Inside the CIA’s Secret Gulag
An empty interrogation chair, a windowless warehouse, and a prison is known as The Salt Pit where inmates were kept in complete darkness , constantly shackled in isolated cells with loud noise or music and only a bucket to use for human waste.
These haunting images curated by British photographer Edmund Clark and counter-terrorism investigator Crofton Black confront the nature of contemporary warfare head on, and in doing so reveal the invisible mechanisms of state control.
One picture shows The Salt Pit, the CIA’s first prison in Afghanistan, upon which the visiting Federal Bureau of Prisons commented they had ‘never been in a facility where individuals are so sensory deprived’.
Gul Rahman, a young Afghan detainee, died of hypothermia there in November 2002. He was buried in an unmarked grave.
And in Lithuania, a windowless warehouse surrounded by woodland was secretly built by the CIA to use as a prison facility.
George W. Bush’s 2001 declaration of the ‘war on terror’ until 2008, an unknown number of people disappeared into a network of secret prisons, according to the exhibition’s research.
These have been organized by the CIA-transfers without legal process and are known as extraordinary renditions. No public records were kept to trace the detainees as they were shuttled to different outposts around the world.
And while some were eventually sent to Guantánamo Bay or released without charge, others remain completely unaccounted for.
The collection, called Negative Publicity: Artifacts of Extraordinary Rendition aims to ‘raise fundamental questions about the accountability and complicity of our governments, and the erosion of our most basic civil rights’.
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