for American Progress:
"My understanding is that these types of temporary facilities can be in no way described as a prison," Mr. Gude said. "They are temporary holding facilities that the CIA has used in the past for decades, ... often parts of exchange agreements with other foreign intelligence agencies."
You got that? It's a "temporary holding facility," which in no way should be confused with a "prison," where the CIA temporarily held people in the bad old days of the Bush administration. At least the right had no illusions about the practices it was defending.