One of the many alarming facts
that came to light with the release of the executive summary of the
Senate Torture Report in 2014 was that the Justice Department’s
Bureau of Prisons had sent a “delegation of several officers” to
Afghanistan to conduct an assessment an infamous CIA detention site
and concluded the CIA “did not mistreat the detainees.”
Senate investigators found that
the Bureau officers visited a detention site codenamed Cobalt north
of Kabul in November 2002. That site — also known as the Salt Pit —
has become infamous for the brutal torture inflicted on detainees
there, including rectal exams conducted with “excessive force.”
According to Senate investigators, the CIA’s own employees
described the facility as “a dungeon,” where detainees “cowered”
as interrogators opened the door and “looked like a dog that had
been kenneled.”
In April, the ACLU filed suit to
obtain documents related to the visit, which the Bureau of Prisons
initially claimed did not exist.
The Bureau has now turned over
several emails mentioning the visit — along with a written
declaration by a senior Bureau of Prisons lawyer explaining the
attempted cover-up. That declaration states that the officers were
tasked orally, so that there was no record of their travel, and that
the CIA forbade the two officers from producing records of or about
the visit.
In a newly released 2011 email,
one of the officers tells a supervisor that “we were not even
allowed to speak with a supervisor about what was going on.”
Full
report:
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