• What is torture? Ex-CIA official renews debate

    Jose Rodriguez, author and former director of the CIA's National Clandestine Service, explains how enhanced interrogation tactics impacted the "War on Terror."

    By Miranda Leitsinger, Staff Writer, NBC News

    What is torture? In the post-9/11 era, that question has loomed over the country’s efforts to track down and interrogate those planning terrorist attacks against the U.S. and its allies.

    The former director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service renewed the debate this week with the publication of his book, “Hard Measures,” and an explosive interview on 60 Minutes in which he defended the “enhanced interrogation” program he helped oversee.

    On Thursday, Jose A. Rodriguez, Jr., told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that what his officers did was legal, noting torture involves the “breaking of bones” and “blood on the walls.” He said CIA officers knew tactics resulting in great bodily harm wouldn’t elicit good intelligence, so they used other ones, like waterboarding and sleep deprivation, on their subjects.

    President Obama, who has said waterboarding is “torture,” ended the practice shortly after taking office.

    Rodriguez defended the Bush administration’s “enhanced interrogation” program on “Morning Joe,” claiming it added momentum to the “war on terror” as the agency began capturing al-Qaida’s “high command.”

    He said the first detainee to provide the big picture on al-Qaida was Abu Zubaydah, who was near death after being wounded by the Pakistanis. He was nursed back to health because the service knew how valuable his information would be, Rodriguez said.
    Zubaydah, who had been the third most senior al-Qaida figure, was subjected to waterboarding along with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, accused of plotting the bombing of the USS Cole in 2002.

    “The program is not about using brute force because we recognize that brute force doesn’t work. So, we’re totally in agreement that torture does not work,” he added.

    But critics charge that waterboarding and other “enhanced techniques” are torture, similar to what was practiced by the Japanese or the Nazis.


    “This is not that,” he said. “Our waterboarding program is based on the U.S. military training program … tens of thousands of U.S. servicemen were waterboarded pursuant to this program to prepare them for the possibility of being captured someday so that they would know what it felt like.”

    The last waterboarding was in 2003. He said there was a lot of confusion among the public over how many times someone was waterboarded versus how many pourings of water there was, noting that “183 pourings of water became 183 times, which is just not the case.”

    Of the interrogation techniques, “waterboarding is the most harsh; sleep deprivation is tough, too,” he said. But he noted that when he described the tactics to a U.S. senator who had been a marine, the response was, “’What?’ He said, ‘That’s it?’”

    When asked what torture was, Rodriguez said: “Brute force. It’s breaking of bones. It’s people passing out from pain. It’s blood on the walls. This is the way that some of our heroes who’ve actually been tortured tell us what torture is.”

    Despite his defense of the technique, Rodriguez doesn’t think waterboarding would work today, since the enemy would be prepared for it. Nonetheless, he said, the controversial interrogation program’s value was “incredible,” providing “thousands and thousands of reports” about al-Qaida.

    “The more we captured, the more we learned and eventually it destroyed the organization that attacked us on 9/11 and allowed us to get bin Laden,” he said.

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  • Hidden in plain sight: Inside a secret CIA prison

    By The Associated Press

    WASHINGTON - In northern Bucharest, in a busy residential neighborhood minutes from the heart of the capital city, is a secret the Romanian government has long tried to protect.

    For years, the CIA used a government building — codenamed "Bright Light" — as a makeshift prison for its most valuable detainees. There it held al-Qaida operatives Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, and others in a basement prison before they were ultimately transferred to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 2006, according to former U.S. intelligence officials familiar with the location and inner workings of the prison.

    The existence of a CIA prison in Romania has been widely reported, but its location has never been made public. The Associated Press and German public television ARD located the former prison and learned details of the facility where harsh interrogation tactics were used. ARD's program on the CIA prison is set to air Thursday.

    The Romanian prison was part of a network of so-called black sites that the CIA operated and controlled overseas in Thailand, Lithuania and Poland. All the prisons were closed by May 2006, and the CIA's detention and interrogation program ended in 2009.  

     Unlike the CIA's facility in Lithuania's countryside or the one hidden in a Polish military installation, the CIA's prison in Romania was not in a remote location. It was hidden in plain sight, a couple blocks off a major boulevard on a street lined with trees and homes, along busy train tracks.

    The building is used as the National Registry Office for Classified Information, which is also known as ORNISS. Classified information from NATO and the European Union is stored there. Former intelligence officials both described the location of the prison and identified pictures of the building.

    In an interview at the building in November, senior ORNISS official Adrian Camarasan said the basement is one of the most secure rooms in all of Romania. But he said Americans never ran a prison there.

    "No, no. Impossible, impossible," he said in an ARD interview for its "Panorama" news broadcast, as a security official monitored the interview.

    The CIA prison opened for business in the fall of 2003, after the CIA decided to empty the black site in Poland, according to former U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the detention program with reporters.

    Shuttling detainees into the facility without being seen was relatively easy. After flying into Bucharest, the detainees were brought to the site in vans. CIA operatives then drove down a side road and entered the compound through a rear gate that led to the actual prison.

    The detainees could then be unloaded and whisked into the ground floor of the prison and into the basement.

    Imported Halal meat
    The basement consisted of six prefabricated cells, each with a clock and arrow pointing to Mecca, the officials said. The cells were on springs, keeping them slightly off balance and causing disorientation among some detainees.

    The CIA declined to comment on the prison.

    During the first month of their detention, the detainees endured sleep deprivation and were doused with water, slapped or forced to stand in painful positions, several former officials said. Waterboarding, the notorious interrogation technique that simulates drowning, was not performed in Romania, they said.

    After the initial interrogations, the detainees were treated with care, the officials said. The prisoners received regular dental and medical checkups. The CIA shipped in Halal food to the site from Frankfurt, Germany, the agency's European center for operations. Halal meat is prepared under religious rules similar to kosher food.

    Former U.S. officials said that because the building was a government installation, it provided excellent cover. The prison didn't need heavy security because area residents knew it was owned by the government. People wouldn't be inclined to snoop in post-communist Romania, with its extensive security apparatus known for spying on the country's own citizens.

    Human rights activists have urged the Eastern European countries to investigate the roles their governments played in hosting the prisons in which interrogation techniques such as waterboarding were used. Officials from these countries continue to deny these prisons ever existed.

    "We know of the criticism, but we have no knowledge of this subject," Romanian President Traian Basescu said in a September interview with AP.

    The CIA has tried to close the book on the detention program, which President Barack Obama ended shortly after taking office.

    "That controversy has largely subsided," the CIA's top lawyer, Stephen Preston, said at a conference this month.

    'Years of official denials'
    But details of the prison network continue to trickle out through investigations by international bodies, reporters and human rights groups. "There have been years of official denials," said Dick Marty, a Swiss lawmaker who led an investigation into the CIA secret prisons for the Council of Europe. "We are at last beginning to learn what really happened in Bucharest."

    During the Council of Europe's investigation, Romania's foreign affairs minister assured investigators in a written report that, "No public official or other person acting in an official capacity has been involved in the unacknowledged deprivation of any individual, or transport of any individual while so deprived of their liberty." That report also described several other government investigations into reports of a secret CIA prison in Romania and said: "No such activities took place on Romanian territory."

    Reporters and human rights investigators have previously used flight records to tie Romania to the secret prison program. Flight records for a Boeing 737 known to be used by the CIA showed a flight from Poland to Bucharest in September 2003. Among the prisoners on board, according to former CIA officials, were Mohammed and Walid bin Attash, who has been implicated in the bombing of the USS Cole.

    Later, other detainees — Ramzi Binalshibh, Abd al-Nashiri and Abu Faraj al-Libi — were also moved to Romania. A deceptive al-Libi, who was taken to the prison in June 2005, provided information that would later help the CIA identify Osama bin Laden's trusted courier, a man who unwittingly led them the CIA to bin Laden himself.

     Court documents recently discovered in a lawsuit have also added to the body of evidence pointing to a CIA prison in Romania. The files show CIA contractor Richmor Aviation Inc., a New York-based charter company, operated flights to and from Romania along with other locations including Morocco and the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay.

    For the CIA officers working at the secret prison, the assignment wasn't glamorous. The officers served 90-day tours, slept on the compound and ate their meals there, too. Officers were prevented from the leaving the base after their presence in the neighborhood stoked suspicion. One former officer complained that the CIA spent most of its time baby-sitting detainees like Binalshibh and Mohammed whose intelligence value diminished as the years passed.

    The Romanian and Lithuanian sites were eventually closed in the first half of 2006 before CIA Director Porter Goss left the job. Some of the detainees were taken to Kabul, where the CIA could legally hold them before they were sent to Guantanamo. Others were sent back to their native countries.

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