Every secret CIA prison, mapped

– I wanna show you this
map of the 54 countries that participated in a secret CIA program to abduct people from all around the world and hide them so that they could secretly
interrogate them using violence, both physical and psychological. This story begins six days after 9/11 when George
W. Bush signs a memo giving the CIA free
reign to secretly capture and detain suspected terrorists. But the question became what to do with these suspects
once they were captured. Putting them in prison in
the US would be problematic because it would mean
that the US would have to follow the rules of war,
which entails declaring them as prisoners of war and
giving them access to a lawyer and a trial, and crucially,
no torture allowed. Those are the rules that most
of the world has agreed upon. And the CIA didn’t want
to play by these rules. The country was raging with anger and a thirst for revenge
against those who did this. For the CIA, the rules
would just slow them down in their hunt for the
intelligence they needed to not only find the terrorists,
but to stop future attacks. So the CIA looked abroad and began constructing a global
network of secret prisons that would allow them to abduct and detain people outside
of the view of the public, the press, and the law. (offbeat music) The first target was a Palestinian citizen named Abu Zubaydah. He was hiding in Pakistan, and the CIA believed that he was a top Al-Qaeda leader. In March 2002, CIA and FBI forces capture
him in a raid in Pakistan. Zubaydah was shot in this raid,
and almost didn’t survive, so the CIA flew in a doctor
from a top US hospital to treat his wounds. They needed to keep him alive so that they could extract
intelligence from him, vital knowledge that the CIA
wanted, but where to take him? The CIA had decided on Thailand where they had worked out a
deal with the Thai government where the CIA could use
this old US military base for whatever they were up to here. This facility became known
as Detention Site Green, and the plan was to get
Zubaydah to talk using quote, “Novel interrogation methods,” meaning they were
planning on using torture. But there was yet
another problem: the law. Capturing people in someone else’s country and then sending them to a
third country without any plan to give them a trial or apply local laws, and then using torture,
is all illegal according to both international and American laws. So one key step in this effort was to ask the government
lawyers back in Washington to create a legal justification for what they were about to do. And the lawyers did exactly
what they were told. They drafted up a series
of memos that argued that Al-Qaeda members
were not typical soldiers. Instead, they would be considered quote, “Unlawful enemy combatants.” So according to the legal
theory in this memo, which was meant to remain secret, the rules don’t apply here. So the CIA got their legal justification, but even still, the CIA
agents in Thailand needed to make sure that none
of this would get out. They send this cable back
to Washington, DC, asking for quote, “Assurance that Abu Zubaydah would remain in isolation and incommunicado for the
remainder of his life.” And here we see in a cable from Washington that they gave these
agents that assurance. Before I go on, let me note that I will not be going into detail about the interrogation
techniques used by the CIA. I think that is well covered elsewhere. So instead, I will be using sterile words like enhanced interrogation, partly because I’m publishing
this to a lot of people and I wanna make sure that
this video remains accessible to a large audience,
including younger viewers. And partly to spare all
of you of these details. I believe that the story
can be well understood without those details. If you do want more information on this, go to the sources in my description where all of this is documented. Okay, so the CIA has
their first secret prison, and it’s in Thailand. And Abu Zubaydah secretly
remains there for nine months, during which the CIA uses
its expanded authority to torture this man to get information that they think will help
them catch more terrorists. But here comes another
problem for the CIA. The Thai government officials are starting to learn more about the secret program, and are becoming uncomfortable with the CIA doing this in their country. Not to mention the media
starts poking around and learning more details
about what the CIA is up to. So much so that Vice President
Dick Cheney himself tries to convince an American news outlet not to publish any of the details. They partly comply, but the
whole thing spooks the CIA. They realize that they
need to leave Thailand. (offbeat music) This is the CIA moving
its secret prisoners from Thailand to another location, but they would have to cover their tracks. And that’s how we get this document. We’re looking at a receipt for
the booking of a private jet through a contractor working with the CIA. We see that they booked a Gulfstream 4 to go from DC to Thailand. This is where they loaded up Abu Zubaydah and a few other secret prisoners. They then fly to the United Arab Emirates. And here’s where things get interesting, because from there, the
official flight records say that this plane went to
Austria and then London, but it actually didn’t. This is a dummy flight
record that the CIA planted, so that we would never know
what they actually did. But because of this receipt,
we know that they actually flew to a small airport in rural Poland. The CIA then drives their
prisoners 20 minutes from this little airport to a
military prison in the woods. The CIA had paid the Polish
Intelligence Agency $15 million of cash delivered in cardboard
boxes, all in exchange for the use of this facility. Their second secret
terrorist torture prison or what we’re now going
to call Black Site. This one was called Detention Site Blue. This is where they would continue
their interrogation work, continuing to abduct suspected terrorists and quietly bringing them here, often scrambling their flight paths and faking their flight records so that this story could never be told, and continuing to use violent torture to interrogate their prisoners. But again, this couldn’t last too long. After a year, they were
on the move again, worried that the world was catching on. So in September, 2003, and here comes another
series of flight paths from Washington, DC bouncing
around a few countries before ending up in Poland. Where they loaded up their
secret prisoners once again, and took off headed to Romania, where the CIA had negotiated
access to the basement of a government building
in September, 2003, their next black site, and then to Morocco where
the CIA was negotiating with the government
for another black site. They ended up paying $20
million to build a prison that was code named Bombay, but in the end, they never used it. Instead, using Morocco’s local prisons to house their prisoners for a short time. And then over to Cuba to the US Naval base at Guantanamo Bay, where they opened two black
sites: detention site Maroon and Indigo. These sites were kept separate
from the military prison at Guantanamo Bay and honestly
not much is known about them. In fact, they’re only mentioned one time and in a footnote in this Senate report that eventually came out. Look at this map. This is one way to
visualize the global network that the CIA created. These are the known flight
paths that the CIA took to transfer prisoners
around their black sites. By 2004, they had captured
about 100 prisoners, consistently moving them
around, hoping to stay out of the light, out of the scrutiny
of the public, the press, and oftentimes the home
governments of these places where they were moving their prisoners. And by the way, all of this
data, these flight paths, this information, we know about
because of an investigation and a Senate report that later came out, and some amazing investigative journalism by the Rendition Project, who
boiled a lot of this down, pieced together a lot of the information, and allowed us to see
this in an accessible way. You can find so much more
detail at The Rendition Project website if you wanna check that out. Let’s look at this network again. The CIA using 54 countries to traffic their secret flights through to cover their tracks from
the law and the press. This reportedly includes a
little known British territory in the Indian Ocean, Diego Garcia. And in the end, the CIA had a total of nine secret prisons
at least that we know of. The network included another
eastern European country, a prison in Lithuania, where
the CIA used a shell company to purchase this nondescript barn that had been an elite horse riding club. It was called Detention Site Violet. They ran four of these secret
prisons in Afghanistan, including one that was
nicknamed dark prison because prisoners were held
in metal shipping containers in complete darkness
and isolation, sometimes with loud music playing to keep them awake among other horrific treatment. The CIA would also work
with countries like Jordan and Egypt where their intelligence officers would use torture. But the CIA agent would be right there guiding the whole thing. And there’s evidence that the CIA also turned
ships into black sites, floating prisons where
they could interrogate their prisoners on international water. Hey, before we go on, I wanna
explain a little bit more about the methodology of how
we report on stories like this. This process takes weeks or months, sometimes it’s a lot of research, a lot of reporting. And a tool we’ve been using
a lot lately is Ground News, who is the sponsor of today’s video. Ground News is a website and an app that aggregates
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QR code that’s on screen. Boy, isn’t that helpful? Thank you Ground News for existing at a time of disinformation and global confusion, and thanks for sponsoring today’s video. With that, let’s get back to
the story of CIA black sites. (offbeat music) All in all, the CIA ended up
interrogating 119 prisoners using this network of black sites. And of the 119, they ended
up releasing 94 of them. Some were sent to foreign
custody, some were just released, and some have a status
that is still unknown, and some turned out to
be totally innocent. Like Maher Arar, who was a Canadian Syrian dual citizen who was taken by the CIA
in an airport in New York on his way back home to Canada. Then he was transferred to
Syria and tortured for a year before the CIA realized
that he was the wrong guy. The Canadian government
ended up paying him $10 million for his troubles. One guy named Gul Rahman died of hypothermia at a
black site in Afghanistan while he was chained
naked to a concrete floor. No CIA officers were punished. One German citizen was held and interrogated in a hotel
room in Macedonia for 23 days before being flown to Afghanistan and imprisoned for four months, before the CIA realized that once again, he was the wrong guy. He was released with a meager
apology and a small payment. But then there’s prisoners
like Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who most people consider the
mastermind of 9/11, the guy who planned it, or Abd Al-Nashiri, who’s charged with planning the bombing of an American Navy ship just before 9/11, the USS Cole. Or this guy, Hanbali, who’s
known as the Osama bin Laden of Southeast Asia. Like, these are guys who need to face justice. They’re most likely responsible
for the gruesome murder of thousands of innocent people. And in a post 9/11 America,
there was so much anger and need for revenge. The idea was that torture
was totally justified, especially if it stopped another attack. But what’s really happening
here with this massive network of secret prisons and this enhanced interrogation is that CIA is falling
into Al-Qaeda’s trap. And internally you start to see how people in the CIA know that this
is actually a bad idea. Many stopped wanting to participate in the
enhanced interrogation. Some were brought to
tears while witnessing it. One memo shows how the CIA started sending their worst people to do these interrogations
leading to mediocre or useless intelligence. And while all of this
was secretly happening, president Bush was publicly saying, – I wanna be absolutely clear
with our people and the world. The United States does not torture. It’s against our laws and
it’s against our values. I have not authorized it
and I will not authorize it. – But eventually the world would catch on. The Washington Post was one of the first to report on this in detail. And then a former CIA chief of counter-terrorism in Pakistan,
the one who directed a lot of the raids to capture these
prisoners, went public telling a journalist that the CIA had
been waterboarding prisoners, a torturous technique
that induces the sensation of drowning over and over. – Feet at a slight incline. There’s some cellophane or
material over your mouth and then they pour water
on this cellophane. You can’t breathe and it feels like the water’s going down your throat. – But you might be thinking that if we’re talking about terrorists, people who have committed heinous atrocities
against innocent people, that the normal rules and values that we abide
by don’t apply here, especially if these techniques
could potentially give us information that would thwart
the next horrific attack and save thousands of lives. In that case, isn’t torture justified? Well, it turns out that in
addition to being a violation of our own values, torture
doesn’t actually work. There’s been extensive
research on this that finds that despite what the movies
say, torture doesn’t work. It creates stress, making it harder for the person being
interrogated to remember facts, and often pushes them
to make up information to get the torture to stop. There are many cases of this happening within the CIA Black Site program. Like when the mastermind of 9/11 was being waterboarded
hundreds of times, he finally gave the names of two men who the CIA spent a bunch of
time going to capture only to learn that they had nothing to do with Al-Qaeda or terrorism. It’s just not as straightforward
as you would imagine. But the CIA disagrees, they said that they got useful intelligence on this. So the Senate, when they were
investigating this program, went case by case to
actually evaluate whether or not torture led to useful intelligence, ones that thwarted the terrorists’ plans. And what they found was
that there was quote, “No relationship between
the information from torture and thwarting these plots,” and stopping the next terror attack. They found that the CIA
did get useful intelligence from these prisoners,
but not from torture. And that they often tried to retroactively justify
the torture by saying that useful intelligence
did come outta the program. But most of the time, that information was
gained from other sources, or it was information that
the government already had. And even worse, they found that the CIA never
actually did an evaluation on how useful these techniques were. They just kind of did
them, evading any kind of accountability and oversight that would
make this not only ethical and legal, but also effective in getting the intelligence they were after. Overall, the conclusion of
this report is that, quote, the CIA’s use of its enhanced
interrogation techniques was not an effective means
of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees. (offbeat music) So they shut the program down. And of the 119 men who went
through these black sites, 21 of them remain in the custody of the United States government, at the military base in Cuba called Guantanamo Bay. But of all of these people, only three of them have faced any version of a trial of justice where evidence is presented and a verdict is given. And this gets to what to
me is the worst outcome of this torture program, which is that it turned
into a massive success for the terrorists who attacked Washington, DC
and New York on that day. Al-Qaeda successfully
provoked the United States and the CIA to lash out in revenge, to violate their own norms and values, the ones that
they preach to the rest of the world, to lay bare the hypocrisy of the United States, which
is something that a lot of the world already has a problem with. The view that the US is
a hypocritical empire, eager to preach about human
rights and rule of law, but quick to violate those very values when they become inconvenient. And in the process, not
only did the CIA fail to get any useful
intelligence out of this, but they also turn these men
into victims, like the guy who probably planned the USS Cole bombing that killed dozens of US Sailors. That guy should face justice. He should sit in a courtroom and have his crimes proved to the public, and he should be punished at a measure that is proportional to his crime. However, due to the CIA’s use of brutal and illegal torture, his case
has been totally tainted. The evidence obtained in his interrogation is now inadmissible in court. He’s even been granted victim
status in the European Court of Human rights for the
torture he endured in Poland, forcing Poland to pay him 100,000 Euros. And so now the families of those who died in that horrific bombing have no closure. The person who did this will
never be brought to justice. And this goes for so many
of the men who plotted and executed the 9/11 attacks. If you go to their Wikipedia page, you’re gonna see a lot about
what the CIA did to them, the Black Site program
that they were a part of. The reason why I call it a trap is because the CIA in doing what they did, helped turn these men into
symbols of American hypocrisy, whereas they should be
seen as symbols of terror. When we stoop to the level of revenge, the most primitive form of
justice, we go backwards. We erode the foundations of
our system, what we’ve built, and then of course our government and our press has to spend years or decades picking up the
pieces, shining a light on all of it, making sure we stand accountable, and that hopefully we
learn from our mistakes.