Trump preparing to reopen CIA overseas prisons: Reports

The administration of US President Donald Trump is preparing an executive order to reopen the CIA’s undocumented overseas prisons, known as black sites, where the spy agency held terrorist suspects before former President Barack Obama closed them, reports say.

The New York Times reported on Wednesday that Trump’s three-page draft order, titled “Detention and Interrogation of Enemy Combatants” would repeal a series of Obama administration executive orders that shut the black sites down. 

The order reportedly would also remove many of the other restrictions on handling prisoners that Obama introduced during his time in office.

If Trump signs the draft order, he would also revoke Obama’s directive that granted Red Cross access to all detainees in American custody, and limited interrogators to techniques approved in the Army Field Manual.

Meanwhile, Reuters also reported on Trump’s potential move on Wednesday quoting two US officials, who told the news agency that the president is expected to issue an executive order that would clear the way for the CIA to reopen the overseas prisons used to detain and interrogate suspects during the time of former President George W. Bush after he launched the so-called "war on terrorism".

According to a copy of the draft published by the New York Times, the executive order would recommend Trump "whether to reinitiate a program of interrogation of high-value alien terrorists to be operated outside the United States" and whether the CIA should run these overseas prisons.

"Experience has shown that obtaining critical intelligence information is vital to taking determined offensive action, including military action, against those groups that make war on us and are actively plotting further attacks," reads an explanatory statement of the draft order.

The CIA employed brutal techniques like water-boarding, physical abuse, sleep deprivation, mock executions, and anal penetration performed under cover of “rehydration” to interrogate terror suspects imprisoned after the September 11, 2001 attacks.

These torture techniques migrated from the CIA’s these undocumented prisons to US military prisons at Guantánamo Bay, Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, and Abu Ghraib in Iraq.

A handful of disturbing images showing abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq surfaced in 2004, drawing international condemnation to the way US military personnel treated detainees.

A former guard at the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, revealed in January last year that CIA staged suicides to cover up inmate deaths at the notorious US military prison.

While campaigning for the 2016 presidential election, Trump embraced the US military’s Guantanamo Bay prison and promised to bring back water-boarding, and other torture techniques.

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