Carl Takei: ACLU Sues for Federal Bureau of Prisons Documents on Approval of CIA Torture Site

Award-winning Investigative Journalist Robert Parry (1949-2018)

Award-winning investigative journalist and founder/editor of ConsortiumNews.com, Robert Parry has passed away. His ground-breaking work uncovering Reagan-era dirty wars in Central America and many other illegal and immoral policies conducted by successive administrations and U.S. intelligence agencies, stands as an inspiration to all in journalists working in the public interest.

Robert had been a regular guest on our Between The Lines and Counterpoint radio shows -- and many other progressive outlets across the U.S. over four decades.

His penetrating analysis of U.S. foreign policy and international conflicts will be sorely missed, and not easily replaced. His son Nat Parry writes a tribute to his father: Robert Parry’s Legacy and the Future of Consortiumnews.

Thank you for donating

If you've made a donation and wish to receive thank you gifts for your donation, be sure to send us your mailing address via our Contact form.

See our thank you gifts for your donation.

The Resistance Starts Now!

Between The Lines' coverage and resource compilation of the Resistance Movement

"The man who predicted Trump presidential win now says Trump impeachment could happen," AM Joy with Joy Reid, MSNBC, Jan. 21, 2018
"Sketchy Kazakh money finds its way into Trump dealings," The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC, Jan. 15, 2018
"Red flags seen in many Trump real estate deals," The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC, Jan. 15, 2018
"Secret Money: How Trump Made Millions Selling Condos To Unknown Buyers," BuzzFeed, Jan. 12, 2018
"The Scandals of Donald Trump: Presidential Edition," The Atlantic, May 15, 2017
"Here's what we know so far about Team Trump's ties to Russian interests," Washington Post's ongoing compilation
"What Comey Was Investigating, Explained," The Moscow Project, Center for American Progress

"Donald Trump's Financial Ties to Russian Oligarchs and Mobsters Detailed In Explosive New Documentary from the Netherlands," Dutch TV documentary, Alternet.org, May 12, 2017
Ongoing compilation of Trump's creeping authoritarianism," MotherJones.com
Full resource list ...

SPECIAL REPORT: "The Resistance - Women's March 2018 - Hartford, Connecticut" Jan. 20, 2018

Selected speeches from the Women's March in Hartford, Connecticut 2018, recorded and produced by Scott Harris

SPECIAL REPORT: "No Fracking Waste in CT!" Jan. 14, 2018

Jen Siskind Jennifer Siskind, local coordinator for Food and Water Watch, describes the campaign to stop fracking waste in Connecticut, which so far has led to fracking waste bans in 34 towns around the state. Interviewed by Richard Hill on Mic Check, WPKN Radio, Bridgeport, CT

SPECIAL REPORT: "Resistance Round Table: The Unraveling Continues..." Jan. 13, 2018

Lindsay Kanaly The panel discusses Trump's long history of racism and the Republican voter suppression juggernaut confronting Democrats leading up to the 2018 elections. Special guest: Lindsay Kanaly, a lead organizer of the Women's Marches planned for Jan. 20, 2018. Panel: Scott Harris, Ruthanne Baumgartner and Richard Hill on Resistance Roundtable, WPKN Radio, Bridgeport, CT.

SPECIAL REPORT: "Capitalism to the ash heap?" Richard Wolff, Jan. 2, 2018

Richard Wolff, Economics professor Richard Wolff declares U.S. capitalism to be beyond repair and suggests the need for a radical alternative. Interviewed by Richard Hill

SPECIAL REPORT: Maryn McKenna, author of "Big Chicken", Dec. 7, 2017

Maryn McKenna, investigative journalist and author of Big Chicken, talks about the widespread use and dangers of antibiotics in commercial poultry, beef and fruit production. Interview by Bill Duesing, Richard Hill and Guy Beardsly on WPKN's Organic Farm Stand.

SPECIAL REPORT: Nina Turner's address, Working Families Party Awards Banquet, Dec. 14, 2017

Nina Turner, president of Our Revolution, talks about the fight ahead for progressives as she receives the Working Families Organization Award for Exceptional Leadership Towards Advancing Progress. The event was held in Meriden, CT. Produced by Richard Hill.

SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Dec. 12, 2017

Working Families Party of CT talks strategy and issues for 2018.
Lindsay Farrell, executive director of the Working Families Party of Connecticut, discusses the state's electoral landscape and lays out the issues and strategies that could lead to progressive victories in 2018. Interviewed by Richard Hill.

SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Dec. 9, 2017

Disturbing developments in the Trump/Republican Agenda
Focus on the tax bill, destruction of our public lands, North Korea and Trump's private CIA. Panel: Scott Harris, Ruthanne Baumgartner and Richard Hill. Special guest: Jo Macallero of Rise and Resist.

SPECIAL REPORT: On Tyranny - one year later, Nov. 28, 2017

Professor Timothy Snyder, author of the highly acclaimed resistance manual On Tyranny, discusses his book and offers a fresh assessment of the state of our beleaguered republic. Timothy Snyder, history professor at Yale, is introduced by Stanley Heller, administrator of Promoting Enduring Peace, a Connecticut-based organization that sponsored this event at the United Church Parish House in New Haven on Nov. 28. A brief interview with Snyder conducted by WPKN radio producer, Richard Hill, follows his talk.

SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Nov. 12, 2017

Lynne Ide, director of program and policy with the Universal Health Care Foundation of Connecticut, talks about the current state of health care coverage in Connecticut. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Nov. 11, 2017

Focus on the Republican tax plan, the just-released autopsy on the Democratic Party, and Internet censorship by Google, Facebook and Youtube. Including an interview with Hilary Grant, a lead organizer with Action Together Connecticut, who discusses the local results of the recent election, with hosts Richard Hill, Scott Harris and Ruth Baumgartner WPKN producers

SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017

Two leaders from Redneck Revolt, an anti-racist, anti-capitalist movement, talk about their work organizing with white working class people in Suffolk County, New York. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017

Bruce Gagnon, coordinator for the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, describes the extent of -- and motives underlying -- the vast US network of military bases around the globe. Interviewed by Richard Hill, WPKN radio producer

SPECIAL REPORT: Resisting U.S. JeJu Island military base in South Korea, Oct. 24, 2017

Joyakol, South Korean peace activist and singer, discusses the crisis on the Korean peninsula and focuses on the resistance to the U.S. huge military base being constructed on Jeju Island. The event was sponsored by the Greater New Haven Peace Council and this audio was recorded by Richard Hill, WPKN producer.
Joyakol discusses Americans' biggest misconceptions about the conflict between North and South Korea and the U.S., Interview by Richard Hill, WPKN producer.

SPECIAL REPORT: John Allen, Out in New Haven

John Allen, founding director of the New Haven Pride Center, Connecticut, talks about his new LGBTQ television show, Out in New Haven, which presents a range of political and cultural issues to the community. Interviewed by Richard Hill on WPKN's Rainy Day Tuesday, Jan. 2, 2018.

2017 Gandhi Peace Awards

Promoting Enduring Peace presented its Gandhi Peace Award jointly to renowned consumer advocate Ralph Nader and BDS founder Omar Barghouti on April 23, 2017.

Subscribe to our Weekly Summary & receive our FREE Resist Trump window cling

(Car window cling)

Email us with your mailing address at contact@btlonline.org to receive our "Resist Trump/Resist Hate" car window cling!

THANK YOU TO EVERYONE...

who helped make our 25th anniversary with Jeremy Scahill a success!

For those who missed the event, or were there and really wanted to fully absorb its import, here it is in video

Jeremy Scahill keynote speech, part 1 from PROUDEYEMEDIA on Vimeo.

Jeremy Scahill keynote speech, part 2 from PROUDEYEMEDIA on Vimeo.

Between The Lines on Stitcher

Between The Lines Presentation at the Left Forum 2016

"How Do We Build A Mass Movement to Reverse Runaway Inequality?" with Les Leopold, author of "Runaway Inequality: An Activist's Guide to Economic Justice,"May 22, 2016, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York, 860 11th Ave. (Between 58th and 59th), New York City. Between The Lines' Scott Harris and Richard Hill moderated this workshop. Listen to the audio/slideshows and more from this workshop.

Listen to audio of the plenary sessions from the weekend.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker "Dirty Wars"

Listen to the full interview (30:33) with Jeremy Scahill, an award-winning investigative journalist with the Nation Magazine, correspondent for Democracy Now! and author of the bestselling book, "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army," about America's outsourcing of its military. In an exclusive interview with Counterpoint's Scott Harris on Sept. 16, 2013, Scahill talks about his latest book, "Dirty Wars, The World is a Battlefield," also made into a documentary film under the same title, and was nominated Dec. 5, 2013 for an Academy Award in the Best Documentary Feature category.

Listen to Scott Harris Live on WPKN Radio

Between The Lines' Executive Producer Scott Harris hosts a live, weekly talk show, Counterpoint, from which some of Between The Lines' interviews are excerpted. Listen every Monday evening from 8 to 10 p.m. EDT at www.WPKN.org (Follows the 5-7 minute White Rose Calendar.)

Counterpoint in its entirety is archived after midnight ET Monday nights, and is available for at least a year following broadcast in WPKN Radio's Archives.

You can also listen to full unedited interview segments from Counterpoint, which are generally available some time the day following broadcast.

Subscribe to Counterpoint bulletins via our subscriptions page.

BTL Blog

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

Special Programming

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

Progressive Resources

A compilation of activist and news sites with a progressive point of view

Share this content:

|

Subscribe to BTL

Podcasts: direct or via iTunes

Subscribe to Program Summaries, Interview Transcripts or Counterpoint via email or RSS feed

If you have other questions regarding subscriptions, feeds or podcasts/mp3s go to our Audio Help page.

Between The Lines Blog

Stay connected to BTL

Learn how to support our efforts!

Tweets by @BTLRadioNews

ACLU Sues for Bureau of Prisons Documents on Approval of CIA Torture Site

Posted April 20, 2016

Interview with Carl Takei, staff attorney with the ACLU, conducted by Scott Harris

Since the public first learned about the Bush administration's approval of torture techniques used by the CIA and military personnel against suspected terrorists held by the U.S. at Guantanamo Bay Naval base in Cuba and other covert sites around the world, there have been a number of unsuccessful attempts to hold government officials accountable for their violation of international and U.S. law.

On April 14, the ACLU filed a lawsuit against the Federal Bureau of Prisons for their refusal to turn over requested documents under the Freedom of Information Act. The documents sought by the civil liberties group relates to a 2002 visit by Bureau of Prisons officials to a CIA secret detention site in Afghanistan, code-named "Cobalt," also known as the "Salt Pit," where the bureau's staff reportedly gave a positive assessment of the conditions there, and offered training to the site's administrators. This, despite documented evidence in the Senate Intelligence Committee's torture report that detainees held at this site were subjected to torture, solitary confinement and sensory deprivation conditions, which led to at least one known death of a prisoner held there.

Between The Lines' Scott Harris spoke with Carl Takei, staff attorney with the ACLU's National Prison Project who talks about why his group launched the lawsuit against the U.S. Bureau of Prisons – and the larger issue of U.S. personnel and their superiors not being held accountable for their violation of international treaties and U.S. laws that prohibit the torture of prisoners.

CARL TAKEI: So the first revelations about the Federal Bureau of Prisons being involved in the CIA torture sites came out when the executive summary of the Senate Torture Report was released in December 2014. We went through and realized, "Wait a minute. What is the Federal Bureau of Prisons doing at a CIA torture site?" This is an agency that is responsible for running the federal prison system. They provide technical assistance to state prison officials around the country and it was surprising to see them involved in visiting these black sites run by the CIA.

What was especially surprising, though, was that the report indicated that they went to a particular torture site in Afghanistan that's code-named "Cobalt" in the report. Many people know it as "The Salt Pit." And they looked at the conditions where people locked up indefinitely in solitary confinement in total darkness, shackled wall with only a bucket to use as a toilet and said, "We think this is not inhumane," and gave it a thumbs up, and allowed the CIA to continue doing what it was doing.

And that's profoundly disturbing for a number of reasons. So we filed a Freedom of Information Act request for all of the documents regarding the bureau's visit to the CIA black site and all of the advice to the CIA afterwards afterwards, and they stonewalled us. They said, "We have no responsive documents." We did an administrative appeal and they responded the same way, and that's why we're now filing this lawsuit.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Carl, from the Senate Torture Report, what else do we know about this particular detention center that the CIA was running? I know that the torture report cited some instances where detainees lost their lives, who were severely injured in the abuse of prisoners there by U.S. personnel. What do we know about this particular site, as you said, code-named Cobalt or The Salt Pit?

CARL TAKEI: Actually, on the very day that the Bureau of Prisons sent its inspection team to The Salt Pit, a detainee named Gul Rahman died. One of the interrogators had ordered he be stripped of all of his clothing, except for a sweatshirt. So he was mostly naked on the floor of his cell, chained to the wall in darkness in temperatures cold enough that overnight he died of suspected hypothermia. If you can just imagine the setting. Some CIA officials called this place a dungeon. Another CIA official said that the baseline conditions of confinement were so extreme that itself operated as an "enhanced interrogation technique."

BETWEEN THE LINES: Carl maybe you can discuss for us the larger issues of accountability here for torture undertaken by U.S. personnel in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks under the Bush administration. We know that higher-ups in the White House approved these torture techniques. They called it by a euphemism, "enhanced interrogation" I think was the term they used. How does this case figure in, from your point of view, with the utter lack of accountability for military and political leaders during those years when torture was officially sanctioned by the White House?

CARL TAKEI: Well, it's part of a larger pattern of impunity for the officials who approved torture by the CIA. But I think another aspect of this is it shows how the culture of torture crossed over back and forth between the domestic prison system and all of these torture sites abroad. One of the things that many people don't realize is that, for example, Charles Graner Jr., who was the ringleader of the Abu Ghraib in Iraq, worked as a prison guard in Pennsylvania before he was in the Army Reserves. And the prison where he worked was filled with accusations that guards there engaged in brutal abuse, beating prisoners, spitting in their food, using racial epithets, and in one case, beating a prisoner and using his blood to write the words, KKK. That is the environment that Graner came out of and then brought to Iraq.

So, all of this is connected. The toleration of abuse and torture in domestic prisons helps normalize it in all of the torture that the CIA engaged in abroad. The accountability is lacking and it's something that remains important to address now. In the future, at some point, we need to reckon with this history of torture because otherwise there is no way to stop it in the future.

Learn more about the ACLU's National Prison Project at aclu.org/aclu-national-prison-project.