If you ever get “black bagged” and stuffed in an unmarked van there are a lot of fucked up and terrifying situations you might find yourself in when the bag comes off: You could be on your knees, in the desert, facing a person-sized ditch in the dirt; or you could be hanging over a swirling pool of tiger sharks; or, worse yet, drugged up and disoriented in Bill Cosby’s basement. 

But the worst place you might find yourself — by far — is at a U.S. military black site. These are places where every trace, trail, or memory of you ceases to exist, where the deepest, darkest, most devious tentacles of our government are free to fuck with you like you’re trapped in a hentai
horror porno.

Black sites are the extra-legal prisons of America’s paramilitary intelligence agencies. They exist beyond the law, in foreign countries and abroad. They’re at the forefront of experimental torture and “interrogation techniques.” They are the playgrounds for the CIA and FBI’s maddest scientists, where people are plied with ungodly amounts of drugs and subjected to the most heinous, mind-bending forms of torture modern science has to offer. These are unspoken extensions of the infamous MK-Ultra initiative — the CIA’s unconstitutional and inhumane program that experimented on unknowing, unconsenting Americans in the 1960s using drugs like mescaline, LSD, psilocybin, opioids, barbiturates, and galaxies of multi-colored uppers, downers, laughers, and screamers, in an attempt to master mind control, hypnosis, and other psychic powers.

Fear and Loathing in America, indeed. After MK-Ultra’s exposure, people were, naturally, horrified that the U.S. government would be running such experiments on its own people. And the government shrugged the whole thing off as an abhorrent failure, a waste of resources, and a fruitless venture into the woo-woo-osphere. 

But of course, it wasn’t any of that. How do you think they programmed the Kennedys’ hypno-assassins? How do you think we got Charles Manson, Ted Kazinski, Osama Bin Laden?

MK-Ultra lives. There’s no way in hell our government abandoned those dark, heady pursuits. The program was just buried deeper, hidden better, and moved onto black sites — places like Guantanamo Bay.

Gitmo

Guantanamo Bay is the best-known American black site. It’s right off the Florida coast, just out of extraditional reach, on the tropical (and socialist) island of Cuba. It’s where Obama admitted that, yes, “we tortured some folks.” So what? They were terrorists. And who cares about terrorists anyway?

Gitmo is the poster child of U.S. black sites. Journalists are regularly covering it. The eyes of the world are watching it. Sure, the prisoners are regularly subjected to waterboarding, mental and physical exhaustion techniques, confusion, disorientation, and humiliation. Sometimes they’re locked in rooms where they can neither stand nor lie down and speakers blast Barney songs on repeat for days on end. But generally speaking, the prisoners who end up at the Guantanamo Bay black site are the lucky ones. Whether they know it
or not.

Black sites Abroad

Besides Guantanamo Bay, there are CIA black sites in 28 countries scattered around the world. And that’s where the really gnarly shit goes down. No one ever hears news about CIA black sites in Morrocco or Western Sahara, Romania, Poland, Lithuania, Afghanistan or Thailand. There are even 17 floating black sites — military prison ships, drifting around out there on international waters. 

There is nothing to stop those prisoners from becoming the subjects of outright diabolical human experiments. It’s hard not to compare these black sites to the laboratories Nazis ran at their own extra-legal prison camps — especially when you learn that a lot of the top MK-Ultra scientists were recruited directly from Nazi ranks. MK-Ultra and by extension, these CIA black sites are the descendant programs of those dark holocaustic schemes. 

All told, there are estimated to be around 100 U.S. black sites worldwide. And those are just the ones that exist outside of our borders. 

Domestic Black Sites

Of course, while the CIA is having all its fun abroad with its black sites, the FBI is up to its own shenanigans right here at home. In 2015 the Chicago Police and FBI were busted for running their own black site right in the middle of two of Chicago’s most crime-ridden areas. The prison, known as Homan Square, was inside a massive red-brick warehouse. Just since 2004 more than 7,000 people have disappeared at this off-the-books interrogation facility — and 82% of them were black. Homan Square refuses to release numbers prior to that. And that’s just one black site on American soil that we know about. Certainly, others exist. We just don’t know where they are or who has vanished into them. And we might never.