Salt Pit
========

The Salt Pit was a Central Intelligence Agency black site in Afghanistan, north of Kabul, used for detention and interrogation during the post-September 11 programme. John Kiriakou will not confirm the site by name, but confirms it was a former Soviet, then Taliban, dungeon and torture chamber that the CIA took over for its own purposes, it started operating before the CIA's other secret prisons precisely because the facility already existed. His own description of the place is three words: "literally hell on earth."

The cold cell

The technique associated with the site is the one Kiriakou rates as the worst in the programme, worse, in his judgment, than waterboarding. "We killed several prisoners with the cold cell."

His account of the method is procedural. The prisoner is chained to an eye-bolt in the ceiling so that he cannot get comfortable in any way, cannot sit, cannot lie down. He is stripped naked. The cell is chilled to fifty degrees Fahrenheit. Then, every hour, a CIA officer enters and throws a bucket of ice water over him. "You can't withstand that kind of treatment. People died. They died of hypothermia."

Gul Rahman, and the official tally

Gul Rahman is the death the CIA admits to: he froze to death in the Salt Pit. The second officially acknowledged killing is al-Jamadi at Abu Ghraib, hung from the ceiling with his arms behind his back until he suffocated, a technique Kiriakou compares to Nazi practice. Both were investigated by John Durham, who in Kiriakou's summary "let the CIA get away with that."

Asked to count, Kiriakou puts the figure at five murdered by the CIA during the Bush-era torture programme: three at Penny Lane at Guantanamo Bay, one at Abu Ghraib, and one at the Salt Pit. He is careful about the limits of his own knowledge, "I don't know, to tell you the truth. I know that there are at least five", noting that Joe Hickman, the former Guantánamo guard and his co-author, believes there are more, and that he has seen press articles indicating there may be dozens. His conclusion: "I think it's one of those things we're just never going to know."

He keeps the CIA figures separate from the military ones. Lawrence Wilkerson has said 108 people died in military custody, a number Kiriakou says the Associated Press independently confirmed; some may have been heart attacks, but many, he says, were tortured to death, and none of them are the CIA deaths.

The deaths he suspects were never recorded

Kiriakou says that in his last job at CIA headquarters, as executive assistant to the associate deputy director for operations, he personally briefed on two prisoner deaths in 2002, the two that came early, in addition to the three Hickman later reported at Guantánamo. Beyond those, "there were people sort of just dying in the process all along."

His suspicion follows from the nature of the site itself: "if you're in a place like Salt Pit, for example, which is literally hell on earth, what's to keep you from killing somebody and just burying them there and just not reporting it? And I often wondered if that was the case." He adds that compartmentation makes the question unanswerable from inside, officers keep their secrets even from one another, so people simply go away without anyone being told how they died.

What he treats as the real scandal is the absence of anyone asking. There has, he says, been no accountability on the Hill, "why are the oversight committees not demanding this kind of information? Why aren't there investigations to get to the bottom of these questions?"

See also

- Guantanamo Bay
- Enhanced interrogation techniques
- Lawrence Wilkerson
- John Kiriakou
