Black Sites and Black Days

A group of American soldiers applying the ‘water cure’ upon a Filipino insurgent during the Philippine-American War, circa 1900. From a book published in 1902.Interim Archives / Getty Images (source: Time Magazine)

By Thomas Neuburger

This is a follow-up to our recent post, "Is ICE Running a Black Site in Minnesota?" Is it really fair to call the ICE prison at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building a “black site”? Let’s take a look.

What Is a ‘Black Site’?

“Black site” is a scary term. It’s been frequently used for places where the CIA maintains off-the-radar prisons, where abducted terrorists are taken, held and usually tortured.

Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan was (and may still be) such a site. From the Atlantic in 2010:

The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) runs a classified interrogation facility for high-value detainees inside Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan, defense and administration officials said, and prisoners there are sometimes subject to tougher interrogation methods than those used elsewhere. Both the New York Times and the BBC reported that prisoners who passed through the facility reported abuse, like beatings and sexual humiliation, to the Red Cross, which is not allowed access. The commander in charge of detention operations in Afghanistan, Vice Admiral Robert Harward, has insisted that all detainees under his purview have regular Red Cross access and are not mistreated.

There’s more at Wikipedia, which reports the 2014 claim by “defense officials” that the facility has been shut down. (True? Who knows? We pay our warriors to lie to keep us safe.)

The definition of “black site” goes something like this:

Black sites are clandestine state-operated detention centers where prisoners who have not been charged with a crime are incarcerated without due process or court order, are often mistreated and murdered, and have no recourse to bail.

What’s interesting about black sites is that they’re not really that secret — they’re just unacknowledged and inaccessible to inspection. The Bagram black site was known as a torture site to the New York Times as early as 2005:

In 2005, The New York Times obtained a 2,000-page United States Army investigatory report concerning the homicides of two unarmed civilian Afghan prisoners by U.S. military personnel in December 2002 at the Bagram Theater Internment Facility (also Bagram Collection Point or B.C.P., now the Parwan Detention Facility) in Bagram, Afghanistan, and general treatment of prisoners. Two prisoners, Habibullah and Dilawar, were repeatedly chained to the ceiling and beaten, resulting in their deaths. Military coroners ruled that both prisoners’ deaths were homicides. Autopsies revealed severe trauma to both prisoners’ legs, describing the trauma as comparable to being run over by a bus. Seven soldiers were charged in 2005.

By the way, there’s still a detention center, the “Parwan Detention Facility,” next to the base. Black site? Who knows?

The Bishop Whipple Detention Center

So the questions are these. Is the prison at the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building…

• acknowledged?

• accessible to inspection?

• a place of torture?

…though the last is not strictly necessary for a black site to exist.

To answer, it seems the immigrant cells are acknowledged, but this is the first report I’ve seen that separate known-citizens cells exist, where illegally detained or abducted citizens could be held indefinitely and without charges.

Second, it’s certainly true that the Bishop Whipple prison is not subject to inspection.

Finally, as to being a place of torture, consider this, from the Houston Chronicle report of the incident (all emphasis mine):

On their way to the cells, [O'Keefe and Sigüenza] saw other detainees who were screaming and wailing for help, though most were dejectedly staring at the ground, they said. In one instance, they observed a woman who was trying to use a toilet while three male agents watched. The overwhelming majority of detainees were Hispanic men, though some were East African — Minnesota is home to the country’s largest Somali community. “Just hearing the visceral pain of the people in this center was awful,” O’Keefe said. “And then you juxtapose that with the laughter we heard from the actual agents. ... It was very surreal and kind of shocking.” Sigüenza said one of his cellmates had a cut on his head and the other had an injured toe, but neither was offered medical help. Their requests for water or to go to the bathroom outside their cells were also ignored, he said.

Note the toilet incident. Humiliation, including sexual humiliation, is a form of torture. It makes people ashamed and compliant, and it’s done deliberately.

There are also reports like this:

Agents say man injured in ICE custody ‘purposely ran headfirst into a brick wall’ A Minnesota man incurred severe head wounds while in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody earlier this month, with the agency posting guards at his hospital bedside despite his deteriorating condition, according to his attorneys. The man, who was born in Mexico, was detained by federal immigration agents Jan. 8 on St. Paul’s east side, according to a habeas corpus petition in federal court asking for his release. The man was brought to the hospital by agents four hours after his arrest. A CT scan found that the man had “life-threatening bilateral skull fractures and hemorrhaging.” … One agent told hospital staff, according to the petition, that “he got his shit rocked,” but did not share other information.

And consider this story of a man whose door was broken down to affect his arrest. He was taken to the Bishop Whipple Federal Building where this occurred:

ICE agents take ‘trophy pictures,’ pack detainees into holding cells Gibson said that after they arrived at the Whipple Federal Building near MSP airport, where ICE has a detention facility, the agents paused and forced him to take part in an act of ritual humiliation. “They took trophy pictures with their personal phones. Like one stood by me on the right side of me. One stood on the left side of me. And they went, like, thumbs up and took pictures with their personal phones,” he said, adding that agents took similar photos with other detainees. … Inside the detention center, Gibson said that officers put him in a bare, metal holding cell about the size of a small conference room with around 40 other detainees. Their legs were shackled. He said that the cell was cold and they shared a single toilet that offered no privacy. Gibson says that one person in the cell appeared to have scabies.

Note also the open defiance of court orders in the same story:

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Bryan on Monday ordered ICE not to remove Gibson from Minnesota, away from his family and lawyer.But later Monday, officers put Gibson on a plane along with other shackled detainees and flew them to a detention center in El Paso, Texas.

This is not your usual arrest-and-detention facility — not Whipple nor any place like it. And the State has three years left to build even more.