Apparently the US has been keeping people in secret prisons thoughout the world, even in Eastern Europe: From the Washington Post:

[...] the arrangement has been increasingly debated within the CIA, where considerable concern lingers about the legality, morality and practicality of holding even unrepentant terrorists in such isolation and secrecy, perhaps for the duration of their lives. Mid-level and senior CIA officers began arguing two years ago that the system was unsustainable and diverted the agency from its unique espionage mission.

"We never sat down, as far as I know, and came up with a grand strategy," said one former senior intelligence officer who is familiar with the program but not the location of the prisons. "Everything was very reactive. That's how you get to a situation where you pick people up, send them into a netherworld and don't say, 'What are we going to do with them afterwards?'"

I have lots of questions. Here are a few:

• Whose big idea was this?
• And how can you need so many prisons? There can't be hundreds of useful terror suspects.
• What's the status of these places? Are they subject to local laws, or are they like embassies? Either way it sounds like the creation of some sort of civil rights legal purgatory. What to do about that?
• What is the next part of the plan? Is there one?
• No matter what happens next or how (if ever) the situation in resolved, have the planners of this given some thought to the reaction around the world?
• Did they think people would not find out about this? If they did,
• What sort of bubble are they living in? And,
• How can these people, living in a bubble as they do, expect to deal with the real problems of terrorism?
• If you have captured real terrorists, wouldn't it be a good idea to expose their crimes and try them in public, so that people can assure themselves that these terrorists actually exist?