New York Times
December 18, 2004
WASHINGTON, Dec. 17 - The Central Intelligence Agency secretly operated a holding and interrogation center within the larger American military-run prison at Guantá
The C.I.A. operation, which was used for the questioning of terror suspects, was closed within the last year, the officials said.
It is not known why the agency opened or closed the center or what interrogation methods were used there. A spokesman for the agency declined on Friday to discuss any aspect of the operation.
The officials said the unit was mainly used by the C.I.A to interrogate detainees taken from the ranks of prisoners already held at the island's military detention center, established to hold captives from the war in Afghanistan. All of the detainees are interrogated in a system run by the military, and the setting up of a separate unit suggests that the C.I.A. wanted to have its own access to some of them.
It is unclear whether any detainees were taken there by the C.I.A. from other countries. That was not the center's purpose, officials said.
The existence of the center was disclosed on Friday by The Washington Post, which described it as related to a network of holding centers operated by the C.I.A. at undisclosed locations around the world since the American authorities began capturing operatives of Al Qaeda after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The C.I.A. has control over about a dozen to two dozen followers of Al Qaeda, who are housed in the highly secret prisons in undisclosed locations around the world, aside from the center in Cuba. Most of the C.I.A.'s detainees are senior Qaeda operatives like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 plot and Ramsi bin al-Shibh, who aided several of the hijackers.
Detainees held by the C.I.A. have been designated as high-value prisoners because of their importance and knowledge of the operations of Osama bin Laden's terror network.
So far, the Bush administration has not said how it plans to deal with these detainees. They might someday be tried before a military tribunal or could be held indefinitely. One official described the high-value detainees as a long-term problem "without an endgame."
The current and former officials said the C.I.A. center in Cuba was not regarded as a place for the imprisonment or interrogation of its significant detainees. Agency officials have long suggested that they were reluctant to be too deeply involved in Guantánamo Bay, partly because the military-run prison there was administered too openly, with more intrusive supervision and frequent visits by representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross.
A spokesman for the Red Cross in Washington said on Friday, "We are confident that we have visited all of the people detained at Guantánamo, in all of the places they are being detained."
The committee has not, however, had access to the agency's high-value detainees held at secret locations around the world.
In addition, the use of Guantánamo has raised the possibility of legal problems for the C.I.A., which has sought to keep its detenti
Most of the 550 detainees at Guantánamo were low-level Qaeda fighters captured in Afghanistan, few of whom were believed likely to yield important information sought by the C.I.A., although some officials said their interrogations by the military had produced useful intelligence.