The Life and Times of the CIA

Tom Engelhardt & Chalmers Johnson

The secret prison was set up on a secure U.S. Naval base outside the U.S. and so beyond the slightest recourse to legal oversight. It was there that the CIA clandestinely brought its "suspects" to be interrogated, abused, and tortured. That description might indeed sound like Guantanamo 2002, but think again. According to New York Times reporter Tim Weiner's new history of the Central Intelligence Agency, Legacy of Ashes -- a remarkable treasure trove of grim and startling information you hadn't known before -- this actually happened first in the Panama Canal Zone in the early 1950s. It was there, as well as at two secret prisons located in Germany and Japan, the defeated Axis powers (and not, in those days, in Thailand or Rumania), that the CIA brought questionable double agents for "secret experiments" in harsh interrogation, "using techniques on the edge of torture, drug-induced mind control, and brainwashing."..

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