CIA secret prisons organized from Germany

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CIA secret prisons organized from Germany
By Jan Peters
1 September 2009

A report in the New York Times on August 13 confirms that the CIA
planned and organized secret prisons from the German city of
Frankfurt/Main. At least three secret prisons were administered by the
CIA branch office in Frankfurt beginning in 2003.

These illegal prisons belonged to the worldwide network of "black
sites" to which the CIA transferred many of its prisoners in its "war
against terror." There were at least eight such secret prisons
maintained by the CIA outside the US. The prisons run from Frankfurt
included two that were located respectively in the Romanian capital of
Bucharest and a remote part of Morocco. A third is alleged to have
been in the Polish town of Kiejkuty, near the Szymany airport. A
fourth prison was located in Lithuania.

The secret prisons were used to extort information from prisoners
using methods of torture that would not have been possible in the US.
The director of the Frankfurt CIA branch office at that time, Kyle D.
Foggo, told the Times that these measures were organized from
Frankfurt because "it was too sensitive to be handled by headquarters."

In September 2006, then US president George W. Bush admitted the
existence of secret prisons for the first time. These torture prisons
were used to systematically subject those deemed to be terrorist
suspects to sleep deprivation, waterboarding and beatings in order to
obtain information or extort confessions. The CIA arrested "potential
mass murderers" on the "battlegrounds of the world" and imprisoned
them in secret locations where the suspects were subjected to "hard,
necessary and effective methods of interrogation," as Bush claimed.

The secret prisons had to be set up outside of the US, because they
contravened existing US law. The fact that the methods of torture
employed by the CIA also violated international law was obviously a
matter of indifference for the US government as well as for the German
and European authorities.

Each of these prisons was designed to accommodate six prisoners and
was constructed in identical fashion in order to confuse prisoners as
to their exact location. The prisons were completely isolated and
designed in such a way as to prevent life threatening injuries during
interrogations. The floors were covered in skid-proof material, with
plywood walls to cushion the impact when prisoners collided with the
walls.

According to the New York Times, after the attacks of September 11,
2001, the "sleepy supply center" of the CIA in Frankfurt moved into
action. The budget of this branch office was awarded an extra seven
million dollars by the Bush government. At a later point this expanded
budget was then trebled.

Frankfurt became the most important supply base of the US secret
service in Europe. In addition, the city developed into an important
logistics base for US operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, organizing
supply flights for CIA deployments on virtually a daily basis.

Foggo, who was director of the Frankfurt CIA branch office, was well
known for his organizational expertise. He worked for the CIA for over
20 years before pleading guilty to corruption charges in 2008 and
receiving a sentence of three years in prison. Previously, in late
2004, he was appointed third-highest official of the CIA, following
his deployment in Frankfurt. In the 1980s he was active in Honduras
for the CIA. At the time, the US was conducting a dirty proxy war
against Nicaragua, which was organized by the CIA in Honduras on
behalf of the American government under president Ronald Reagan.
The role of the German government

Neither the office of the German chancellor, nor the interior
ministry, the foreign office or the German Federal Intelligence
Service (BND), have commented on the New York Times article. This
silence must be taken as an admission that the German government
agencies were aware of what the CIA was doing.

When questioned by the media individual police officers have declared
that they knew nothing about the activities of CIA agents in Germany.
This was the business of the Americans, they claimed. "Even if we got
wind of anything," a high-ranking official told the Süddeutsche
Zeitung, "nothing would have changed anyway."

As long ago as November 2005, the Washington Post and Human Rights
Watch had uncovered the illegal prisons run by the CIA, and its
criminal practice of kidnapping terror suspects. After these first
exposures the secretary-general of the Council of Europe opened a
preliminary investigation. It was led by former Swiss public
prosecutor Dick Marty, president of the Commission for Human Rights of
the Council of Europe. As special prosecutor Marty carried out
investigations into the secret CIA prisons from 2005 to 2007.

In June 2006 Marty submitted an initial report. It stated that it
could not definitively prove the existence of the secret prisons, but
presented substantial evidence to indicate the use of such facilities
by the US secret services. Marty continued his investigations and
prepared a second report. He discovered close cooperation between
European secret services and the CIA, but met with a wall of silence
and denial on the part of the European governments.

The second Marty report of 2007 criticized the German and the Italian
governments in particular for systematically suppressing the truth
about the prisons. In Milan, leading political agencies closed down
the investigation in the same year against 26 CIA agents who had
openly kidnapped the Egyptian Imam Abu Omar in Italy in February 2003
and transported him to an Egyptian torture prison.

Marty recently told the Frankfurter Rundschau that it was difficult to
uncover the whole truth about all of the alleged terrorist suspects
kidnapped during this period. In the main, European governments had
"made little effort" to clarify what had taken place, he said.

Between 2005 and June 2009 a German parliamentary committee of inquiry
investigated the methods used by the CIA and its collaboration with
the BND. The list of the topics to be examined was long. It included,
in addition to the secret prison system and secret CIA flights over
Germany, the participation of BND agents in the Iraq war, the
knowledge by German intelligence sources of CIA kidnappings of German
terrorist suspects, and the monitoring of journalists by the BND.

In the event, the committee of inquiry served as a whitewash for the
intelligence services and the German government. In its final report
of June 19 the committee concluded that the Social Democratic
Party-Green government at that time had no knowledge of either the
secret transportation of suspects or the existence of secret prisons.
The committee of inquiry expressed no interest in the fact that an
inquiry set up by the European parliament had already uncovered some
time before that between 2001 and 2005 CIA transport planes had landed
on no less than 336 occasions at German airports. It is completely
unrealistic to expect that the government and its intelligence
services had no knowledge of such flights.

The final report of the Bundestag committee served above all to cover
the tracks of the current German foreign minister and SPD chancellor
candidate, Frank-Walter Steinmeier. During the period in office of the
SPD-Green government (1998-2005) Steinmeier was head of the German
chancellery and personally responsible for the secret services. At the
end of 2002 it was Steinmeier who prevented the Turkish citizen Murat
Kurnaz, who lived in the German city of Bremen, from entering the
federal republic. Accused of being a terrorist, Kurnaz was detained in
the US Guantánamo detention centre. The US authorities had offered to
free Kurnaz in 2002 due to lack of evidence. Because of Steinmeier's
refusal to readmit Kurnaz to Germany, however, he was forced to remain
a further four years in Guantánamo.

Steinmeier denied any responsibility for Kurnaz's fate at the
committee of inquiry. He was also acquitted of any responsibility in
the case of Khaled el-Masri. El-Masri is a Lebanese citizen resident
in Germany who was kidnapped in 2004 by the US secret service in
Macedonia and transported to Afghanistan—allegedly without the
knowledge of the German government.

The record shows clearly that no account of their real role will be
forthcoming from the official authorities. The extent of the
complicity of the German government in the criminal activities and
torture methods of the CIA will only be revealed by an independent
inquiry and investigation conducted by and on behalf of the working class.

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/sep2009/ciag-s01.shtml

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