Within the heavily guarded perimeters of the Defense Department's
much-discussed Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, the CIA has maintained a
detention facility for valuable al Qaeda captives that has never been
mentioned in public, according to military officials and several current
and former intelligence officers.
The buildings used by the CIA are shrouded by high fences covered
with thick green mesh plastic and ringed with floodlights, officials
said. They sit within the larger Camp Echo complex, which was erected to
house the Defense Department's high-value detainees and those awaiting
military trials on terrorism charges.
The facility has housed detainees from Pakistan, West Africa,
Yemen and other countries under the strictest secrecy, the sources said.
"People are constantly leaving and coming," said one U.S. official who
visited the base in recent months. It is unclear whether the facility is
still in operation today. The CIA and the Defense Department declined to
comment.
Most international terrorism suspects in U.S. custody are held not
by the CIA but by the Defense Department at the Guantanamo Bay prison.
They are guaranteed access to the International Committee of the Red
Cross (ICRC) and, as a result of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling this year,
have the right to challenge their imprisonment in federal courts.
CIA detainees, by contrast, are held under separate rules and far
greater secrecy. Under a presidential directive and authorities approved
by administration lawyers, the CIA is allowed to capture and hold
certain classes of suspects without accounting for them in any public
way and without revealing the rules for their treatment. The roster of
CIA prisoners is not public, but current and former U.S. intelligence
officials say the agency holds the most valuable al Qaeda leaders and
many mid-level members with knowledge of the group's logistics,
financing and regional operations.
The CIA facility at the Guantanamo Bay prison was constructed over
the past year as the agency confronted one of its toughest emerging
problems: where to hold terrorists for interrogations that could last
for years.
During the 1990s, the CIA typically had custody of half a dozen
terrorists at any time and usually kept them in foreign prisons, mostly
in Egypt and Jordan. But just two months after the attacks of Sept. 11,
2001, CIA paramilitary teams working with foreign intelligence services
had arrested dozens of people thought to have knowledge of upcoming
attacks on the United States.
The CIA is believed to be holding about three dozen al Qaeda
leaders in undisclosed locations, U.S. national security officials say.
Among them are pivotal Sept. 11 plotters Khalid Sheik Mohammed, Ramzi
Binalshibh and Abu Zubaida and the leader of Southeast Asia's Islamic
terrorist movement, Nurjaman Riduan Isamuddin, who is also known as
Hambali.
CIA detention facilities have been located on an off-limits corner
of the Bagram air base in Afghanistan, on ships at sea and on Britain's
Diego Garcia island in the Indian Ocean.
Maintaining facilities in foreign countries is difficult, however,
said current and former CIA officials. Binalshibh and Abu Zubaida were
believed to have been taken to Thailand immediately after capture. The
Thai government eventually insisted that they be transferred elsewhere.
"People are willing to help but not to hold," said one CIA veteran
of counterterrorism operations.
The U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay thus provided the CIA with an
isolated venue devoid of the sensitive international politics. But it
came with strings attached.
The U.S. military, which controls the base, required the agency to
register all detainees, abide by military detention standards and permit
the ICRC some level of access.
"If you're going to be in my back yard, you're going to have to
abide by my rules" is how one defense official explained it.
Army officials investigating the Abu Ghraib prison scandal
concluded that the CIA had held "ghost detainees" at the prison, inmates
who were not registered or officially acknowledged, a violation of
military rules.
Asked about the arrangement with the CIA at Guantanamo Bay,
Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said he could not comment on operations
of other agencies. "As we have stated since the beginning of detention
operations at Guantanamo, the ICRC has access to detainees at Guantanamo
and is permitted to meet with them, consistent with military necessity,"
Whitman said in a statement. Pentagon policy "is that all [Defense]
detainees, including those at Guantanamo, are treated humanely, and in
accordance with applicable law," the statement continued.
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One U.S. official knowledgeable about the arrangement with the
ICRC considered it a positive step forward. "There is no one in Gitmo
who is not identified," he said, using Guantanamo Bay's nickname.
Red Cross officials declined to say where they had been permitted
to visit, or whom. "We have been granted broad access to the camp," the
ICRC said in a prepared statement. "We are confident we have visited all
of the people detained at Guantanamo, in all of the places they are
being detained."
The CIA has worked at Guantanamo Bay since the early days of the
prison camps, which opened in January 2002 when the first men captured
in the Afghan war where transferred to a collection of chain-link cages
called Camp X-Ray. The CIA has kept an office at the Navy base and takes
part in interrogation sessions of Defense Department detainees alongside
FBI agents, military intelligence officers and others in what are called
Tiger Teams.
Many of the interrogations have been conducted inside trailers set
up within the perimeter of Camp Delta, a more permanent compound of
steel cages that took the place of Camp X-Ray by the end of 2003.
The facility used by the CIA is in Camp Echo, which also houses
high-value military detainees. The camp consists of more than a dozen
single-story concrete-block huts built away from the main prison
complex. Each hut is divided in half. Inside is a steel cage, a
restroom, and a table for interviews and interrogations, according to
sources familiar with the facility.
The CIA's facility has been "off-limits to nearly everyone on the
base," said one military official familiar with operations at Guantanamo
Bay.
One of the huts at Camp Echo has been occupied by a detainee named
Mohamedou Oulad Slahi, according to one source familiar with the new
compound. Slahi, a Mauritanian businessman, acted as the liaison between
a group of Islamic radicals living in Hamburg and al Qaeda leader Osama
bin Laden, according to the Sept. 11 commission.
According to statements given by the key plotter, Binalshibh,
Slahi persuaded the men to go to Afghanistan, rather than Chechnya, to
fight.
He arranged their travel and for them to meet al Qaeda operatives
in Pakistan, who in turn arranged a meeting between Binalshibh and bin
Laden.
Slahi was arrested by secret police in Mauritania during the night
on Sept. 27, 2001, members of his family told local media at the time.
By December, he was in U.S. custody.
Researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
