THE CIA no longer uses secret prisons around the world and has banned contractors from conducting interrogations, according to the intelligence agency’s director Leon Panetta.
In a letter to CIA staff, Mr Panetta said that no prisoners had been held at the secret prisons, known as “black sites”, since he took up his position in February.
Private security personnel who have been guarding the sites have been dismissed and the CIA is preparing plans for the prisons to be shut down permanently.
Mr Panetta’s announcement follows the publication this week of a leaked report by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) documenting the torture of 14 people held by the CIA at black sites. The agency has not disclosed the location of the sites, but media reports have identified EU member states Poland and Romania as among host countries, along with Thailand and Jordan.
Mr Panetta said that, while the CIA would still pursue suspected terrorists, interrogators would no longer use physical force. “CIA officers, whose knowledge of terrorist organisations is second to none, will continue to conduct debriefings using a dialogue style of questioning,” he said.
President Barack Obama has outlawed the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” authorised by the Bush administration, but Mr Panetta has made clear no CIA officers will be investigated or prosecuted for torturing captives.
Vice-president Joe Biden said this week that the previous administration’s harsh policies had made the US more vulnerable to terrorist attack and fuelled anti-American feeling throughout the world.
Former White House adviser Karl Rove, however, has disputed Mr Biden’s account of a conversation with former president George Bush, and described the vice-president as a liar and a blowhard.
“He’s a serial exaggerator. If I was being unkind I would say he’s a liar, but it’s a habit he ought to drop,” Mr Rove told Fox News. “You should not exaggerate and lie like this when you are the vice-president of the United States.”
Mr Biden claimed that, in a conversation at the Oval Office, he had told Mr Bush that, if the president thought he, Mr Bush, was a leader, nobody in the world was following him. Mr Rove said: “It’s his imagination. It’s a made-up, fictional world. He ought to get out of it and get back to reality.”
Mr Biden’s spokesman said the vice-president stood by his account of the exchange.