Jeremy Keeshin

Mirini Kim
Carlyn Levy
Source A

Burger, Timothy. “Letting the President Say.” Time Oct. 2006: 29.

It was the first White House confirmation of a secret CIA-operated network of overseas
prisons, places where unorthodox methods of interrogation were not unknown. “Were it
not for this program,” Bush said, referring to the secret prisons and the things done there,
“al-Qaeda and its allies would have succeeded in launching another attack against the
American homeland….

By allowing coerced testimony to be entered as evidence in trials, Congress potentially

legitimized torture as a means of obtaining information. It left the President in charge of
filling in the details of what the allowable methods should be. The clearest limit to what
might be done was actually not so clear…

More than that, the measures adopted by Congress last week stripped defendants of the
ancient habeas corpus right to challenge their detention in court—a step that makes it
possible that the Supreme Court will strike down some portion of the law and send
everybody back to the drawing board…

For the next nine months, says a person briefed on activity in the program, some at the
agency developed a bias for killing its targets instead of bringing them in for questioning,
thought sources add that ground conditions make capture impossible anyway….

So far in 2006, as government sources and public reports indicate, few if any terrorist
suspects have been captured by the CIA. But at least four—including bombmaker Abu
Khabab al-Masri, on the FBI’s most wanted list—have been killed, in most cases by
remotely fired missiles from Predator drones….

And what method are O.K.? NO one inside or outside the CIA will say. Which may mean
we’re going to be fighting on “the dark side” for some time to come.