Changes

Now we finally learned what we all suspected: the numerous reports and testimonies about the Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib prisons were a trap to distract the attention of the public from the true secret: in the last days, big media reported that the CIA operates secret detention facilities beyond the reach of the law and outside official oversight at bases in two eastern European countries and some other Asian countries. The CIA has not even acknowledged the existence of these "black sites" with "ghost prisoners": to do so could open the U.S. government to legal challenges, since the prisoners are there submitted to "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" (the US newspeak for torture). The original idea was to hide and interrogate the two dozen or so al Qaeda leaders believed to be responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks, or who posed an imminent threat; but as the CIA began apprehending more people whose intelligence value and links to terrorism were less certain, the original standard for consigning suspects to the invisible universe was lowered or ignored.