Abuse in Secret
In clandestine prisons in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and in detention facilities maintained by authoritarian allies such as Egypt, the CIA is holding dozens of detainees without any legal process, outside review, family notification or monitoring by the Red Cross and other human rights groups. In effect, these prisoners have "disappeared," like the domestic opponents of dictatorships that the State Department annually critiques in its human rights report. Many may have been tortured. As Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales confirmed in January, the administration has authorized CIA interrogators to subject these detainees to "cruel, inhumane and degrading" treatment banned by an international treaty that has been ratified by the United States.
Though the photographs from the Abu Ghraib prison have received the most attention, what is known of the CIA's secret prisons indicates that abuses there have been far more serious. The agency's inspector general is reviewing at least half a dozen cases of criminal abuse -- the number is not publicly known -- including at least four deaths. On Thursday The Post's Dana Priest reported the previously unpublicized case of an Afghan detainee held in a secret facility known as the Salt Pit. The detainee died in 2002 after a CIA officer allegedly ordered Afghan guards to strip him naked, chain him to a concrete floor and leave him overnight without protection from severe cold. The prisoner was buried in an unmarked grave, without notice to his family; the CIA officer was promoted. Not a single regular CIA employee has been charged in an abuse case, nor has the agency offered Congress or the public any accounting of its behavior.
Despite this shocking record, Congress has abdicated its responsibility to oversee the agency and prevent it from violating fundamental American standards of decency. The Republican chairmen of the Senate and House intelligence committees, Sen. Pat Roberts (Kan.) and Rep. Peter Hoekstra (Mich.), have been resisting Democratic requests for an investigation of the CIA's handling of its secret detainees.
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