BANGKOK
Thai authorities have strenuously denied allegations in a report on torture that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency were permitted to establish a secret interrogation center in the Southeast Asian country where detainees accused of terrorism were tortured.
“Cooperation between the U.S. and Thailand is based on national sovereignty. There are no policies or any practices which are against the law,” the Thai prime minister’s office minister, Suwaphan Tanyuvardhana, told local media this week. “I can assure you that there were no secret jails or torture in Thailand.”
The denial was echoed by Army Chief General Udomdej Sitabutr, who said he had no information regarding such sites in Thailand.
The 6,000-page U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee report, of which just 500 pages were released Tuesday in an executive summary, concluded the CIA had used torture and inflicted pain beyond its legal authority on alleged al-Qaeda-linked prisoners at “black sites” located outside of U.S. territory.
Although the report specifically mentioned Thailand and Afghanistan as having allowed the establishment of the sites, large sections of the document concerning details of the countries’ involvement were blackened out in the released version.
Interior Minister Anupong Paochinda, a former army chief, said the U.S. Senate report was “recycling old information” and that if such a detention site had existed, the report should have specified the location.
According to the Senate report, suspected al-Qaeda logistics planner Abu Zubaydah -- captured in March 2002 -- was sent to a secret CIA detention center in Thailand in June of the same year and stayed 47 days in complete isolation. During three weeks in August 2002, he was questioned through harsh methods including repeated waterboarding, a torture technique simulating drowning through the pouring of water down a prisoner’s cloth-covered head. The report says the interrogation wielded no new information.
Reports of a CIA black site in Thailand, established in 2002, first emerged in 2007, when Voice of America reported the location of such a facility in northeastern Udon Thani province. Thai authorities denied the allegations at the time.
Thailand is the only treaty-allied country of the U.S. in Southeast Asia. Close military and intelligence cooperation between the countries goes back to the 1963-1975 Vietnam War, when Thailand became the launching pad for the U.S.’s B-52 bombing raid over communist northern Vietnam.
The U.S. continues to maintain an extensive military facility in Bangkok called JUSMAG, attending to combined military exercises and military training.
On Wednesday, the day after the Senate report’s release, the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok urged its citizens to take extra precautions as the included information could prompt anti-American violence in Thailand.
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