No Accountability for CIA after 9/11: Former CIA Officer

Press TV
February 15, 2013

Photo: http://silverscreensaucers.blogspot.com

Former CIA officer Philip Giraldi said that there was almost no accountability in terms of what the CIA has been doing since the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Giraldi also said he was “not surprised” when he heard that at least 20 detainees once held in the secret torture cells are currently unaccounted for.

Long after U.S. President Barack Obama ordered to close CIA’s “black-site” prisons and just after his nominee to head the agency, John Brennan claimed that the CIA is “out of the detention business,” at least 20 CIA prisoners are still missing.

“It shows that after 9/11 there was almost no accountability in terms of what the CIA was doing and they were literally as we know in the case of Italy and some other places picking people off the street and putting them in prisons in other countries. Sometimes the prisons were run by the local people and sometimes by the CIA in cooperation with local people. So I’m not surprised to hear this that there have been a number of people who had disappeared as part of this process,” Giraldi told Press TV on Thursday.

Last week the Open Society Foundations’ Justice Initiative released a report pulling together the most current information available on the fates of the prisoners. A few emerged from foreign prisons after the turmoil of the Arab Spring, according to ProPublica.

The report counts 136 prisoners who were either held in a CIA black-site or subject to so-called extraordinary rendition, in which detainees were secretly shipped to other countries for interrogation.

Many of the prisoners were tortured, either under the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” program or by other countries after their transfer.