The Salt Pit was a Central Intelligence Agency black site in Afghanistan used for detention and interrogation during the post-September 11 program. 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.[1]
A death at the site
Kiriakou says a prisoner named Gul Rahman died at the Salt Pit. Separately, he says the CIA murdered a man named al-Jamadi at Abu Ghraib — the U.S. military prison in Iraq — by hanging him from the ceiling with his arms behind his back and suffocating him to death, a technique he compares to Nazi practice.[2]
Kiriakou’s suspicion of unreported deaths
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, in addition to the three that his The Convenient Terrorist co-author Joe Hickman later reported at Guantanamo Bay. He says he has often wondered whether other prisoners were killed off the books at black sites like the Salt Pit.[3]