The Obama administration may talk about resetting America’s behaviour after the extremism of the Bush years but there’s copious evidence to the contrary. Take this from Pro Publica:
In one of President Barack Obama first acts in the White House, he ordered the closure of the CIA’s so-called “black-site” prisons, where terror suspects had been held and, sometimes, tortured.… The CIA says it is “out of the detention business,” as John Brennan, Obama’s pick to head the agency, recently put it.
But the CIA’s prisons left some unfinished business.… In 2009, ProPublica’s Dafna Linzer… listed… more than thirty people who had been held in CIA prisons and were still missing.…
Some of those prisoners have since resurfaced, but at least twenty are still unaccounted for.
Last week the Open Society Foundations’ Justice Initiative… released a report… pulling together the most current information available on the fates of the prisoners. A few emerged from foreign prisons after the turmoil of the Arab Spring. One has died. (The report relied exclusively on media accounts and information previously gathered by human rights groups. The Open Society Foundations also donate to ProPublica.)
The report counts 136 prisoners who were either held in a CIA black site or subject to so-called extraordinary rendition, in which detainees were secretly shipped to other countries for interrogation.
Many of the prisoners were tortured, either under the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” program or by other countries after their transfer. The report also lists 54 countries that assisted in some way with detention and rendition. The U.S. has not disclosed the countries it worked with, and… few… have… acknowledged… their participation.
The CIA declined our request to comment.