Original title: "if you want good interrogation send suspects to Jordan, if you want them dead, send them to Egypt or Syria: Ex-CIA official"LONDON â CIA agents have broken ranks to reveal the âcruel and inhumanâ interrogation techniques they are ordered to use at secret prisons around the world, including freezing and near-drowning. Amid a growing row in the US over torture, a list of âenhanced interrogation techniquesâ used by CIA agents in secret prisons â including near-drowning, freezing, sleep deprivation, shaking and slapping â has been leaked. In at least one case, a prisoner has died.
The techniques have been authorised for use at CIA âblack sitesâ abroad, at which top terror suspects are held. Last week the US-based organisation Human Rights Watch said, âghost detaineesâ were held at two military bases, in Poland and Romania. Similar sites in half a dozen other countries, including Afghanistan, Thailand and the Indian Ocean base of Diego Garcia, leased from Britain, are now said to have been closed.
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Colin Powell when he was US secretary of state, said last week that he knew of more than 70 âquestionable deathsâ of detainees under US supervision up to the end of 2002, when he left office. That figure, he added, was now around 90. These incidents are in addition to the increasingly well-documented practice of ârenditionâ: flying suspects to Middle Eastern countries where torture and deaths in custody are routine. âIf you want a good interrogation, you send them to Jordan. If you want them dead, you send them to Egypt or Syria,â one former CIA agent is reported in the media as saying.
America's covert forces are operating in a climate of impunity, described by Cofer Black, then CIA counter-terrorism chief, who told a congressional committee in 2002: âAfter 9/11, the gloves were off.â At one point, according to âNewsweekâ, the Bush administration formally told the CIA it could not be prosecuted for any technique short of inflicting the kind of pain that accompanies organ failure or death.