Stuff They Don't Want You To KnowIn the United States, people accused of crimes are entitled to certain well-known protections under the law. And, in the international sphere, global agreements theoretically guarantee certain rights to prisoners of war. However, in the wake of 9/11 elements of the US government felt these protections were preventing them from obtaining justice. They needed locations off the books. Places where the normal rules didn't apply -- places that, officially speaking, did not exist. Tune in to learn more about the rise of black sites.
Fellow conspiracy realist, have you ever had the feeling that you're in a place you shouldn't be?
Only every day of my life, buddy.
You ever walk in and you know, like the vibes off, or you wake up and you know, like, how did I get on this plane?
Are we talking about a specific place? This is not my beautiful house, nor is this my beautiful life. This is a windowless room and I'm tied to a chair with a bag over my head. That's a hold on what.
A non consentually? Yet, this is the true story that we explored in twenty nineteen. Here in these United States, for now, people accused of crimes are theoretically entitled to certain well known legal protections. And if you scope out to the globe overall, you'll see things like the Geneva Conventions that guarantee certain rights to prisoners of war. However, the theory does not always translate to the practice, does it.
Now, there's some big butts in there, guys.
Yeah, are we both waiting for that Brazilian Buttlet's.
Joke, it was there all along.
Please please do not get a BBL at a black site.
Don't do it. Yeah, that's a place to do that.
Yeah, black sites, we're uh, we're laughing by the gallows because there is no whistle like a graveyard whistle. Black sites are terrible. They're real. They are a violation of international law. They are an active conspiracy, both in twenty nineteen when we originally recorded this and in twenty twenty five as we record today.
Yeah, call that because they don't exist, right, that's the concept.
And yikes, where you get disappeared too.
That's roll the tape from UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff. They do want you to know. A production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works.
Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my.
Name is Nolan.
They call me Ben, and we are joined as always with our super producer, Paul Mission Control Decant. Most importantly, you are you. You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know. If you want to be a part of the conversation as we delve into today's rabbit hole, you don't have to wait till the end of the show. You can just give us a call directly and then you know, oh, push pause, give us a call and then push play.
Yeah, and make sure your vehicle is not in motion and you're not driving.
Or that you have one of those cool voice activated ones.
Definitely, and where should they point their telephonic device? Fellas well?
You type in the numbers one eight three three std witk Yeah, give us.
A call three minutes. Choose your time wisely and let us know if you have something that you do not want to end up on the air.
Just please be explicit, you know, you guys here in Atlanta, I'm often taken in by these fake rap songs that are on the radio that are actually just advertisements for like one eight hundred, you know, buy gold or like an ambulance chaser type attorney. There's a few of them that are really good.
They're great, and I'll always.
Like find myself bopping to them, and then I'm like, got it, got me again when they drop the call to action. You know.
I like the I Have No Regrets. I like the ones of sick verses. And there are a few out there actually where you're like, I know this is an ad, but it slaps.
I know.
There's one called one hundred and forty one one pain nice, that's the big one.
My favorite is uh one eight three three cars for kids five seven two four five for kids.
Boom airhorn. Maybe that's it. Uh Yes, So we recently did it episode diving into the strange story of closed cities. These are places that in some cases did not or do not officially exist.
Many of them are.
Radiated, and many of them are Cold War relics located in Russia, but not all of them. It's an interesting story and it may hit close to home for some of our fellow listeners. Today we're looking at something kind of related, another sort of invisible place, a place where people officially disappear. So here are the facts. First prisons, really starting on an up note today, guys, prisons are an ugly fact of every nation's existence. And if you have ever researched this or done some cursory googling in your time on the internet, you have found that some prisons, like those in Norway, are held up as models of successful rehabilitation. There's a lot of good and bad press out there about Norway's prisons. People who consider themselves hard on crime will say that Norway is coddling criminals, and people who consider themselves. I don't know, maybe more progressive or people who have studied recidivism rates will say that Norway is enormously successful rehabilitating prisoners. And you know what, you can't lie. You can pull up the pictures, you can check out the prisons. They are very nice, considering that their prisons they don't look like jails or prisons.
Yeah, and some of the best attorneys in the world have come out of Norwegian prisons or they got their degrees. I did not know that. Well, well, hanging out in bubble baths. It's not true. Oh okay, sorry, I'm still back on the lawyer rap tip. But you know, there's definitely a broad spectrum of the types of activities and things that go on in prisons, Norway possibly being the extreme and the positive or you know, if you're hard on crime, you can say in the negative.
But well, yeah, focusing on getting a person who's incarcerated back to existing and functioning within normalized society, that's one extreme.
That's one extreme. Then you have places like South Africa where it's kind of just all bets are off. I mean, they're absurdly notorious for the types of horrible things that go on in there.
That's correct. The violence, the crime, and the corruption are incredibly high. There is a triad of gangs that run many of the prisons in South Africa. I believe they're the twenty five's, the twenty sixes, and the twenty sevens. They are much more sinister than their names would lead you to believe. For instance, one of the common punishments for someone who has broken the codes or moraise of the gang is for someone to This is incredibly graphic, it may not be suitable for all listeners. Is for someone to be wounded in their anus and then to be assaulted by an HIV positive member of the gang. That happens in South African prisons. In some cases, the prisoners have almost as much power as the staff that technically keeps an eye on them. So we have very very very very very nice, sometimes called unfairly called Ikea prisons in Norway, and then we have very very very bad and dangerous places, and the US, depending on who you ask, can fall somewhere in between. One thing that's no secret is that there are a ton of prisons and jails here in these United States.
Yes, and you're speaking about a ton of different places, right, and each of those is its own ecosystem in a lot of ways. In the US, we have over seventeen hundred state prisons, over one hundred federal prisons, and nine hundred and forty two juvenile correctional facilities. But let's keep going here, three two and eighty three local jails and seventy nine jails that are on indigenous people's reservations.
And you might be saying to yourself, given the population of our country, those numbers actually seem kind of low, Yeah, which means severe overcrowding in many of the nation's prisons.
Yeah. Let's keep in mind this does not count military prisons, immigration detention facilities, civil commitment centers, and prisons in the many US territories.
And that's not to say that the kinds of things ben that you describe taking place in South African prisons don't happen in the United States. Largely due to this overcrowding, in New Mexico's State Penitentiary in February of nineteen eighty, prison inmates essentially took over the facility and got a hold of what you would call snitch files, where folks that were actually you know, reporting on you know, illegal activity, they end up in these physical files in the prison wardens office, and the folks that kind of took over the facility found those single those people out and did things very much in line with the kinds of tortures and punishments that Ben was describing taking place in South Africa, involving genital mutilation and you know, hanging from the rafters, you know, by their necks and things like that. Just absolute unimaginable terror.
Yeah, And there has been a growing discrepancy between the way that prisons in the US are depicted in works of fiction versus how day to day life is for the inmates and the staff alike. The truth of the matter is that conditions at these sites can vary widely, sometimes due to issues of funding, and sometimes due to the type of crimes a given inmate may be found guilty of committeing, for example. There are a lot of people who might be in jail for a comparatively short amount of time, and some of our fellow listeners may had this experience at some point in their lives. In some cases, you can also participate in work release programs. This means that someone who's convicted of a crime and has jail time to serve, can serve that time on nights and weekends such that they are able to hopefully maintain employment while serving out their sentence, still be a part of their local community, and hints be less likely to end up back in jail.
Jeffrey Epstein.
Jeffrey Epstein did definitely have an extreme version of a work release program, and check out episode three on Jeffrey Epstein. I think, depending on audience interest, I think we need to do an episode four just to look at gislaying Maxwell exclusively.
I would agree with you.
So what about the other extreme of prisons, like if the Epstein's and the white collar criminals of the world go to what has sometimes been described as camp fed, you know, what's the what's the other the other far end of the spectrum.
Here you're talking about super max facilities.
And this is.
It's a it's a different kind of torture. I think being alone for long long periods of time. Inmates in places that would be considered super max facilities could be alone in solitary confinement for a year, more than a year years, and then a lot of times when they're when they're experiencing that kind of thing, they will get some kind of moment to themselves, basically an hour to be outside, I mean during a single twenty four hour period.
I'm not mistaken. There have been changes in the law surrounding confinement to solitary, isn't it I mean a little bit more regularly than it used to be. Or is it still just completely up to the discretion of prison officials, because I thought there were some human rights cases that sort of prevented just willing la shoving people in solitary and throwing away the key.
In two thousand and twelve, there was a federal class action lawsuit against the Bureau of Prisons and people who run the ad X shoe or Secure House Security Housing Unit, it's the nice name for these prisons. The case was dismissed, So no, so that's off. I'm it's enormously controversial. The UN has condemned the practice, but the UN writes a lot of condemnations without a lot of teeth behind them. And supermax is it's a prison within a prison. And that thing that you're describing, Matt where they get outside time for an hour or whatever, it's pretty depressing, right, they're in a different cage outside. Yeah, so we see this, We see this huge, this huge discrepancy between some prisons or some detention facilities and another. But one thing is not up for debate. Going to a point I believe you raised earlier, This doesn't sound like a ton of facilities, right, given that the population of the United States is in the three hundred millions. The US prison population, however, the actual people incarcerated is huge. There was a twenty eighteen report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics that found, okay, the numbers are a little wonky, right, but they found almost two point two million people are caught up in the system, or as many as almost two point three million people, and that came from the end of two thousand and sixteen. That means, if we adjust for the population of this country, we find a disturbing statistic. For every one hundred thousand people residing in the United States, approximately six hundred and fifty five are behind bars as we speak, for one reason or another. But there's another way to think about it. We can get lost in these numbers, and I think a proportion is a good way to slice the pie. Or let you see the larger picture. But we have a good analogy to or good comparison would be a better way to say it.
Yes, so, if the population currently in US prisons was the population of one city, it would be a city larger than Dallas or Philadelphia, which as we know, are pretty populous metro areas. It would in fact be one of the ten largest cities in these United States, just a little smaller than Houston and a little bigger than Phoenix.
Staggering numbers. It's also, again, even more disturbing when we realize that these numbers do not count hundreds of thousands of people currently held in those other facilities, the military, the prisons in US territories, the detainment centers for immigrants and their children, the.
Ones that are often much more difficult to even find out what those populations look like.
It's true, But wait, Ben, what if there's even more to this story?
Surely you jest, No, I do not.
What if there are other facilities, not detainment centers, immigration centers, not your standard military prison. What if there's a much more secret place where people could be held and are.
Held, Facilities like those closed cities of the Cold War that do not officially exist. Right, places where the normal laws do not apply, wherea's talking no real trials, none of the normal avenues for parole, probation and so on, severe constraints on your rights as an individual. What if there are places where, in a very real sense, people disappear. What exactly are these so called black sites?
And we'll get to that right after a quick word from our sponsor.
Here's where it gets crazy. Yes, it's true. This is one of the things where we have a conclusive, concrete, definitive answer. Black sites did and this is speculative, but they probably do still exist, almost certainly.
Yeah, And to really get a full picture of the development of this, we're gonna have to zip back in time to that fateful day on September eleventh, two thousand and one, when what is officially recognized as a terrorist attack in New York City and Washington d C caused the Central Intelligence Agency to start to think outside the box, outside the existing prison boxes a military situations that were already in place, and to really go further and create an entire new network of facilities.
I would say they're looking outside of that system as well as the judicial system in general, as well as maybe even oversight from the United Nations, and it.
Takes one of these. It takes something as you know, life changing, as earth chattering politically, and just in terms of like day to day existence as September eleventh, to really cause this kind of sea change where it's like, you know, the ends justify the means is sort of the order of the day, right.
The idea here is something that we've encountered in previous arguments for torture, which is the ticking time bomb scenario. You have an individual that you cannot legally arrest, but this individual has knowledge that could help you prevent another huge disaster. So you do what's called an extraordinary rendition. You move beyond the law. You take them someplace where the law does not fully apply. The CIA started looking for outside facilities where they could do this. They could detain and interrogate people they believed it's a very important distinction, people they believed to be high level Al Qaeda suspects. These secret prisons, known as black sites, were used by the CIA to interrogate the folks they thought were terrorists, often using what are called enhanced interrogation by some what are called torture techniques by others to obtain intelligence. And we know that this program began mere days after the events of September eleventh. I mean, you want to dive into the history.
Yeah, we should and can do that, and we're going to do that with the help of a UN report that was officially titled Report of the Special Reporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms while Countering Terrorism by Ben Emerson. Yeah, that's the.
Uh, that's the guy writing the report.
This is why they write names like this because people have already like tuned out by the time they get to Special Reputeur and they're certainly not going to read the actual reporter. We will, and we're going to give you a little exert here that I think we'll maybe do this round robin style. On seventeen September two thousand and one, President Bush authorized the CIA to operate a secret detention program. It's obviously written by a brick because he's spelled program p R O g r MM.
That's the way. That's the type of English the un US.
Is that right? Interesting? That makes sense? Okay. A secret detention program, which involved the establishment of clandestine detention facilities known as quote black sites end quote on the territory of other states, with the collaboration of public officials in those states, And.
Just to continue the quote here. At about the same time, he George W. Bush allegedly authorized the CIA to carry out extraordinary renditions, the secret transfers of prisoners outside any lawful process of extradition or expulsion, enabling them to be interrogated whilst in the formal custody of the public officials of other states, including states with a record of using torture.
At the beginning of August two thousand and two, the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel purported to authorize a range of physical and mental abuse of terrorist suspects known as enhanced interrogation techniques. So that's the end of the quote. And that's a pretty pretty easy summation there. Now, people who support the existence of black sites and the activities that took place within these sites will insert one thousand footnotes into that single paragraph, right, and we will give those We will give those opponents of this ride up there. Due However, everything in that paragraph is factual, that all actually happened. It has been vetted. We can look at examples of what black sites actually are. This iteration of black sites. The first one was built in Thailand. It was built shortly after the September eleventh attacks.
That is just surprising to hear. I think of thinking of Thailand as being the first place.
Well, Thailand is not a place that pops up on the map in a lot of areas. So, for instance, if you suspected the CIA to do something like this, one would naturally and rightfully imagine that they would have a site that was closer to the fracas, right, but this.
I would think Saudi Arabia probably sure.
Yeah, I mean they would probably just rent one of the one Saudi Arabia already has.
And this is all done with full cooperation from these various governments, that is correct.
Yeah, So wonder what.
That negotiations like in a favor. Is it saying like, how can we do this together and make it mutually agreeable? Or is it basically just saying like, this is what's happening. We will withhold aid from you if you don't help us out. I'm wondering, speculator.
Well, there's a later on we'll get to an example from Poland that has a good blow by blow of how this happens. But I suspect it is a case by case basis. You know, this is very much a situation in which US intelligence is building the car while they're driving the car, you know what I mean. So back to Thailand, the American officers there repeatedly water boarded at least two detainees. This was part of those interrogation techniques that the rest of the world, by the way, would later call torture. So waterboarding, for anyone who has an experience, it may sound relatively tame at first, it's a simulation of the experience of drowning. So anybody who has been in danger of drowning ever knows that it is not a pleasant way to go what happens. And there are you know, there are training courses where people who will later use those techniques have to experience it for themselves because you need to know at what point to stop. But here's what happens. You take the victim and you have a rag over their mouth and their nose important, and then you just continually pour a steady consistent amount of water into their mouth and goes through the rag.
While they're laying back or sometimes even at a lower angle than.
Just while their feet are elevated above their head. Yes, yeah, and you know usually on like a plank. Right. And while that sounds tame because you could say, well, they're not beating the snot out of people, They're not breaking fingers or collecting fingernails or teeth or whatever. This this is a incredibly from experience. This is an incredibly unpleasant thing. I was not waterboarded by government agency, but it is an extremely unpleasant experience. And more importantly, it is one that can be repeated ad nauseum, so you can keep drowning people, bringing them back, asking them to confess to something, and then just almost drowning them again.
It's like death simulation. I mean, you know the things that kick in in situations like that are terror and anxiety and panic and just utter, you know, like not feeling safe in any way.
I think you hit it right on the head when you use the t word terror being inflicted then on someone you know, perhaps suspected of being a terrorist, because you know, it's it's exactly what you're saying. You're simulating drowning, right, but it's it's like the most advance DAN flight simulator that's ever existed. If you're thinking about it as a one to one to flying to drowning, because your body experiences and ben you know this exactly physically, exactly what it would do if it were drowning.
I need is a bucket and a rag a table.
It's also sometimes called dry drowning, which I think is a more sinister phrase there. It can cause some serious physical damage, even if a person does not die while this is happening. And to be fair on the side of people who support this interrogation technique, it is described as something that the people administering it have received extensive training and such that they're not going to accidentally keep someone asphyxiated for too long. All in all, there were ten CIA prisoners that we know of who were arrested or held on the soil of Thailands before being transferred to Guantanamo Bay, which we all knew would show up at least partially in this episode. Guantanamo Bay is located on the island of Cuba, and these folks were transferred without any kind of due process or hearing. That's according to a report by the Open Society Justice Initiative from twenty thirteen. Funny story about this. It is the worst kept secret in Thailand. There have been successive members of the Thai government in the military in the years following this, and one thing they all have in common is they have all denied that this ever happened, that there was a black site. It's all a big misunderstanding. These are not the droids you're looking for. These prisons were not just in Thailand. They were initially located in at least eight different countries. They were classified, and they were so classified that inform on each one was known only to the President, a few other US officials, and the people doing the dirty work.
And you know, there were a lot of problems. Pretty obviously on the face of these kinds of things, now I would have seen that kind of well, yeah, but a lot of these problems started to show up pretty quickly after these sites were established.
Yeah, at least twenty six people were held due to cases of mistaken identity.
There are a couple great documentaries around surrounding this. Something about the taxi. I can't remember the name of it, but there's a fantastic documentary that came out in the mid two thousands about a taxi driver that just ended up at Guantanomo crazy.
That's the thing. If you're there due to a case of mistaken identity and you have no recourse to getting you know, your case heard and proving that you're not this person, at that point you just become like collateral damage of the system and you're just stuck, like what do you do? It gives me a panic attacks thinking about it.
Also, add to that the language barrier. Yeah, you know, these many of these interrogators would have a translator of some sort, but the interrogators themselves were often not fluent in the language spoken by the people being detained. So yes, at least twenty six people, at least twenty six people were totally not supposed to be there. Their name just sounded similar, or there was a vague description, or they were turned over when reporting suspected terrorists became incentivized, which is a different problem. Second thing that cropped up almost immediately, the CIA gets caught line to Uncle Sam along with some other members of the CIA who had a problem with this. Because again, although it's tempting and it's easy and cognitively delicious to think these are monolithic entities, they are not. There are people within there are wheels within wheels, there are people competing for the same positions. There's a left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. Kind of situation that crops up. And that's what compartmentalized intelligence is all about. So, according to The Washington Post, in at least one case, an internal CIA memo relays instructions from the White House to keep the program secret from the Secretary of State, the guy whose job is literally to know what's going on here. That was then Secretary of State Colin Powell, and they wanted to keep it a secret from him out of concern that he would quote blow his stack if he were to be briefed on what's going on.
Wow.
Wow, the guy that was, you know, giving a hearing in Congress showing the yellow cake.
He's the guy who you're like, yeah, we can't let him know about this.
He got misled several times. Ye, he did in his career.
So of one hundred and nineteen known suspects who were held, thirty nine of them were subjected to this. Well, this story is full of these absurd terms, sort of these sanitized versions of the same idea. Enhanced interrogation was that a Cheney thing. That was a Cheney thing.
I feel like the I think it was the lawyer who his name escapes you maybe yeah, no, oh ye not you, yoh yes.
Yeah.
The thing is these these these are like any other buzzwords. Often the original author of the buzzword is not going to be super jazzed about it.
Yeah, no, it's true. But these techniques referred to pretty controversially as enhanced interrogation, were used, and we'll get into more on that in just a bit. But some of these things included being slapped and this concept of wall which is new to me, and that's when people were slammed against walls, along with of course waterboarding and sleep deprivation. And you know, we've seen some of these photos with the Forest Unity from the Abou Gray prison where folks were forced to stand on buckets for extended periods of time with like bags over their heads and completely strip naked. It's just a lot of it comes down to humiliation as well.
Yeah, and at times, these this stuff included even more egregious acts. There were incidents of physical view, sexual assaults, threat I believe the photos you're referring to specifically feature people being threatened with military dogs. The thing about these techniques is they were chosen on purpose because they could be applied repeatedly for days or weeks at a stretch. And I just want to confirm off air. We checked back to this to make sure that we were correct. It was John You John chune U, an attorney, law professor, former government official. He was the author of the so called torture Memos, in which the phrase enhanced interrogation. As you might assume, shows up quite often. Seven of the people subjected to these techniques produced no intelligence whatsoever. What do we mean when we say they produced no intelligence whatsoever? We mean that they didn't even produce incorrect intelligence. They didn't even panic and say, well, maybe that guy I went to college with, maybe he's the one you're looking for.
Or yeah, I'll say anything you want me to, just please stop drowning me.
And at least three were confirmed to be subjected to waterboarding. We know about the two in Thailand. There's one other, but there are many, many more reports. A little bit earlier in the show, we mentioned that we had a specific example that gives us a look at the money and the operation. In the Blow by Blow Day by day operation involved let's pause for a word from our sponsor, and then let's travel to Poland.
Okay, so we're back and we are now in Poland. You probably didn't expect to head that.
Way, no episode.
No one expects to go to Poland.
I know, well except for that Germany went there one time, if I recall.
Yeah, yeah, I mean nowadays, no one expects to go to Poland.
Yeah, but it is interesting that we ended up there with one of these black sites. It was one of the first and the probably the most important European black site. It was it was there in Poland. The CIA made a fifteen million dollar deal with their intelligence agencies, their intelligence structure there to build the site, and they called it Quartz, or at least they referred to it as quartz Quartz.
Yes, the accommodations wors were not on the level of a Norwegian prison. Instead, they could only hold a handful of detainees. There was very, very sparse accommodation. There was a shed behind the house that was also converted to a cell. Now if this sounds a little bit clandestine, it's because it was, you know, the biggest, the biggest task robstacle in front of the Polish and American authorities was to make sure that this remained the stuff. They don't want you to know very much. They wanted people to think this was just a villa, right and if someone were to look, say via satellite, and want it to be too obvious that this was an illegal jail prison torture chamber that did not officially exist. There was one room where detainees could ride a stationary bike or use a treadmill if they cooperated. We do know that despite the p problems, despite the injustices evolved, the system kept growing. It went global, it became an international franchise. At least fifty prisons have been used to hold detainees in over twenty well in twenty eight countries. And that's in addition to twenty five more prisons in Afghanistan, twenty in Iraq. There's also there's also this story, in this rumor, in this allegation of floating prisons, which I thought was incredibly devious and brutally clever.
And it's estimated that the US had seventeen of those starting from two thousand and one, which brings the total estimated number of prisons operated by the US and our allies in order to house alleged terraces since two thousand and one to more than one hundred and other countries that held suspects on behalf of the US included.
I'm gonna caution, let's try not to do the Animaniacs.
So yeah, it's a lot long list. It's a lot we got and I can't do it. Algeria, Azerbaijan, Bosniah, Didjibuti Djibouti, Yes, that's the Dasylam, Egypt, Ethiopia, Gambia, Israel, Jordan, Kenya, Kosovo, Libya, Lithuania, Mauritania, Morocco, Pakistan, Poland, Katar, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Somalia, South Africa, Thailand, United Kingdom, Uzbekistan, Yemen, and Zambia.
And according to the Human Rights Watch, the US held detainees from many different countries around the world, twenty one in all, including some that will be easily recognizable and some that might be a little bit surprising. So detainees from Algeria, Egypt, India, Iran, Iraq, Gaza in the West Bank, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Malaysia, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Sweden, Tunisia, Turkey, Ukraine, the UK, and Yemen.
Including a guy named Kelli Sheik Muhammad, the you know, the quote mastermind of nine to eleven, outside of Osama bin Laden, of course, but he was held in that Poland spot for quite a while there where he was waterboarded and all the he was enhancedly interrogated. Then he was moved several times to different places. But it's interesting too to think that someone of such a considered to be such a high level target would be kept in that two story villa in Poland, just hidden somewhere.
Yeah. I'm sure the security was I'm sure it was robust, Yeah, but it wasn't enough. In several of these black sites, the detainees were you know, they had been tortured for whatever information they were perceived to have, and then they were shipped to a place that was deemed more secure or at least marginally more legal. And that is where Guantanamo Bay comes into play. Guantanamo or GITMO as it's been called before, is not exactly the same as a black site because it was not purposefully built for secret detention. In the wake of nine to eleven Guantanamo Bay as a US possession, has been around for a long time, and it has a strange history because it's on Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, right, and it's been there in some form since nineteenh three. So even when the US and Cuba have very antagonistic relationships or you know, interactions, Guantanamo Bay is still around and has stood the test of time. So it does have this in common with Black sites. Detainees from these secret sites were sent to Guantanamo Bay, and they were also subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques there with some real psychologically disturbing torture as well. They tried to get into not just physically threaten people, but also get into their heads and humiliate them.
Yeah. There's a two thousand and five report that was presented to the Senate Armed Services Committee, I guess, and it detailed the interrogation of one man who was considered the twentieth hijacker in the nine to eleven attacks. His name was Mohammed al Katani. Might remember his name from news reports over the years. He was supposedly forced to wear a bra to dance with a man and do what we're called dog tricks. While tied to.
A leash, set laid down, Yeah, rollover.
So very much, just breaking him down essentially psychologically. But military investigators said this was not considered something that was prohibited and they did not consider it inhumane treatment either.
I kind of wonder, like, do you think there's a committee that comes up with this stuff or is it just sort of like improv do you mean the torture? Yeah, Like that's so specific.
You know.
It's like like like, do do you think it was like the guards or like the interrogators that come up with this or is there some higher level like committee or board that comes up with quote unquote acceptable humane forms, Because obviously waterboardings will go to because it's not going to kill them, it's considered maybe less problematic than like attaching electrodes to somebody in a car battery, you know, but like it's definitely still pretty rough. But I'm wondering, like where do these go to tortures come from?
Like it's definitely not improvised, Yeah, yeah, I.
Mean I don't think so either, But I'm wondering where, like if there's a committee that there's specific job is to come up with this stuff in some you know darkened room.
Well, a lot of these techniques have stood the test of time. It's not for nothing that people decide to pursue the similar taking of physical or mental stress. I would draw everyone's attention to earlier published memos and pamphlets from the CIA in that were put out in South American countries and Central American countries that were meant to educate people on how to be insurgents and meant to give you some information about how to torture someone without killing them, because the thing is you want to get them right to the line right. There are some things that are so messed up they sound like they occur in fiction, but there are real cases. For instance, if you read some of this stuff where someone who is going to torture a detainee right will say whether for this government or another government. They'll walk in and they'll be your friend on a chat with you and make sure you're hungry, you need anything, you like sprite? I heard you like spit. Let's get this guy sprite. And then they'll have a conversation like, okay, look there's some stuff that we think you know. We know you know it, and we want you to tell us, but to me. It doesn't matter what you say. You and I are going to be quite close. Check this out. And then when they say check this out, they will harm themselves in front of the person, you know, like cut their arm such that it bleeds copiously, but not you know, lethally, not a north to south kind of cut, just like floah vertical cut like that with their arm hanging out of kimbo. And then they'll hold it there and like, I just did this to myself, What do you think I'm going to do to you? That kind of stuff. You're not physically hurting the person, but you're in their head and that thing. While it sounds like a complete malarkey written by a screenwriter somewhere, that has happened before, and people do that because it works. So all this stuff, in answer to your question is not is largely not improvised.
Yeah, And it's also one of the things where it's like, to the subject being on the receiving end of said torture, they're like, go back to being nice again. Whatever I have to do to get you back to where you were, where you were giving me a sprite, you know and being my friend, I'll do that. You know it Literally, it's like you're showing this juxtaposition. You're like you're baiting and switching, and then you're like whatever it takes to get back to that first version of you, you know.
So let's jump back here in time. We were talking about that two thousand and five report that went to the Senate Armed Services Committee, and then the next year, in September of two thousand and six, the president at the time, George W. Bush, acknowledged that the CIA had indeed held suspected terrorists in these places, these secret prisons overseas in different countries. He also announced the transfer of fourteen specific captured al Qaeda operatives. Again, like you're just kind of he's just announcing this to the public, like we just say, okay, those must be al Qaeda operatives, but he's saying fourteen captured Alkayeda operatives who were being transferred, including Mohammad bin al shib and Abu Zubaya to Guantanamo Bay. So two thousand and six is when the President of the United States says, yes, indeed, we are keeping people in these secret places, and we're shipping people now to Guantanamo.
And there's been a lot of work leading up to this as well. There's some fantastic, i would say, heroic journalists such as Dana Priest, who did a lot of work for the Washington Post on this subject. So when it was confirmed by the then president, it was already something that was widely suspected or even already considered to be true by people a little more on the fringes of the national and international conversation. Let's fast forward twenty eighteen. As you may know, neither the naval base nor the detention center are closed. Posed last year January thirtieth, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to keep the detention center open and also to approve the transfer potential new prisoners to the site. So not only is it not closed, it might actually grow. There was a well, they're having a series of legal challenges to this because these people are often, you know, they're not experiencing due process. There have been people who have been held for years and turned out that they were completely the wrong person. Right. In June of this year, twenty nineteen, the Supreme Court of the US rejected a challenge to the indefinite detention of Guantanamo Bay detainees who have yet to be charged imagine being detained indefinitely, no charges brought against you for almost twenty years. Twenty years, that's how that's how long ago this was.
Now it's basically saying we have enough evidence, like this is what you have to imagine the authorities saying to you, as the individual, we feel as though we have enough evidence to convince us that you were definitely a heinous person who has done heinous things or is plenty to do heinous things, But we don't have enough evidence to you know, take you to trial anywhere, or we don't have a place in which we can try you for these crimes.
I mean, it reminds me of the way they used to just be able to, like, you know, a king back in the dark ages could just throw somebody in the dungeon, you know, and throw away the key, with no trial, no due process, and they wouldn't even have known what they have done.
You know.
Think of the abuses that are likely inherent in this system. You know, people with a grudge, or people where someone maybe has some dirt, who knows. I mean, you know, I'm not trying it on. I mean, I think it's certainly what I'm saying is when you when you lack accountability, corruption tends to run free.
Well.
And the other thing is just how how human beings, through the legal eese and the manipulation of the law, are categorized. We've talked about this before on this show, but the concept of I believe it was during the Barack Obama's presidency where I think it was under his watch, where males of a fighting age in any country where the United States is engaged militarily are considered an enemy combatants. Right. Yeah, that means if you are within that age range and you are a male, then you could.
Just be at a black site.
The assumption is right. This is fascinating in a terrible, terrible way. We do have to also, again to be fair, we have to point out that because some of these people were victims of mistaken identity, because some of these people were accused of crimes that they did not commit, it does not mean that everyone there was innocent.
Absolutely. That's why it's so difficult.
Right, And of the fifty four countries that the Open Society that we mentioned at the top of the show, the fifty four countries that Open Society confirmed is having captured, held, question, tortured, or helped transport these detainees for the CIA, Fewer than half of them have opened any kind of domestic inquiry or had any court cases challenging their involvement. Means, in a very real sense, this stuff continues to officially not exist. But here is the ultimate question. Did these black sites and the interrogations performed within actually produce results? Plot twist spoiler alert. The CIA believes so, in case that was a big Shamalan moment for anyone.
Yeah, they, I mean, they almost kind of have to believe so. And we have a quote here from the CIA Director John Brennan, or at the time CIA Director John Brennan.
He gave this official statement. Our review indicates that interrogation of detainees on whom enhanced interrogation techniques were used, did produce intelligence that helped thwart attack plans, capture terrorists, and saved lives. The intelligence gained from the program was critical to our understanding of al Qaeda and continues to inform our counter terrorism efforts to this day. Congress, this is out of the quote. On the other hand, did not agree.
Right right, So for many of us listening, or at least a few of us listening, This feels like an ugly, ugly reality, you know what I mean. War is a brutal thing. And when we are when we're in that hypothetical situation where doing something abominable to one person may save hundreds of thousands, we're very close to that needs of the many outnumber the needs of the few kind of cold logic argument.
Right, well, what if those numbers are are just towards or do terrible things to one person and save ten.
Right, even then the ratio still holds your safe. You're creating more net good by doing a little bit of evil. And the problem with that kind of experiment is that it is very very rare for someone to know with certitude that their activities prevented a disaster or a catastrophe, because by preventing it, it's never happened, you know what I mean.
Absolutely, It's kind.
Of like the psychic prediction problem where someone says, oh, I have a premonition, Paul, mission controlled decand do not take do not take your car to I don't know and to a trip on Thanksgiving or something, because there will be an accident. So maybe they just go a different route and nothing happens. You know what, I mean, yeah, or take a flight, or take a flight and nothing weapons. So amongst the people who disagreed with that stance, amongst the people who disagreed with the CIA's pro interrogation, pro black site stance were members of Congress. Actually just Congress disagree because one thing Congress used to really have a problem with was being lied to. In their December ninth, twenty fourteen report, which was called the Committee's Study of the Central Intelligence Agencies Detention and Interrogation Program. Again you have to love the sexy titles, they found twenty different findings that were published where they took the CIA to task. They deemed the activities legal. They said, A, this doesn't work. B stop lying, and it went on and on. The weird thing about the report is that it is six thousand pages long. Five hundred and twenty five of those pages were declassified along with an executive summary, which is where most people got the facts. Right now, we do have an answer to the original question. We do know the black sites did exist. They were highly illegal. Despite the arguments made in court right and despite the clear illegality as espoused by members of the legislative branch, it appears the judicial branch of this government is stonewalling at different turns, right, and they're saying, well, again, it's ugly, but it's a special case. We have to protect the many, and we don't know if there are other black sites out there.
It feels like one of those terrible, dark truths ugly secrets that almost oh, it's so weird because on this end, you know, as American citizens sitting in this room, in the privilege that we have just by existing in this country, it feels, in this really messed up way good to know that this kind of thing is out there to ostensibly protect us here in this country, right, And I think we have to acknowledge that there's like a there's a weird sense of like, okay, well, at least at least it's our my people, our people, our side, the good guy is doing this thing.
Right.
Those are all like subjective terms to put on the American authorities, But I wonder what that feels like, what it truly feels like inside from let's say, a Polish citizen who finds out that there is a black site in their country where this kind of thing is being carried out on their soil.
Well, I guess that all depends on how much benefit they feel like they're getting from their relationship with the United States, which varies from country to country and those arrangements, right, I don't know, like that, like the whole thing with Trump supposed to withholding aid from Ukraine in that situation, Ukraine really needed that aid. So there's a quid pro quote. I mean, not to throw around the buzz term of the moment, but there is an absolute benefit as a country where you say, oh, Okay, the US is giving us this military aid. Therefore maybe we'll turn the other cheek or you know, well we'll turn the other way if we think they're doing some nefarious stuff on our turf because we feel like they're actually actively helping us and having better lives.
Sure, I don't think it could. I don't think it could occur without some kind of pretty heavy incentive like that.
It's just to your point that you're thinking, like, how the average citizen, how do they feel about it? Well, yeah, I mean you're talking.
I mean we listed off the number of places where these black sites existed. In a lot of them, you can imagine the citizens of those countries being at risk of ending up and you know, it would be a very small proportion of the citizens and almost not making you know, wouldn't even be a blip on a calculator.
It's just I don't know.
To me, I'm interested in the mindset of just somebody knowing that's happening, because it's very it.
Feels even though even though sitting in.
This room as an American citizen, it kind of feels not okay, but like I'm not scared about it.
Oh right, because you probably won't get black backed for now. For now. Yeah, that's I mean, that's a very good point because we know in our previous episode it is completely possible for people to lose or hide entire cities with populations of thousands. So having a small area where you have a handful or at the most hundreds of detainees who have been disappeared, it's so disturbingly plausible that that could happen, could be happening now, and there would be no proof, and maybe the people who live in the next town or village over just have have been have been given to understand that no one goes near the old dairy factory, you.
Know what I mean.
And that's all it takes yep, that's all it takes. And this leads us to the question that we cannot really answer. Will this happen in the future. Have these black sites actually closed or have they just moved further from the public eye. If that is the case, then these locations remain the stuff they don't want you to know. And that's our classic episode for this evening. We can't wait to hear your thoughts.
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