[Welcome, Crooks and Liars readers!]

Reuters:

The Polish prosecutor’s office is investigating allegations that there was a CIA prison in Poland where al Qaeda suspects were questioned and guards might have used methods close to torture, the prime minister’s top adviser said on Friday.

I suppose this is happening now because the Bush administration has, er, disposed of the prisoners? Because the birds have all flown? One more little problem cleaned up before the perps enter the dreaded private sector?  Read more 

Gosh, it’s almost like Bush has something to hide:

Setting up what could become the first showdown between the Bush administration and the new Democratic Congress, the Justice Department has refused to turn over two secret documents, describing the CIA’s detention and interrogation policies for suspected terrorists, to the incoming chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

But, but—What about Civility? What about Bipartisanship? What about working together to solve complex problems”?*

Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), who asked for the documents in November, said Tuesday that the department’s response suggested that President Bush’s promise to work with the new Congress “may have been only political lip service.”

Could it be?!?!?  Read more 

Some timely reportage from The Times! Who knew they were still capable of it?

Detainee 200343 was among thousands of people who have been held and released by the American military in Iraq, and his account of his ordeal has provided one of the few detailed views of the Pentagon’s detention operations since the abuse scandals at Abu Ghraib. Yet in many respects his case is unusual.

The detainee was Donald Vance, a 29-year-old Navy veteran from Chicago who went to Iraq as a security contractor. He wound up as a whistle-blower, passing information to the F.B.I. about suspicious activities at the Iraqi security firm where he worked, including what he said was possible illegal weapons trading [See here].

But when American soldiers raided the company at his urging, Mr. Vance and another American who worked there were detained as suspects by the military, which was unaware that Mr. Vance was an informer, according to officials and military documents.

“Informer,” forsooth? Isn’t whistleblower the right word?

So now, we get a glimpse inside the gulag (Camp Cropper, and in the same “high value” facility where Saddam was held.) Here’s how the camps and the tribunals look from the inside:  Read more 

Once more let’s do some very simple arithmetic:

1. We know that we’re holding thousands of prisoners (estimates range from 7,000 to 35,000).
2. Gitmo holds only 500.
3. So, where are the missing thousands? The only alternatives I can think of:
1. They’ve been released
2. They’re still in jail
   
3. They’ve been disappeared.

Barring divine intervention, the bodies of the missing thousands occupy time and space in this world. Where are they?

Which door would you choose? (a), released? (b), still in jail? Or (c), disappeared?

Today, we have two stories on the Bush gulag, one from WaPo, and the other from AP.

Notably, neither comes close to answering the question:

Where are the missing thousands?

In fact, both stories fail to answer the question, both by orders of magnitude.  Read more 

Let's do some arithmetic on how many prisoners Bush is holding in his gulags.

1. We know that there are thousands of prisoners (estimates range from 7,000 to 35,000).
2. Gitmo holds only 500.
3. So, where are the missing thousands? The only alternatives I can think of:
1. They've been released
2. They're still in jail
   
3. They've been disappeared.

Barring divine intervention, the bodies of the missing thousands occupy time and space in this world. Where are they?

Which door would you choose? (a), released? (b), still in jail? Or (c), disappeared?  Read more 

Over the past year, we’ve been tracking the story of Bush’s gulags, and asking ourselves how many prisoners He was keeping there. Our answer (given in early 2005 on the basis of airplane tail numbers, long before WaPo “broke” the story) was 8,500. Later in 2005, the Times estimated 14,000. And recently, CD reported (via Sidney Blumenthal) Colonel Wilkerson’s estimate of 35,000.

But we really didn’t question too closely what was happening inside the the gulags—yet another instance of not being cynical enough, no matter how hard we try. Now, in the UK’s New Statesman, Stephen Grey, author of Ghost Plane: the inside story of the CIA’s secret rendition programme, uses similar methodology and does some arithmetic himself:

More than 7,000 prisoners have been captured in America’s war on terror. [Agreeing with our original estimate, interestingly.] Just 700 ended up in Guantanamo Bay. Between extraordinary rendition to foreign jails and disappearance into the CIA’s “black sites”, what happened to the rest?  Read more 

Remember back in 2005 when we published this photo of the airplanes being used to transport prisoners to Bush’s European gulags?

We pointed out then that this was no executive jet for transporting onesies and twosies—this was a transport plane, capable of transporting hundreds.

And we asked then, “How many prisoners are in Bush’s European gulag?”

It only took a year, but now we have something close to an answer. AP:

In the few short years since the first shackled Afghan shuffled off to Guantanamo, the U.S. military has created a global network of overseas prisons, its islands of high security keeping 14,000 detainees beyond the reach of established law.

If the statistics from Abu Ghraib, Gitmo itself, and the very few domestic cases Bush has managed to bring to trial are any indication, the great majorituy of the prisoners are innocent of any crime except, perhaps, Breathing While Muslim.

Now, Bush claims he’s closed down the European gulags:  Read more