{"id":60868,"date":"2016-11-22T05:07:53","date_gmt":"2016-11-22T12:07:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=60868"},"modified":"2016-11-22T05:07:53","modified_gmt":"2016-11-22T12:07:53","slug":"prison-officials-visited-cia-dungeon-but-kept-no-record-of-the-trip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2016\/11\/22\/prison-officials-visited-cia-dungeon-but-kept-no-record-of-the-trip\/","title":{"rendered":"Prison officials visited CIA “dungeon,” but kept no record of the trip"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By Graham Kates CBS News November 21, 2016<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n
The Bureau of Prisons has acknowledged for the first time that two of its officials traveled 14 years ago to a secret CIA detention site in Afghanistan, where they provided training to staff at a facility once described by an intelligence official as the closest thing he has seen to a dungeon.\u201d<\/div>\n
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The admission came Thursday in response to a lawsuit filed by the ACLU, which sued in April after the Bureau of Prisons denied having any record of involvement with the detention site.<\/div>\n
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The Bureau of Prisons\u2019 November 2002 visit to the site \u2014 known interchangeably as The Salt Pit\u201d and COBALT \u2014 was documented in a Senate Intelligence Committee report on torture, interrogation and detention, which was released in 2014.<\/div>\n
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The report notes that prison officials determined the site was not inhumane\u201d despite seeing detainees who were forced to stand for days naked and shackled to walls in total darkness, in a facility that was described to be 45 degrees Fahrenheit.\u201d Loud music played nearly constantly and the detainees were given only buckets for their waste.<\/div>\n
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The CIA asked for the Bureau of Prisons inspection, because agents worried conditions were too harsh for them to elicit reliable intelligence, according to the Senate report.<\/div>\n
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Some detainees \u2019literally looked like (dogs) that had been kenneled,\u201d one interrogator said, according to the Senate report. \u00a0When the doors to their cells were opened, \u2018they cowered.\u2019\u201d<\/div>\n
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During the prison officials\u2019 visit, one detainee, Gul Rahman, died from apparent hypothermia, naked except for a sweatshirt,\u201d the report said. Rahman was well-known in Afghanistan after an earlier incident in which he rescued the country\u2019s president, Hamid Karzai, while wading through rocket and small-arms fire.<\/div>\n
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Prison officials said they were wow\u2019ed\u201d and had never been in a facility where individuals are so sensory deprived,\u201d according to the Senate report.<\/div>\n
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The Bureau of Prisons is a domestic law enforcement agency that does not have the authority to classify intelligence information. The agency explained in the legal filing on Thursday that the two officials who visited the detention site were told by the CIA that they were not permitted to discuss their participation in this training, or to create or retain any records of the training or their involvement.\u201d<\/div>\n
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Despite the extraordinary, and rare, assignment to travel to a war zone, one of the two officials told a Bureau of Prisons lawyer this year that he never saw a written request …. rather, his supervisor orally tasked him to participate.\u201d<\/div>\n
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That same prisons official conducted training for the Department of Defense at Guantanamo Bay, and was allowed to produce limited documentation of that assignment.<\/div>\n
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Carl Takei, the ACLU attorney who first asked the Bureau of Prisons for information about the COBALT visit in a Freedom of Information Act request, said Thursday\u2019s acknowledgement raises new questions about the agency\u2019s role at the detention site.<\/div>\n
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These two particular individuals, according to the Senate report, saw a place that was simply horrifying and they had a chance to raise alarms about these conditions of confinement. Instead of doing that, they allowed it to proceed unopposed,\u201d Takei said.<\/div>\n
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He added that it\u2019s an issue that has suddenly become pressing in the days since members of President-elect Donald Trump\u2019s transition team have indicated an interest in reinstating approval for certain controversial interrogation techniques.<\/div>\n
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As we transition from the Obama administration to the Trump administration, this entire question of official torture is being raised anew,\u201d Takei said. This is an illustration of how when there\u2019s an administration that officially endorses torture, that endorsement effects every level of government.\u201d<\/div>\n
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The ACLU said Monday it is dropping its lawsuit against the Bureau of Prisons, as a result of Thursday\u2019s disclosure.<\/div>\n
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The Bureau of Prisons filing includes a series of emails sent in 2011 and 2014 about the Afghanistan trip.<\/div>\n
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The 2014 email includes a link to a CBS News article about the agency\u2019s visit to the detention site, and the email\u2019s subject line is the title of the article.<\/div>\n
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In the body of the email, the sender wrote just one sentence: They just won\u2019t let it go.\u201d<\/div>\n
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The Bureau of Prisons has not yet responded to a request for comment on this case.<\/div>\n
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http:\/\/www.cbsnews.com\/news\/bureau-of-prisons-officials-visited-cia-salt-pit-dungeon\/<\/div>\n
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By Graham Kates CBS News November 21, 2016 The Bureau of Prisons has acknowledged for the first time that two of its officials traveled 14 years ago to a secret CIA detention site in Afghanistan, where they provided training to staff at a facility once described by an intelligence official as the closest thing he […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60868","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-forum"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60868","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60868"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60868\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}