Turkish Foreign Minister Gul Denies Claims CIA Has Torture Center In Turkey

Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul denied on Wednesday claims that Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the United States had a torture center in Turkey.

Responding to a question with notice of Republican People`s Party (CHP) deputy Kemal Anadol, Gul said that a Turkish press organ published a news referring to an article of the New York Times.

Gul noted that the press organ claimed that CIA had torture centers in some countries including Turkey, but the mentioned article did not make any reference to Turkey....

--TurkishPress.com/Andalou Agency

Meanwhile, a Swedish Muslim freed from Guantanamo is saying he was tortured ("They dragged me to the interrogation room and used it as a refrigerator. They put it on freezing and it became tremendously cold and you had to freeze there for hours. You had to sit there for 12-14 hours, in chains"). The Pentagon denies this.

Also, yesterday General Jay Hood, the commander of the Guantanamo facility, showed members of the Senate Judiciary Committee some Gitmo DVDs -- but only a few of the many available; "Based on the staff's review of a small number of the videos, it does not appear that prisoners at Guantanamo were subjected to the types of egregious abuses that occurred at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq or at Baghram detention facility in Afghanistan," Senator Pat Leahy said in a written statement.

And, as you may already know from Atrios guest blogger Athenae, Seymour Hersh has said in a speech that the Pentagon has video from Abu Ghraib in which boy prisoners are sodomized ("The worst is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking").

ALSO: Congress is still trying to get to the bottom of all this:

Before Congress goes into recess at the end of the month, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner wants the Pentagon to provide witnesses for another public hearing into the issue....

His committee is getting a closed-door, classified briefing Thursday on where several Defense Department investigations into abuse now stand....

The committee also will be briefed on previous International Committee of the Red Cross reports into mistreatment of Iraqis. The House Armed Services Committee had a similar briefing Wednesday and Rep. Ellen O. Tauscher, D-Calif., blasted the Defense Department afterward, saying the documents were so long in coming they were relatively useless....

The recent charge she referred to was the Red Cross allegation Wednesday that while it has visited thousands of prisoner in Iraq and elsewhere, the United States might be hiding more detainees in other lockups across the globe.

Terror suspects the FBI reported as captured have never turned up in detention centers, and the United States has failed to reply to demands for a list of everyone it's holding, said Antonella Notari, spokeswoman for the Switzerland-based ICRC...