Bright Light is the codename of one of the

Central Intelligence Agency The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA ), known informally as the Agency and historically as the Company, is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gathering, processing, ...

's network of

black sites In military terminology, a black site is a location at which an unacknowledged black operation or black project is conducted. According to the Associated Press, "Black sites are clandestine jails where prisoners generally are not charged with a ...

—clandestine interrogation centers. The location of the site, in

Bucharest Bucharest ( , ; ro, București ) is the capital and largest city of Romania, as well as its cultural, industrial, and financial centre. It is located in the southeast of the country, on the banks of the Dâmbovița River, less than north of ...

Romania Romania ( ; ro, România ) is a country located at the crossroads of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. It borders Bulgaria to the south, Ukraine to the north, Hungary to the west, Serbia to the southwest, Moldova to the east, and ...

, was confirmed in an exclusive report from the

Associated Press The Associated Press (AP) is an American non-profit news agency headquartered in New York City. Founded in 1846, it operates as a cooperative, unincorporated association. It produces news reports that are distributed to its members, U.S. ne ...

on December 8, 2011. Some of the most important captives in the high value detainee program, including

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (sometimes also spelled Shaikh; also known by at least 50 pseudonyms; born March 1, 1964 or April 14, 1965) is a Pakistani Islamist militant held by the United States at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp under terrorism-re ...

, the mastermind of the

September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks, commonly known as 9/11, were four coordinated suicide terrorist attacks carried out by al-Qaeda against the United States on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. That morning, nineteen terrorists hijacked four commer ...

, were held there. Other sites in the CIA's network were in isolated locations. The Bucharest site was housed within the campus of the Romanian National Registry Office for Classified Information, explaining the need for high security. The cells the captive were held in were mounted on springs, to keep the captives off balance. According to

ABC News ABC News is the news division of the American broadcast network ABC. Its flagship program is the daily evening newscast ''ABC World News Tonight, ABC World News Tonight with David Muir''; other programs include Breakfast television, morning ...

captives were subjected to " enhanced interrogation techniques" in the Bucharest site, but were not subjected to the controversial technique of

waterboarding Waterboarding is a form of torture in which water is poured over a cloth covering the face and breathing passages of an immobilized captive, causing the person to experience the sensation of drowning. In the most common method of waterboard ...

Authorization from the Romanian government

Romanian President The president of Romania ( ro, Președintele României) is the head of state of Romania. Following a modification to the Romanian Constitution in 2003, the president is directly elected by a two-round system and serves for five years. An indi ...

Ion Iliescu Ion Iliescu (; born 3 March 1930) is a Romanian politician and engineer who served as President of Romania from 1989 until 1996 and from 2000 until 2004. Between 1996 and 2000 and also from 2004 to 2008, the year in which he retired, Iliescu ...

claimed in a Der Spiegel interview that he approved just the use of the location, without knowing the details about the secret prison. The U.S. government requested at the end of 2002/beginning of 2003 a building for the CIA and Iliescu approved it, appointing presidential adviser Ioan Talpeș in charge of the details. Talpeș said that he understood that the situation could "become dangerous", so he told the CIA that the Romanian government did not want to know anything regarding how the building was being used. These statements contradict the result of a 2008 investigation by the Romanian Parliament, which concluded that no CIA prisons existed in Romania.

References

{{coord, 44.467955, N, 26.046033, E, display=title Black sites Buildings and structures in Bucharest Counterterrorism in the United States Detention centers for extrajudicial prisoners of the United States Government buildings in Romania Prisons in Romania