The past two weeks have offered a glimpse of the invisible universe.
April 5th, 2007, Associated Press: Ethiopia running secret prisons for CIA, holding detainees from nineteen countries.
April 8th, 2007, New York Times: Bush Administration allowed Ethiopia to purchase arms from North Korea, despite U.S. sanctions against the latter country.
April 15th, 2007, LA Times: CIA is fully funding Iraqi National Intelligence Service; one billion dollars a year. Head of INIS has a home in U.S.
April 17th, 2007, New York Times: Senate Republicans block Democratic bill forcing disclosure of location of secret prisons. The bill would also have required the Bush Administration to disclose details of the estimated 44 billion dollar intelligence budget.
Let's go through this carefully.
To remind ourselves of how this began, let's look again at the November 2, 2005 Washington Post article in which Dana Priest baptised the invisible universe.
CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons
Debate Is Growing Within Agency About Legality and Morality of Overseas System Set Up After 9/11
By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 2, 2005; A01
The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.
-- snip --
The CIA program's original scope was to hide and interrogate the two dozen or so al Qaeda leaders believed to be directly responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks, or who posed an imminent threat, or had knowledge of the larger al Qaeda network. But as the volume of leads pouring into the CTC from abroad increased, and the capacity of its paramilitary group to seize suspects grew, the CIA began apprehending more people whose intelligence value and links to terrorism were less certain, according to four current and former officials.
The original standard for consigning suspects to the invisible universe was lowered or ignored, they said. "They've got many, many more who don't reach any threshold," one intelligence official said.
In tomorrow's New York Times, April 17, 2007, we learn that the prisons are ongoing. Democrats are trying to shine a light. Republicans prefer the shadows.
Bush Allies in Congress Block Bill That Would Require Intelligence Disclosures
By MARK MAZZETTI
Published: April 17, 2007
WASHINGTON, April 16 — The Bush administration’s allies in Congress on Monday blocked a bill that would require the White House to disclose the locations of secret prisons run by the Central Intelligence Agency and to reveal the amount spent annually by American intelligence agencies.
-- snip --
Since 2002, the C.I.A. has detained and interrogated several top operatives of Al Qaeda, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, suspected of being the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks. Last year, President Bush announced that all C.I.A prisoners had been transferred to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and put in military custody, but that the C.I.A. prisons would remain in operation.
The White House has since declined to say whether the C.I.A. currently has any prisoners in custody.
In answer to that last point, the question of whether the still-running secret prisons hold anyone:
Earlier this month, we learned that a part of the invisible universe is in Ethiopia.
Ethiopia secret prisons under scrutiny
By ANTHONY MITCHELL, Associated Press Writer
Thu Apr 5, 6:38 PM ET
NAIROBI, Kenya - Ethiopia was under pressure Thursday to release details on detainees from 19 countries held at secret prisons in the country where U.S. agents have carried out interrogations in the hunt for al-Qaida in the Horn of Africa.
Canada, Eritrea and Sweden were lobbying for information about their citizens. Human rights groups say hundreds of prisoners, including women and children, have been transferred secretly and illegally to the prisons in Ethiopia. An investigation by The Associated Press found that CIA and FBI agents have been interrogating the detainees.
No doubt coincidentally, the Bush Administration has allowed Ethiopia to make secret arms purchases from North Korea, despite sanctions against the totalitarian nuclear upstart.
Sanctions aside, U.S. lets North Korea arm Ethiopia
By Michael R. Gordon and Mark Mazzetti
[April 8, 2007]
The New York Times
WASHINGTON — Three months after the United States successfully pressed the United Nations to impose strict sanctions on North Korea because of the country's nuclear test, Bush administration officials let Ethiopia complete a secret arms purchase from North Korea, in what appears to be a violation of the restrictions, according to senior U.S. officials.
In a perhaps unintentionally ironic passage later in this article (the New York Times author gives no indication of knowing about the AP story from three days earlier, concerning secret prisons):
Since the Sept. 11 attacks, as the administration has made counterterrorism its top foreign-policy concern, the White House has sometimes shown a willingness to tolerate misconduct by allies that it might otherwise criticize, like human-rights violations in Central Asia and anti-democratic crackdowns in some Arab nations.
Also earlier this month, we learned that one billion dollars a year of CIA's undislosed total budget goes to fully fund Iraq's National Intelligence Agency.
Divided Iraq has two spy agencies
Shiite officials wary of the CIA-funded, Sunni-led official intelligence service have set up a parallel organization.
By Ned Parker, Times Staff Writer
April 15, 2007
-- snip --
The U.S. had invested heavily in creating a strong spy service and trusted Shahwani, who has been a crucial asset to the Americans since the fall of Hussein's regime. Shahwani, who owns a home in the U.S., provided them access to old army officers, and formed an Iraqi special forces unit, called the "Shahwanis," that fought in the November 2004 battle to retake Fallouja from Sunni Arab insurgents.
Shahwani's service "is funded completely by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, not by the Iraqi government," a U.S. military official said on condition of anonymity. "U.S. funding for the INIS amounts to $3 billion over a three-year period that started in 2004."
Asked about the funding, CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said, "The CIA does not as a rule discuss publicly the details of its relationships with the intelligence services of other countries."
A glimpse of the invisible universe: arms sales from dictators to allies in trade for maintainence of secret prisons. CIA funded intelligence services of puppet governments. Spy chiefs of occupied lands owning homes in America.
This is the global war on terror.
(Cross-posted at NION.)