A high-ranking government official today said a decade of reports, including one yesterday to the U.S. Senate, are wrong about Thailand ever hosting a secret CIA prison.
Suwaphan Tanyuvardhana, Office Minister to the prime minister and head of the National Intelligence Agency, denied the CIA operated one of its notorious “black sites” in the kingdom, as indicated by testimony and media reports since it was first disclosed in a Washington Post report in 2005.
In comments to reporters, Suwaphan said he hadn’t seen the report and described it as old news with no bearing on the present, according to Bangkok Post.
By most accounts the torture of prisoners held under the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program occurred in Thailand during the regime of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. Successive regimes have issued similar denials.
However testimony to the U.S. Congress has previously identified Don Mueang Airport as the site of such a facility. Indeed Thailand hosted the torture program’s very first prisoner, according to yesterday’s U.S. Senate report on the torture program, as reported in the New York Times:
The Senate report quotes a series of August 2002 cables from a C.I.A. facility in Thailand, where the agency’s first prisoner was held. Within days of the Justice Department’s approval to begin waterboarding the prisoner, Abu Zubaydah, the sessions became so extreme that some C.I.A. officers were “to the point of tears and choking up,” and several said they would elect to be transferred out of the facility if the brutal interrogations continued.
Most of the details regarding Thailand were unavailable from the report, with only its executive summary released to the public. There was little new information available, beyond evidence of misrepresentations made by U.S. intelligence about the torture program’s efficacy, frequency and brutality. Thailand’s involvement was mentioned on a number of occasions.
The United States torture program was born from Cold War-era treatment of its soldiers during its war with Vietnam. Originally a program to simulate the “worst practices” of U.S. enemies, it somehow became a model for U.S. interrogation when the two cowboys running the program, who’d never actually interrogated anyone, convinced the agency to adopt their methods. While torture apologists defend the measures as “necessary,” the Senate report concludes it was an ineffective and counterproductive means of gaining information.
James Mitchell, one of the program’s architects, actually described the report as “a bunch of hooey” to Reuters today.
The political right in the United States have smeared the report as partisan, although one of its senior statesmen, Sen. John McCain, spoke out strongly in support of it. McCain was routinely tortured as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam.
Meanwhile the U.S. State Department, under pressure from embarrassment over a 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya, has warned Americans living in Thailand to be vigilant about their security.
“U.S. citizens in Thailand should be aware that release of declassified versions of the executive summary, findings, and conclusions of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s report of the CIA’s Rendition, Detention and Interrogation program could prompt anti-U.S. protests and violence against U.S. interests, including private U.S. citizens,” it read.
Photo: Waterboarding demonstration by John Han
