CIA running secret facilities in Somalia

SOMALIA: The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency is using a secret facility in Mogadishu for counterterrorism purposes as well as a secret prison, The Nation magazine reported Tuesday. The report said the CIA has "a sprawling walled compound" on the coast of the Indian Ocean which looks like a small gated community, with more than a dozen buildings behind large protective walls.

The magazine also quoted, the site has its own airport and is guarded by Somali soldiers, but the Americans control access. The secret center is located near the Mogadishu main airport, which is guarded by AMISOM troops in Somalia, the report says.

An RBC Radio correspondent says many Mogadishu residents are sometimes closely watching small planes landing and taking off from a nearby airstrip, which they said they 'did not understand what it was.' Last month it was reported that the CIA was using unmanned drones in Somalia for the first time coinciding with the unveiling of a new U.S. counterterrorism strategy shifting the war on terror away from costly battlefields and toward expanded covert operations.

At the time, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a counterterrorism expert at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, told Al Jazeera that the attack in Somalia emphasized the new American counterterrorism strategy, which favored "surgical strikes."

Washington's new approach also reflects America's general weariness with large-scale foreign conflict at a moment when the economy is struggling, and the country is burdened by unprecedented debt. Independent

The United States has been identified as the world's No. 1 user of targeted killings - largely as a result of its unmanned drone attacks.

Armed Predator and Reaper drones already operate in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya and now in Somalia where they are controlled by the U.S. military or the CIA. Guardian