Uncovered: the torture chamber that proves the CIA went nuts

INVESTIGATIVE journalists have finally unearthed something in Bucharest they have long suspected to be there - a secret CIA prison in the basement of a government building. The news was broken jointly by the Associated Press and German public television, ARD Panorama, yersterday.

Unlike similar 'Black' locations in remote birch forests in eastern Europe, this prison was in a busy residential neighbourhood a short tram ride from the centre of the Romanian capital.  

The investigation suggests that from 2003 - 2006 the facility (dungeon would be more accurate) was used to detain and interrogate the CIA's most valuable detainees before shipping them out to Guantanamo Bay, including Khaled Sheikh Mohammed – al-Qaeda's top operational planner until his capture in Pakistan in 2003.
 
The basement consisted of six prefabricated cells each with a clock and an arrow pointing to Mecca so that the inmates could pray five times a day kneeling in the right direction. Halal food was brought in from the huge US base outside Frankfurt. The CIA clearly takes 'diversity' seriously.

According to US officials, interviewed anonymously, during their first month in detention the detainees were deprived of sleep, doused with water, forced to stand in painful positions and 'slapped'. There is a convenient and descriptive shorthand for this kind of treatment which readers in 'civilised' countries might find useful – torture.  
 
One weird detail about the prison chills the blood more than anything else. The six cells were mounted on springs so they were always swaying a little.  Apparently, it's a good way of keeping people disorientated for long periods of time. God knows where the CIA recruits the sort of people who can dream up this kind of stuff – from the ranks of a heavily armed backwoods militia maybe or perhaps even the Ku Klux Klan.
 
If I were writing a play rather than an article I would at this point include a note for the Sound Director – 'From behind the stage a loud noise like the sound of several million cubic feet of moral high ground sliding into the gutter'; something similar perhaps to the sound of a huge chunk of ice breaking away from a glacier and sliding into the sea so well portrayed in the BBC's Frozen Planet series.
 
Curiously, the officials maintain the CIA's favourite interrogation technique of 'waterboarding' - which involves pouring water over the face of an immobilised captive, causing them to experience the sensation of drowning  - was apparently not practised at this location. Given that the dubious intelligence gleaned from waterboarding was highly regarded by American spooks, I'd take this with a pinch of salt.
 
Using torture to revenge and humiliate is one thing but to believe that it can produce useful intelligence is Gothic fantasy.  As Obergruppenfuher Reinhard Heydrich discovered to his cost.  Like the CIA he favoured waterboarding and the 'intelligence' it produced when he was running Reichssicherheitshauptamt (SS Counter Intelligence) in Berlin. He took some of its top thugs with him when he was sent by Hitler to govern Czechoslavakia in 1941. Despite the widespread torture and execution of members of the Czech Resistance and their families, Heydrich never managed to uncover the one really critical piece of intelligence he needed – the Czech Resistance would mount an operation to successfully assassinate him in May 1942.  
 
Let's face it. Parts of the American security and intelligence establishment have been out of control for a while and are still out of control under President Obama. Jack Nicholson playing, splendidly, US Marine Colonel Nathan R. Jessep in the 1992 film A Few Good Men expresses well the attitude of mind that was later to sweep over the Anglophone intelligence world after 9/11:
 
"I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it!  I would rather you just said 'Thank you', and went on your way…"
 
The point about Jessep in the film is that he is nuts. But nuts has been the new normal for the more hardline American spooks for some time. And what's normal for them soon becomes normal for their wholly owned subsidiaries, the British intelligence agencies. ·