Daily Archives: September 7, 2006

President Confirms Secret CIA Prisons

Original story here.

Bush Says Detainees Will Be Tried
He Confirms Existence of CIA Prisons

By R. Jeffrey Smith and Michael Fletcher
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, September 7, 2006; Page A01

President Bush yesterday announced the transfer of the last 14 suspected terrorists held by the CIA at secret foreign prisons to the military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and said he wants to try them before U.S. military panels under proposed new rules he simultaneously sent to Congress.

Bush’s statement during an impassioned East Room speech represented the first time he has confirmed the existence of the CIA program under which Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and others have been secretly held and subjected to irregular interrogation methods.

It’s these kinds of stories that I honestly and truly have trouble reading. I actually start to get physically sick and have to turn away. There was a point in say late 2001 when I use to exclaim that I simply must be on fucking Mars, because the world just did not make sense to me anymore. That feeling’s passed, to be replaced by an incredulous wonder at the path that we have taken, at the things we do now.

Secret prisons. We’re operating secret prisons. Irregular interrogation methods. This is also called torture. It’s all just so a priori wrong.

In the movie The Untouchables, a Chicago beat cop, played by Sean Connery, describes to federal agent Elliot Ness, played by Kevin Costner, the “Chicago way” of dealing with criminals. Agent Ness subsequently murders a captured suspect, throwing him from a roof. He declares, “I have broken every law I have sworn to uphold, I have become what I beheld, and I am content that I have done right.”

Chilling.