Gulag archipelago

Recall the furious reaction by the Right -- and the White House in particular -- to Dick Durbin's quoting of an Amnesty International report comparing our prison at Guantanamo Bay to a Soviet Gulag?

Well, I don't know from such things, but it looks to me like we've been running our very own archipelago.

The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.

The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.

The hidden global internment network is a central element in the CIA's unconventional war on terrorism. It depends on the cooperation of foreign intelligence services, and on keeping even basic information about the system secret from the public, foreign officials and nearly all members of Congress charged with overseeing the CIA's covert actions.

The existence and locations of the facilities -- referred to as "black sites" in classified White House, CIA, Justice Department and congressional documents -- are known to only a handful of officials in the United States and, usually, only to the president and a few top intelligence officers in each host country.

The CIA and the White House, citing national security concerns and the value of the program, have dissuaded Congress from demanding that the agency answer questions in open testimony about the conditions under which captives are held. Virtually nothing is known about who is kept in the facilities, what interrogation methods are employed with them, or how decisions are made about whether they should be detained or for how long.

While the Defense Department has produced volumes of public reports and testimony about its detention practices and rules after the abuse scandals at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and at Guantanamo Bay, the CIA has not even acknowledged the existence of its black sites. To do so, say officials familiar with the program, could open the U.S. government to legal challenges, particularly in foreign courts, and increase the risk of political condemnation at home and abroad.

Nice thinking. Not acknowledging them isn't going to stop those legal challenges or the condemnation. How long did they think this could remain secret considering that countries -- allies -- such as Sweden and Canada have been investigating just where exactly their citizens were being sent to after being apprehended by U.S. intelligence agents?

The secret detention system was conceived in the chaotic and anxious first months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when the working assumption was that a second strike was imminent.

Since then, the arrangement has been increasingly debated within the CIA, where considerable concern lingers about the legality, morality and practicality of holding even unrepentant terrorists in such isolation and secrecy, perhaps for the duration of their lives. Mid-level and senior CIA officers began arguing two years ago that the system was unsustainable and diverted the agency from its unique espionage mission.

"We never sat down, as far as I know, and came up with a grand strategy," said one former senior intelligence officer who is familiar with the program but not the location of the prisons. "Everything was very reactive. That's how you get to a situation where you pick people up, send them into a netherworld and don't say, 'What are we going to do with them afterwards?'"

Now, I understand that in the hours, days, and weeks following the coordinated attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, that our intelligence services and defense agencies when into reactive mode. There was real fear at the time and a sense of helplessness.

But that was four years ago. In that time, it appears that there has been no assessment of "strategies" devised on the fly in September of 2001, no metrics on the usefulness of torture, no consideration that allowing these detention systems to grow would eventually lead to their exposure, no thought that the immediate threat is over and it's time to develop new strategies. Nothing. Four years.

Several former and current intelligence officials, as well as several other U.S. government officials with knowledge of the program, express frustration that the White House and the leaders of the intelligence community have not made it a priority to decide whether the secret internment program should continue in its current form, or be replaced by some other approach.

The really, really, nifty part of this is that we have replaced the Soviet Union as the corrupter of Eastern Europe.

The Eastern European countries that the CIA has persuaded to hide al Qaeda captives are democracies that have embraced the rule of law and individual rights after decades of Soviet domination. Each has been trying to cleanse its intelligence services of operatives who have worked on behalf of others -- mainly Russia and organized crime.

In only four years, this nation has become unrecognizable.

But beyond that, as a citizen of this country, as someone who was in New York City on that horrible day, I would like to see one of the buggers on trial, convicted, and punished -- transparently. Not this.

The top 30 al Qaeda prisoners exist in complete isolation from the outside world. Kept in dark, sometimes underground cells, they have no recognized legal rights, and no one outside the CIA is allowed to talk with or even see them, or to otherwise verify their well-being, said current and former and U.S. and foreign government and intelligence officials.

As for the rest -- those considered "less important," well, I guess they're just more collateral damage -- wrong place, wrong time -- in the U.S. Global War on Terror.