

Usually, if you saw the schematics of an ultra-secret CIA prison, it meant you had probably done something very, very bad – and something very, very bad was about to happen to you. But now you can see what one of these shuttered prisons, housed in Europe to "interrogate" terrorism detainees in secret, actually looked like.

The Associated Press has gone deep inside one of the "black sites," off-the-books CIA detention centers that the agency has never formally acknowledged operating. It was located in the basement of a government building in Bucharest, Romania so inconspicuous it's viewable on Google Street View. The CIA reportedly called its hidden prison "Bright Light," showing off its sense of dark irony.

According to the AP's blockbuster report, detainees would be taken into the facility in vans, spirited down a side road into the actual prison building. Down in the basement was a complex of six "prefabricated" cells. "The cells were on springs, keeping them slightly off balance and causing disorientation among some detainees," report the AP's Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman.

Those cells were torture chambers for the world's most infamous terrorists. One resident was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 plot. In his month of detention, officials waterboarded him 183 times. Former government officials pinky-swore to the AP that Mohammed wasn't waterboarded at Bright Light, but detainees there "endured sleep deprivation and were doused with water, slapped or forced to stand in painful positions."

The AP reporters didn't just take its readers deep inside Bright Light through the clarity of their writing. They built an interactive schematic of the prison, which you can explore here. Click on the icons, and street-view imagery pops up, allowing you to see what officials saw on their way to work. Satellite photography provided by GeoEye gives a bird's-eye view of the facility, while reporter Goldman narrates a tour through the basement prison, its back-gate entranceway, and the surrounding landscape "slightly north of the city center, maybe a 20 minute drive from the smaller of the two airports in Bucharest."

In July, Glenn Carle, a former CIA interrogator, told Danger Room about his time with a detainee he called CAPTUS in a similar secret CIA prison. He helped "psychologically dislocate" CAPTUS, he said: "Noise, temperature, one's sense of time, sleep, diet, light, darkness, physical freedom — the normal reference points for one's senses are all distorted."

But when the CIA felt CAPTUS was holding out on them, they shipped him off to a black site like Bright Light for much rougher treatment. Carle came to believe CAPTUS didn't actually have the information he was suspected of possessing, and was outright "innocent." The CIA unceremoniously freed him years later.

That won't happen to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is now detained in Guantanamo Bay after President Bush moved him in 2006 and President Obama ordered the black sites shuttered in 2009. There has never been any accounting for torture in the war on terrorism; an inquiry by a federal prosecutor into alleged CIA torturers – not the officials who ordered them to torture – recently dropped 99 out of 101 cases. The most significant spotlight shone into the black sites, so far, has come from the Associated Press.

Photo: Google Street View

See Also: