Secret Prisons

"The US has stopped running its global network of secret prisons, CIA director Leon Panetta has announced. 'CIA no longer operates detention facilities or black sites,' Mr Panetta said in a letter to staff" - BBC, April 9, 2009

Are you surprised that we have had secret prisons until 2009? Are you surprised that Panetta is lying and we still have these prisons? The Nation reports:

As part of its expanding counterterrorism program in Somalia, the CIA also uses a secret prison buried in the basement of Somalia’s National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters, where prisoners suspected of being Shabab members or of having links to the group are held. Some of the prisoners have been snatched off the streets of Kenya and rendered by plane to Mogadishu. While the underground prison is officially run by the Somali NSA, US intelligence personnel pay the salaries of intelligence agents and also directly interrogate prisoners.

At least the program is a success and we are safer as a result:

But according to the senior Somali intelligence official, who works directly with the US agents, the CIA-led program in Mogadishu has brought few tangible gains. “So far what we have not seen is the results in terms of the capacity of the [Somali] agency,” says the official. He conceded that neither US nor Somali forces have been able to conduct a single successful targeted mission in the Shabab’s areas in the capital. In late 2010, according to the official, US-trained Somali agents conducted an operation in a Shabab area that failed terribly and resulted in several of them being killed. “There was an attempt, but it was a haphazard one,” he recalls. They have not tried another targeted operation in Shabab-controlled territory since.

I have been pointing out the Obama presidency is Bush's third term. I do not think that from Bush's perspective he could have asked for a better Democratic successor in the foreign policy area:

This arrangement, as Scahill told me yesterday, is consistent with standard Obama administration practice: "they continue even the most controversial Bush terrorism policies by having some other government technically operate it so they can keep their fingerprints off it."  Indeed, the administration has even resorted to this playbook by using "torture by proxy" -- as we saw when the Kuwait government, with at least the complicity if not direction of the U.S., detained and beat American teenager Gulet Mohamed during interrogation sessions.  Just yesterday, a federal judge "reacted skeptically" to the Obama DOJ's demands for dismissal of a lawsuit (on secrecy grounds) brought by an American citizen imprisoned for four months in Africa, where "U.S. officials threatened him with torture, forced disappearance and other serious harm unless he confessed to ties with al-Qaida in Somalia." 

Obama has issued an executive order banning torture. This is why the administration still has these secret prisons. There the "suspects" can be tortured at will and the executive order does not apply.

Here is Salon's summary of an ABC report:

Worse still, the ABC report justifies the CIA program by quoting the anonymous CIA official as describing the program as "the logical and prudent thing to do."  ABC then helpfully adds that "senior U.S. officials have expressed concern that al Shabab may be trying to expand its terror operations beyond Somalia" and that " U.S. government officials worry that those lawless regions might become a safe haven for al Shabab and other terror groups."  There is no discussion -- zero -- of the illegal aspects of maintaining a secret prison, the dangers of allowing unchecked renditions of prisoners to Somalia hidden from international human rights monitoring, or the likely violations of Obama's highly-touted Executive Orders. 

I can see the left's skepticism when the left-leaning biases of the media are pointed out. Here ABC is following the CIA line. They must, if they want to be the next source of the "anonymous" leak. The point is not that ABC is leftist or rightist. It is leftist, but within the normal mainstream acceptance of the state-statism. It is a left leaning statist news organization. 

Salon concludes:

I Am Not a Number, I Am a Free ManThat's because "Serious Journalism" in Washington means writing down what government officials tell you to say, and granting them anonymity to ensure they have no accountability.  

Yes that is Journalism today in both the left-leaning and right-leaning media. The only way to get less filtered news is to watch Al Jazeera and Russia Today. Both are available streamed or on You Tube. I recommend that you add them to your programing choices. I am shocked to see myself write this, but that is just the way it is.

Are we operating Secret prisons? Yes.

Is the government lying about them? Yes. 

Are they illegal? Yes.

Does anyone in the mainstream media care? No.