Ghost ship. A ‘ghost’ prisoner’s fate is no better
The CIA versus NSA (Pentagon) internecine war ticks up a notch with CIA presstitute AP snitching out the Pentagon’s torture ‘black sites’ on ships:
“THE SHIPS”
“Several inmates said guards frequently threatened prisoners by saying they would “take them to the ships.”
“Senior U.S. defense officials flatly denied the U.S. military conducts any interrogations of Yemenis on any ships.
“We have no comment on these specific claims,” said Jonathan Liu, a CIA spokesman, adding that any allegations of abuse are taken seriously.
“But a Yemeni officer told AP he had worked on a vessel off the coast where he saw at least two detainees brought for questioning.
“He said the detainees were taken below deck, where he was told American “polygraph experts” and “psychological experts” conducted interrogations. He did not have access to the lower decks and thus had no first-hand information about what happened there. But he said he saw other Americans in uniforms on the ship. The officer spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared retaliation for discussing the operations.
“A second Yemeni officer said he was involved in moving detainees to a ship, where he said he saw foreigners though he didn’t know their nationality. “They say these are the important ones. Why are they important? I have no idea,” he said of the detainees.
“A top official in Hadi’s Interior Ministry and a senior military official in the 1st Military District, based in Hadramawt, also contended that Americans were conducting interrogations at sea, as did a former senior security official in Hadramawt. The three men spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to share military information”
No doubt the American public will see this as some revelation but actually this old news:
Obama didn’t actually close down black site prisons, he merely relocated them to preexisting black site ships run by the military. This (above screenshot) article is from 2010:
“U.S. PRISON SHIPS: On June 2, 2008 UK’s Guardian reported, “The US has admitted that the Bataan and Peleliu were used as prison ships between December 2001 and January 2002”. According to Reprieve, the U.S. may have used 17 ships as “floating prisons” since 2001. Detainees are interrogated on ships and may be rendered to other, undisclosed locations. Reprieve expressed concern over the time the U.S.S. Ashland spent off Somalia in early 2007. According to The Guardian, “At this time many people were abducted by Somali, Kenyan and Ethiopian forces in a systematic operation involving regular interrogations by individuals believed to be members of the FBI and CIA. Ultimately more than 100 individuals were ‘disappeared’ to prisons in locations including Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Guantanamo Bay. Reprieve believes prisoners may have also been held for interrogation on the USS Ashland and other ships in the Gulf of Aden during this time.”
The U.S. Navy, through a spokesman, said, “There are no detention facilities on US navy ships” but Commander Jeffrey Gordon told The Guardian some individuals had been put on ships “for a few days” during initial days of detention.
Reprieve quoted one prisoner released from Guantanamo who was on one of the U.S. ships who said there were 50 other prisoners in cages in the bottom of the ship and they were beaten even more severely than in Guantanamo. Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve’s legal director, is quoted as saying, “They choose ships to try to keep their misconduct as far as possible from the prying eyes of the media and lawyers. We will eventually reunite these ghost prisoners with their legal rights”
Well, good luck with ‘reuniting’ those ‘ghost’ prisoners with their families, recalling it was Henry Kissinger mentored the South American military strongmen who ‘disappeared’ tens of thousands of ‘suspected’ leftists. The relevance? Multiple tens of thousands of ‘ghost’ prisoners remain unaccounted for, of the estimated 100,000 or so ‘renditioned’ prisoners directly related to the USA’s war on terror. The real news is, it would appear those prisoners who aren’t ‘outsourced’ but meet ‘importance’ criteria enough to be sent to ‘The Ships” are disappeared and don’t come back. How many? This, on top of renditions math that doesn’t add up, the ‘lie by omission’ the AP is never going to admit (if only because it gets sticky, in that case, for the CIA, not only the Pentagon.) Adding ‘The Ships’ to the known CIA renditions flights, we ALL can know the Feinstein torture investigation had been little more than a whitewash.
Here’s my article on the renditions math from December, 2014:
122 KNOWN aircraft were used in renditions within a database of 11,000 flights (by those aircraft) during the known period of renditions. With 119 ‘detained suspects’ acknowledged in Feinstein’s ‘torture report’, the first problem we see is, there are more planes known to have renditioned people than the ‘torture report’ admits had been renditioned. Ignoring the idea the CIA had required use of a separate plane for each rendition (+3 planes), the initial math comes out to 92 flights per prisoner. Let’s toss 1/2 the flights and we have 46 flights per prisoner. Let’s toss 1/2 the flights again, and we have 23 flights per prisoner. Ok, so now we’ve thrown out 75% of the flights by known renditions aircraft and that works out to 25% of the flights would amount to renditions of 2,750 prisoners. So, let’s cut that by half again; if 12.5% of the known flights were renditions, there would be 1,375 kidnapped and or captured persons flown by the CIA. Cut in half again, to 6.25% of flights by planes known to fly renditions, and we should have 688 involuntary ‘transportees.’ If 3% of the flights by KNOWN renditions aircraft, were transporting ONE prisoner each, depending on number of stops, we’d still have up to 344 people (versus Feinstein’s 119), relating to the CIA renditions.
The disparity of the math is too great to give any sense of credibility or reliability to the Feinstein report. And there is no present way of determining whether flights ‘disappearing’ people (dumped at sea) had been employed in the (CIA supported) Latin America junta style.
Now, it stands to reason we don’t have close to all of the planes and flights identified because many of them would have been military. As well, we know the American military has not been even close to fully probed over its own ‘black site’ torture centers, this documentary film’s existence (suppressed in American media) is a singular example:
How many people are missing? We’ll never know so long as the people perpetrating the crimes (CIA-U.S. military) are the people providing access to the information, such as the CIA had in the case of the Feinstein probe. The Feinstein ‘torture report’ can be little more than a ‘we’ll acknowledge as little as possible’ white-wash or professional psychological operation employed for purpose of damage control.
There needs to be an authentic accounting. Most or nearly all flights that weren’t to ‘black sites’ were likely military flights to, examples given, Bagram and Guantanamo. The point of using civilian jets together with filing false flight plans is to cover criminal activity such as kidnap renditions. A civilian jet points to a kidnap rendition or less often, someone handed over by a 3rd party, for instance Pakistan, as opposed to a battlefield capture. What are the structures? Aside from inferred CIA black sites in the Senate report identified from other sources (Poland, Romania et al) it is known prisoners were delivered for torture to 3d party nations Morocco, Jordan, Syria, Egypt and Libya, there was a ‘black site’ under military control at Bagram and there well may have been a ‘black site’ at Guantanamo separate from the regular detention facility, not to mention strong indicators pointing to Diego Garcia. As well, I’ve seen reports Special Forces in Afghanistan, working with CIA, had numerous small (off record) detention facilities in remote areas where prisoners had been shell-gamed to evade rules, and reports of black site jails on U.S. navy ships. Also there are indications renditions had been reduced in favor of stepped up assassinations under Obama. The subject of renditions is a longs ways from broken open in any sense of reality.
And there is a large question yet looms .. ‘what had been the fate of the women prisoners’ ?
June Notes, Week Three the 3rd soap installment
June Notes, Week Two spooks & USA infrastructure
June Notes, Week One weapons sales, media whores & more
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A Sociopaths & Democracy project
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Ronald Thomas West 