When does incompetence become depravity?
For the CIA, I guess, never:
The Senate Democratic staff members who wrote the 6,000-page report counted 119 prisoners who had been in C.I.A. custody. Of those, the report found that 26 were either described in the agency’s own documents as mistakenly detained, or released and given money, evidence of the same thing.
The C.I.A. told the Senate in its formal response that the real number of wrongful detentions was “far fewer” than 26 but did not offer a number. Human rights advocates who have tracked the C.I.A. program believe that considerably more than 26 were wrongfully detained.
With such competing narratives (and taking into account the CIA's track record on honesty) we'll just split the difference and call it
1 in 4. You have to wonder which other of Dick Cheney's investments boast a twenty-five percent failure rate.
In just one example of the CIA's indiscriminate kidnapping and torture of innocent people, this morning's New York Times highlights the story of Mohamed Bashmilah (Republicans can stop stop reading right now, I know...with a name like that he must be guilty, right?) who was initially (and mistakenly) arrested by our staunch allies in the War on Terror, the Jordanians. Bashmilah, who worked in the clothing business, committed the crime of attempting to arrange heart surgery for his mother at a hospital in Jordan. He had traveled from his home in Indonesia to Jordan to meet his wife and assist his mother.
But Bashmilah had lost his original passport back home, so he got a new one before he left. It didn't have many stamps, which is generally true of all new passports. This was something novel to the Jordanians, apparently. Then Bashmilah did something pretty crazy--he either volunteered or admitted that (like hundreds of thousands of other people) he had once visited Afghanistan. What happened to him during the next four days is straight out of Franz Kafka's worst nightmares:
Bashmilah’s apparent innocence was clearly lost on officials with Jordan’s General Intelligence Department. After his arrest, the Jordanians brutally beat him, peppering him with questions about al-Qaida. He was forced to jog around in a yard until he collapsed. Officers hung him upside down with a leather strap and his hands tied. They beat the soles of his feet and his sides. They threatened to electrocute him with wires. They told him they would rape his wife and mother.
It was too much. Bashmilah signed a confession multiple pages long, but he was disoriented and afraid even to read it. “I felt sure it included things I did not say,” he wrote in his declaration to the court delivered Friday. “I was willing to sign a hundred sheets so long as they would end the interrogation.”
After our Jordanian allies had their fun with him, on October 26, 2003 they delivered Bashmilah up to a “tall, heavy-set, balding white man wearing civilian clothes and dark sunglasses with small round lenses.” The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency would finish the job on this innocent man, holding Bashmilah for
another 19 months in secret "black sites", shackling him, stripping him naked, putting him in cuffs and hoods, and kept in a solitary, tomb-like cell. He had no idea where he was or whether he would ever be released. They stopped interrogating him in 2004, after they finally realized he was not an "Al Qaeda operative." In the course of his imprisonment by Americans Bashmilah attempted suicide three times, once by pills, once by slashing his wrists, and once by attempting to hang himself.
The CIA held Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah in several different cells when he was incarcerated in its network of secret prisons known as “black sites.” But the small cells were all pretty similar, maybe 7 feet wide and 10 feet long. He was sometimes naked, and sometimes handcuffed for weeks at a time. In one cell his ankle was chained to a bolt in the floor. There was a small toilet. In another cell there was just a bucket. Video cameras recorded his every move. The lights always stayed on — there was no day or night. A speaker blasted him with continuous white noise, or rap music, 24 hours a day.
The guards wore black masks and black clothes. They would not utter a word as they extracted Bashmilah from his cell for interrogation — one of his few interactions with other human beings during his entire 19 months of imprisonment. Nobody told him where he was, or if he would ever be freed.
Bashmilah wasn't "freed." After the Americans brutalized him he was he was transferred at the U.S. request to Yemen, where he was "convicted" on a trumped up charge of forgery (the allegedly "forged" document was never produced). He was sentenced to nine additional months but released based on "time served." In the meantime, Bashmilah learned that his father had died during his imprisonment, never knowing whether his son was alive or what was being done to him.
As the Times article shows, Bashmilah's case is in no way unique. The incompetent and overzealous CIA would imprison the wrong people with the same last name, or, more often, based on "friendly" but notoriously unreliable intelligence agencies. One unfortunate man “was subjected to ice water baths and 66 hours of standing sleep deprivation before being released because the C.I.A. discovered he was not the person he was believed to be.” And there were many more:
Among the others mistakenly held for periods of months or years, according to the report, were an “intellectually challenged” man held by the C.I.A. solely to pressure a family member to provide information; two people who were former C.I.A. informants; and two brothers who were falsely linked to Al Qaeda by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the 9/11 planner, who “fabricated” the information after being waterboarded 183 times.
In addition, the report says, “C.I.A. records provide insufficient information to justify the detention of many other detainees.”
Bashmilah has received no apology from the U.S., let alone any compensation for his ordeal. The U.S. legal system has proved to be as disgraceful as the CIA in this horrific tale:
No apology was forthcoming from the C.I.A., which declined to comment on specific cases. A lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of Mr. Bashmilah and others flown to prisons on C.I.A. aircraft against an agency contractor, Jeppesen Dataplan Inc., was dismissed on the grounds that it might expose state secrets.