The CIA's 'Black Sites'
What are we going to do with the secret prisoners who cannot be tried in our courts?
"What are we going to do with these people [in the CIA secret cells]? . . . Are they going to disappear? Are they stateless? . . . What are we going to explain to people when they start asking questions about where they are? Are they dead? Are they alive? What oversight does Congress have?"
The present answer to Jack Cloonan's last question is this: There is no congressional oversight. Congress has been blocked—by its Republican leadership, the president, Donald Rumsfeld, and CIA chief Porter Goss—from having any oversight at all. The constitutional separation of powers has also fallen into a black hole.
Ethiopia-born Benyam Mohammed, who grew up in Britain, told his attorney, in English, "[At one point] I was chained to the rails [of my cell] for a fortnight. . . . The CIA worked on people, including me, day and night. . . . Plenty lost their minds. I could hear people knocking their heads against the walls and the doors, screaming their heads off."
There is a rising focus around the country on this year's midterm elections. During the campaigning, will there be any mention of the screams in the CIA's underground prisons of darkness? And if there is, how many Americans will care enough to be repelled by their own silent, passive complicity in the growing moral darkness of this nation's leadership?