secret prisons

Stories 1 - 20 |  Next >>

'Terror on the High Seas': the Coast Guard's Floating Prisons

Fishermen carrying drugs from South America detained on US vessels for days or weeks

(Newser) - Seth Freed Wessler wrote a story last week for the New York Times that he describes to PRI as one of "real terror … on the high seas": what amounts to "floating Guantanamos" in the Pacific, Coast Guard cutters sent far from US shores to bust smugglers trying...

Report Finds Extreme Torture in Yemen Prisons

Americans involved in interrogations but deny abuses in AP investigation

(Newser) - Hundreds of men swept up in the hunt for al-Qaeda militants have disappeared into a secret network of prisons in southern Yemen where abuse is routine and torture extreme—including the "grill," in which the victim is tied to a spit like a roast and spun in a...

CIA Kept Man in Secret Prison Despite Knowing He Was Innocent

New report details the 'outrageous' case of Khaled al Masri

(Newser) - German citizen Khaled al Masri was held and interrogated in a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan for five months in 2004—during which time he was kept in a “small cell with … a bucket for his waste”—despite the CIA being fairly certain he wasn't a...

Polish Leaders: We OK'd Secret Prisons, Not Torture

US just asked for a 'quiet site' to 'obtain info,' they say

(Newser) - After years of denials, two former Polish leaders acknowledged yesterday that they had allowed a secret CIA prison to operate on their territory, but they insisted they never authorized the harsh treatment or torture of its inmates. Former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski and former Prime Minister Leszek Miller spoke to...

Report: CIA Gave Poland $15M for Use of 'Black Site'

'Washington Post' report sheds light on infamous secret jail

(Newser) - Polish prosecutors intend to look into a Washington Post report alleging that the CIA in 2003 handed Polish intelligence agents two cardboard boxes stuffed with $15 million in cash as a payoff to use a Polish facility as perhaps the agency's most infamous "black site" prison . The report...

CIA Nabs bin Laden's Son-in-Law

With a little assist from Turkey

(Newser) - The CIA quietly captured Osama bin Laden's son-in-law last week and spirited him away to the US, a Turkish newspaper reported today. Turkish authorities first seized Sulaiman Abu Ghaith last month at a luxury Ankara hotel thanks to a CIA tip-off, the AFP reports. The CIA had asked Turkey...

20 People Held in Secret CIA Prisons Still Missing
20 People Held in Secret
CIA Prisons Still Missing
PROPUBLICA REPORTS
Feb 13, 2013 10:56 AM CST

20 People Held in Secret CIA Prisons Still Missing

Despite 2009 order to close 'black sites,' many unaccounted for

(Newser) - In 2009 President Obama ordered the CIA's "black site" prisons closed. That same year, ProPublica reported that more than 30 people who had been held in them were unaccounted for. In a look at what's happened since, ProPublica reports that at least 20 prisoners remain missing. A...

CIA Kept Secret Prison in Bucharest Neighborhood

AP investigation uncovers details of black site in Romania

(Newser) - The CIA's secret "black site" prison in Romania wasn't in some remote region of the country, but smack dab in the middle of a busy residential neighborhood near the center of Bucharest, the AP has discovered in a joint investigation with German public television. Sources say the...

A Prisoner, a Call, a Courier: How They Found bin Laden

Intel from detainees, tapped phones led to courier

(Newser) - It wasn’t long after 9/11 when a detainee in one of the CIA’s secret prisons first mentioned the name Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. That name—plus years of intelligence work—would eventually lead America to Osama bin Laden, the AP reports. The first break came in 2004, when an...

US Still Holding Terror Suspects in Secret Jails

Suspects held up to nine weeks, say sources

(Newser) - The US military is still detaining terror suspects in a network of around 20 secret prisons spread throughout Afghanistan, interrogating them without charge for weeks at a time, sources tell the AP . For a long time the Pentagon denied the existence of such facilities, even in the face of descriptions...

Secret CIA Interrogation Tapes Found Under Desk

Yet told the government they didn't exist

(Newser) - The CIA has tapes of confessed 9/11 plotter Ramzi Binalshibh’s interrogation in a secret prison in Morocco, even though it has twice told the government that such tapes do not exist. The tapes, two video and one audio, were found in a box under a desk at the agency,...

Prisoners Raped, Tortured in Secret Baghdad Prison
Prisoners Raped, Tortured
in Secret Baghdad Prison
'Abu Ghraib Was a Picnic'
Apr 28, 2010 6:07 AM CDT

Prisoners Raped, Tortured in Secret Baghdad Prison

Human Rights Watch details abuses

(Newser) - They were hung by their feet and whipped, suffocated with plastic bags. If they passed out, they were revived with electrical shocks to the genitals. That's just a taste of the horrors prisoners describe in Human Rights Watch's report on the recently revealed Iraqi-run secret prison in Baghdad, where suspected...

Maybe Bagram Will Be the New Gitmo

Administration ponders how best to handle detainees

(Newser) - President Obama's security team is for the first time writing guidelines on how to handle captured terror suspects—specifically on whether any will be allowed to be detained indefinitely without trial, the Los Angeles Times reports. Draft guidelines predict that will be necessary for a small number of detainees, with...

CIA Refuses to Hand Over Interrogation Records

Agency says releasing Bush-era documents will undermine national security

(Newser) - The CIA has refused to hand over any more documents relating to its Bush-era interrogation and detention programs, the New York Times reports. The agency told a federal judge that dozens of documents, including communications from secret prisons and agency assessments of the programs' legality, must remain secret in the...

Agents Say Waterboarding Turned Around Terrorist

(Newser) - After being waterboarded 183 times and deprived of sleep for a week, self-proclaimed 9/11 mastermind Kalid Sheikh Mohammed transformed from an avowed enemy of the US into a sort of CIA guest lecturer, the Washington Post reports. Two anonymous sources, looking to build the case that harsh interrogation worked, say...

CIA Manipulated Every Detail of Interrogation Sessions

Top-level approval of interrogation techniques could complicate Justice probe

(Newser) - As the CIA discloses internal reports concerning “enhanced” interrogation techniques on detainees at secret prisons, the ugliest details—threats of execution and harm with a power drill—have grabbed headlines. But the documents also reveal an intriguing level of control that the CIA and Department of Justice maintained over...

How the CIA Built Its Secret Prisons

(Newser) - When CIA officials decided to build a series of secret prisons, they immediately contacted the chief of the agency's European supply base, a Frankfurt-based logistical whiz. “It was too sensitive to be handled by headquarters,” Kyle “Dusty” Foggo tells the New York Times. He called a contractor...

Feds Battle to Keep Rendition Case Under Wraps

(Newser) - The Obama administration is fighting to keep details secret in the case of a former Guantanamo detainee who says he was tortured, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. A San Francisco court has ruled Binyam Mohamed and four others can sue the company they allege flew them to secret CIA prisons—...

Fate of Dozens of CIA Detainees Still Unknown

(Newser) - The Bush-era CIA memos made public last week revealed that an al-Qaeda suspect, Hassan Ghul, had been held in one of the agency’s secret jails. But the inadvertent disclosure of one name merely highlights how much the public still doesn’t know about the network of secret detention facilities,...

US Readied Waterboarding as Early as 2001

Harsh tactics were readied even before suspects captured

(Newser) - The Bush administration prepared to use waterboarding and other harsh tactics widely considered to be torture 8 months before the Justice Department approved them, and even before capturing a high-level terrorist suspect, the Washington Post reports. A Senate investigation reveals these brutal interrogation methods were approved despite warnings that they...

Stories 1 - 20 |  Next >>