Here comes a simply absurd tale in the CIA's law-skirting legacy of secrecy: to stave off boredom while in secret detention, the CIA let Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the guy who masterminded 9/11, to design a better vacuum cleaner.According to a surreal Associated Press report, Mohammed was stashed away in the basement of a CIA prison in Romania about a decade ago. With the help of a little enhanced interrogation, the CIA squeezed confessions and information about all kinds of horrible acts out of Mohammed. Then came the reality: What do you do with a secret prisoner once you've got what you want? You can't let him go, and getting him to trial means getting evidence and explaining why you have him in the first place?So the CIA held onto him. Now, being in secret prison isn't exactly brain-stimulating, and Mohammed, who has a bachelor's in mechanical engineering, started to get bored. So he asked if he could redesign the vacuum. From the AP, who got the leak from anonymous officials:"We didn't want them to go nuts," the former senior CIA official said, one of several who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about the now-shuttered CIA prisons or Mohammed's interest in vacuums.So, using schematics from the Internet as his guide, Mohammed began re-engineering one of the most mundane of household appliances.That the CIA may be in possession of the world's most highly classified vacuum cleaner blueprints is but one peculiar, lasting byproduct of the controversial U.S. detention and interrogation program.One of the CIA's favorite post-9/11 activities is picking up terrorists in secret planes and delivering them to secret prisons around the world for interrogation. It's shocking, really, that a US government agency could interrogate prisoners in secret in, say, Poland with no one the wiser.This takes the reality-twisting aspects of the terror war to a whole new level. It feels like a scene from a post-9/11 version of Catch-22. But it's not fiction. This unreal world is the one we live in.@derektmead
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