Inmate Kyle Foggo – Creator of the post-2003 torture facilities

It looks like the Obama administration will investigate and prosecute senior CIA officials who broke American law. 

In the meanwhile CIA officials are spinning their stories to the NYT, with usual welter of self-justifications and contradictions.

If you read this somewhat confused NYT article carefully you’ll see examples of those contradictions – in addition to being generally incoherent. In one spot it says waterboards were built on the spot, in another paragraph it says waterboarding had been discontinued when the prisons were built. I

The article reads like multiple leaks with different aims. Some statements seem intended to help Mr Foggo, others to convict him …

Interrogation Inc. - A Window Into C.I.A.’s Embrace of Secret Jails - NYTimes.com

WASHINGTON — In March 2003, two C.I.A. officials surprised Kyle D. Foggo, then the chief of the agency’s main European supply base, with an unusual request. They wanted his help building secret prisons to hold some of the world’s most threatening terrorists…

… Foggo went on to oversee construction of three detention centers, each built to house about a half-dozen detainees, according to former intelligence officials and others briefed on the matter. One jail was a renovated building on a busy street in Bucharest, Romania, the officials disclosed…

… a small company linked to Brent R. Wilkes, an old friend and a San Diego military contractor…  provided toilets, plumbing equipment, stereos, video games, bedding, night vision goggles, earplugs and wrap-around sunglasses. Some products were bought at Target and Wal-Mart, among other vendors, and flown overseas. Nothing exotic was required for the infamous waterboards — they were built on the spot from locally available materials, the officials said.

… Mr. Foggo .. pleaded guilty last year to a fraud charge … and he is now serving a three-year sentence in a Kentucky prison … He was not charged with wrongdoing in connection with the secret prisons, but instead accused of steering other C.I.A. business to Mr. Wilkes’ companies in exchange for expensive vacations and other favors. Before leaving the C.I.A. in 2006, he had become its third-highest official…

… Early in the fight against Al Qaeda, agency officials relied heavily on American allies to help detain people suspected of terrorism in makeshift facilities in countries like Thailand. But by the time two C.I.A. officials met with Mr. Foggo in 2003, that arrangement was under threat, according to people briefed on the situation. In Thailand, for example, local officials were said to be growing uneasy about a black site outside Bangkok code-named Cat’s Eye…

.. Eventually, the agency’s network would encompass at least eight detention centers, including one in the Middle East, one each in Iraq and Afghanistan and a maximum-security long-term site at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, that was dubbed Strawberry Fields, officials said. (It was named after a Beatles song after C.I.A. officials joked that the detainees would be held there, as the lyric put it, “forever.”)

The C.I.A. has never officially disclosed the exact number of prisoners it once held, but top officials have put the figure at fewer than 100.

At the detention centers Mr. Foggo helped build, several former intelligence officials said, the jails were small, and though they were built to house about a half-dozen detainees they rarely held more than four.

The cells were constructed with special features to prevent injury to the prisoners during interrogations: nonslip floors and flexible, plywood-covered walls to soften the impact of being slammed into the wall…

… C.I.A. analysts served 90-day tours at the prison sites to assist the interrogations. But by the time the new prisons were built in mid-2003 or later, the harshest C.I.A. interrogation practices — including waterboarding — had been discontinued…

As the investigations proceed there will be more leaks. Eventually a case may be built against Mr. Foggo, but more likely the feds will lean on him, and whoever he implicates, to turn in someone else.