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Former SAS soldier Ben Griffin blows apart Miliband denial of UK torture involvement.
Written by Stewart office Monday, 25 February 2008 ...The use of British Territory and airspace pales into insignificance in light of the fact that it has been British soldiers detaining the victims of Extraordinary Rendition in the first place.
Since the invasion of Afghanistan in the autumn of 2001 UKSF has operated within a joint US/UK Task Force.
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This Task Force has been responsible for the detention of hundreds if not thousands of individuals in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Individuals detained by British soldiers within this Task force have ended up in Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp, Bagram Theatre Internment Facility, Balad Special Forces Base, Camp Nama BIAP and Abu Ghraib Prison.
...These secretive prisons are part of a global network in which individuals face torture and are held indefinately without charge.
All of this is in direct contravention of the Geneva Conventions, International Law and the UN Convention Against Torture.
...Camp Nama at Baghdad International Airport during 2004... this facility was used to interrogate individuals captured by the joint US/UK Task Force.
In it are the details of numerous breaches of the Geneva Convention and accounts of torture.
These breaches were not the actions of rogue elements.
The abuse was systematic and sanctioned through the chain of command.
...Throughout my time in Iraq I was in no doubt that individuals detained by UKSF and handed over to our American colleagues would be tortured.
Complete Article |
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At another time, Jeff saw a British SAS officer beat a detainee:
[It] was a beating in a kind of a bunker behind the main facility. . . .
this British guy actually who wasn’t supposed to be interrogating anybody — a British soldier.
SAS. That’s all I know about him. I don’t know his name or anything.
But we went back there and he gave the guy a pretty good pounding.
Nothing really in the face.
A lot of stomach shots, and I would say two or three groin shots, very harsh.
A knee to the abdomen.
Thrown against the wall and so forth.
Human Rights Watch — Soldiers’ Accounts |
Revealed: MI5's role in torture flight hell
· British source tells of betrayal to CIA
· 'I was stripped and hauled to US base' David Rose Sunday July 29, 2007 An Iraqi who was a key source of intelligence for MI5 has given the first ever full insider's account of being seized by the CIA and bundled on to an illegal 'torture flight' under the programme known as extraordinary rendition. In a remarkable interview for The Observer, British resident Bisher al-Rawi has told how he was betrayed by the security service despite having helped keep track of Abu Qatada, the Muslim cleric accused of being Osama bin Laden's 'ambassador in Europe'. He was abducted and stripped naked by US agents, clad in nappies, a tracksuit and shackles, blindfolded and forced to wear ear mufflers, then strapped to a stretcher on board a plane bound for a CIA 'black site' jail near Kabul in Afghanistan.
He was taken on to the jail at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba before being released last March and returned to Britain after four years' detention without charge.
'All the way through that flight I was on the verge of screaming,' al-Rawi said.
'At last we landed, I thought, thank God it's over.
But it wasn't - it was just a refuelling stop in Cairo.
There were hours still to go ... My back was so painful, the handcuffs were so tight.
All the time they kept me on my back.
Once, I managed to wriggle a tiny bit, just shifted my weight to one side.
Then I felt someone hit my hand.
Even this was forbidden.'
He was thrown into the CIA's 'Dark Prison,' deprived of all light 24 hours a day in temperatures so low that ice formed on his food and water.
He was taken to Guantanamo in March 2003 and released after being cleared of any involvement in terrorism by a tribunal.
A report by Parliament's intelligence and security committee last week disclosed that, although the Americans warned MI5 it planned to render al-Rawi in advance, in breach of international law, the British did not intervene on the grounds he did not have a UK passport.
The government claimed he was the responsibility of Iraq, which he fled as a teenager when his father was tortured by Saddam Hussein's regime.
The report confirmed that al-Rawi, 39, was only held after MI5 sent the CIA a telegram, stating he was an 'Islamic extremist' who had a timer for an improvised bomb in his luggage.
In reality, before al-Rawi left London, police confirmed the device was a battery charger from Argos.
The committee accepted MI5's claim, given in secret testimony, that it had not wanted the Americans to arrest him, in November 2002, concluding the incident had damaged US-UK relations.
But al-Rawi alleged that the CIA told him they had been given the contents of his own MI5 file - information he had given his handlers freely when he was working as their source.
He said an MI5 lawyer had given him 'cast iron' assurances that anything he told them would be treated in the strictest confidence and, if he ever got into trouble, MI5 would do everything in its power to help him.
When al-Rawi was in Guantanamo, he asked the American authorities to find his former MI5 handlers so they would corroborate his story but, because he did not know their surnames, MI5 said it could not assist.
The committee report cited MI5 testimony claiming that when al-Rawi was transported in December 2002, it could not have known how harsh his treatment might be.
Yet eight months earlier, Amnesty International had published a lengthy report on US detention in Afghanistan, quoting several ex-prisoners who described conditions very similar to those experienced by al-Rawi.
He had conveyed messages between the preacher Abu Qatada and MI5 when Qatada was supposedly in hiding in 2002.
At MI5's behest, he came close to arranging a meeting between the two sides.
Al-Rawi has now spoken out in an effort to help his friend Jamil el-Banna, who remains in Guantanamo.
A Jordan-ian who also lived in London for years, where his wife and five children are British citizens, he too has been cleared by the Americans.
However, he has been unable to leave Guantanamo because Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, says she is reviewing his right of residence on national security grounds.
Sarah Teather, the Liberal Democrat MP for Brent East in London, where el-Banna lives, said his case revealed 'decrepitude at the heart of the government'.
The government had 'no regard for the welfare of his children'.
His lawyers have filed a statement from al-Rawi as part of a judicial review case.
In the action, they accuse MI5 of having a 'causative role' in both men's ordeals, stating it was 'complicit' in the illegal rendition and guilty of an 'abuse of power'.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2007 |
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Boeing: Accused of Running Torture Travel Agency
By Rick Anderson The Seattle Weekly Saturday 02 December 2006 [Images inserted by TheWE.biz] A British author and an ex-prisoner's attorney say that records uncovered by Spanish investigators show Boeing has a direct role in "extreme renditions" — planning and organizing the flights through a unit of its Seattle commercial airplane division.
Since 2003, human-rights investigators and news media reports have described a Boeing Business Jet as one of the most-dreaded planes in the Central Intelligence Agency's clandestine air force.
The modified 737 — a model rolled out in Renton in 2001 — was built for executive fun and comfort.
But it is alleged to be the flagship of the CIA's "extreme rendition" squadron, ferrying suspected terrorists to secret agency prisons or countries where the U.S. is said to outsource torture.
Boeing has more direct role
The use of this jet, with a 6,000-mile flying range and plush customized cabin, has until now been Boeing's only connection to the prison airlifts.
But a British author and an ex-prisoner's attorney say that records uncovered by Spanish investigators show Boeing has a more direct role - planning and organizing the flights through a unit of its Seattle commercial airplane division.
Boeing won't confirm or deny the claim. But the Spanish documents, and an investigation by Amnesty International and the Council of Europe, indicate Boeing was making arrangements for as many as 1,000 rendition flights through 14 countries by four CIA planes, including that notorious Boeing Business Jet.
"Travel agent for the CIA seems the right words," Stephen Grey says of Boeing's role.
A British author, he has written about prisoner rendition and the CIA's global torture program in his new book, Ghost Plane, in which he has documented about 90 rendition flights.
The Bush administration has acknowledged transfers of Al Qaeda suspects to Guantánamo Bay but has denied the U.S. engages in torture-transfer flights.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in 2005 that the United States "does not use the airspace or the airports of any county" for such purposes. Senate Democrats, who take control in January, are promising a full investigation.
According to Grey and others, a wholly owned Boeing subsidiary called Jeppesen Inc. cleared the airways and runways for the CIA, providing landing and navigation assistance, scheduling flight crews, and booking hotels for them. Jeppesen is a unit of Boeing's Seattle-based Commercial Aviation Division.
The cargo of prisoners includes many who say they were tortured and others who claim to have been mistakenly abducted and abused.
One detainee, Khaled el-Masri, a German of Lebanese decent who is suing the CIA and aviation companies under the Alien Tort Statute for alleged Fifth Amendment (due process) violations, says he now plans to add Boeing to his lawsuit.
Masri "was injected with a drug and chained to the floor of the plane," says his attorney, Ben Wizner of the New York ACLU.
"I don't think anybody would hold Boeing responsible for manufacturing the plane.
However, the emergence of [Boeing's flight-assistance role] changes all that."
The prisoner flights, launched by the Clinton administration to transfer foreign suspects to trial in the United States, became a darker undertaking following 9/11.
George W. Bush approved what critics say amounts to the kidnapping of foreign nationals, some flown to countries such as Morocco or Egypt, known for abusive interrogation techniques.
Others were taken to a system of CIA prisons in Afghanistan and Europe, or the U.S. compound in Guantánamo, rights groups say.
In his book, Grey cites documents showing Boeing made travel arrangements for the CIA flights.
He does not specifically name Boeing, but in a phone conversation last week with Seattle Weekly, Grey confirmed that Spanish government documents he obtained name Jeppesen's International Trip Planning unit as rendition flights planner. |
Thursday, 28 December 2006
Hunt for CIA 'black site' in Poland
By Nick Hawton BBC News, Szymany, Poland
It was exactly at this spot, and under the cover of darkness, that the CIA planes did their business.
"They always followed the same procedure," says Mariola Przewlocka, the manager at the remote Szymany airport in north-east Poland when the strange flights arrived during 2003.
"We were always told to keep away. The planes would stay at the end of the runway, often with their engines running. A couple of military vans from the nearby intelligence base would go up to them, stay a while and then drive off, out of the airport.
'Cash payments'
"I saw several of these flights but never saw inside the vans because they had tinted windows and they never stopped at the terminal building.
"Payment was always made in cash. The invoices were made out to American companies but they were probably fake," says Mrs Przewlocka.
In September 2006, President Bush admitted what had been suspected for a long time - that the CIA had been running a special programme to transport and interrogate leading members of Al-Qaeda, away from the public spotlight.
Human rights groups have expressed concerns that the prisoners may have been tortured.
The hunt has been on ever since to locate the secret prisons, or "black sites" as they are known.
Poland and Romania have been named by investigators as hosting such sites.
The claims are denied by both governments.
CIA landings
After a week of meetings in smoky Warsaw restaurants and coffee bars with Polish intelligence sources, airport workers and journalists, I obtained what I had been looking for, and something that nobody in authority wanted to reveal, the flight log of planes landing at Szymany airport.
They confirmed my eyewitness's account - that a well-known CIA Gulfstream plane, the N379P, had made several landings at the airport in 2003.
The plane has been strongly linked to the transportation of Al-Qaeda terrorists [sic thewe.biz].
Another plane, a Boeing 737, had flown direct from Kabul to this remote Polish airport.
"There is no particular reason for a Gulfstream to stop there. So there has to be a reason why the plane is stopping there and the fact that everyone is trying to conceal this reason makes it all the more interesting to try to find out what it is," says Anne Fitzgerald from Amnesty International.
I followed the route of the military vans from the airport to the nearby secret Polish intelligence base at the village of Stare Kiejkuty.
Surrounded by double-lined fences, security cameras and thick pine forest, visitors are not welcome.
'Secret prison'
Within five minutes of stopping the car I was approached by a man in a military uniform who made it clear he wanted me to leave.
Was this where a CIA secret prison had been located?
A committee of European parliamentarians who investigated the CIA secret prison programme subsequently concluded in a report:
"In the light of... serious circumstantial evidence, a temporary secret detention facility may have been located at the intelligence training centre at Stare Kiejkuty."
Others go further. Marc Garlasco is a senior military analyst with Human Rights Watch.
He says: "It's almost a foregone conclusion that Poland hosted a CIA Black Site."
But the authorities in Poland do not want to talk about it.
All requests for interviews with government ministers were rejected.
The European parliamentarians met a similar wall of silence.
One civil servant from the prime minister's office claimed a secret, internal inquiry had concluded there had been no "black site" in Poland.
Others disagree.
"I think it's quite probable there was a kind of transfer site, a black site, in Poland. There is a Kafka-like mood in Warsaw. No one from the government has the will to answer our questions," says Jozef Pinior, a senior Polish politician, who has called for a commission to investigate the claims.
With Polish troops serving in Afghanistan and Iraq, and with the United States as the country's key ally, there is no desire to delve into the secret deals made in the secret war against international terrorism.
The US State Department has said it always complies with its laws and treaty obligations and respects the sovereignty of other countries.
But the truth of Poland's role may soon emerge.
The new Democrat-controlled US Congress may begin its own investigation into the CIA secret prisons programme in the next few months.
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Boeing bought the Denver-based company, then called Jeppesen Sanderson, in 2000 for $1.5 billion from the (Chicago) Tribune Co., whose mixed portfolio includes the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Cubs.
John Hayhurst, then a Boeing vice president here, hailed Jeppesen as "another enduring global brand" for Boeing's business roster.
Boeing later bought two related companies and expanded the Jeppesen unit, offering electronic mapping and navigation services to airline, general aviation, and government customers along with flight and trip planning.
Spain's largest newspaper, El Pais, last year reported that Jeppesen was named the CIA's flight arranger in investigative documents compiled by Spanish police.
More recently, The New Yorker magazine noted the connection, reporting "it is not widely known that the [CIA] has turned to a division of Boeing, the publicly traded blue-chip behemoth, to handle many of the logistical and navigational details for these [rendition] trips."
On its Web site, Boeing boasts: "From Aachen to Zhengzhou, King Airs to 747s, Jeppesen has done it all."
But what, exactly, has it done?
How deep is Boeing's involvement in the rendition flights?
The company won't specifically say.
From Chicago headquarters, Boeing spokesperson Tim Neale points out that flight planning is done for "thousands and thousands of customers each year. It's done on a confidential basis, and unless a customer authorizes us to comment, we can't."
He adds: "Jeppesen's flight planning process is to provide the route that is going to be followed, how much fuel is needed on board, where they will stop, and how many people will be on board, for weight reasons.
"We don't necessarily know very much about the purpose of a flight because that information isn't necessary to create a flight plan. What somebody's going to do when they get off is not part of that plan."
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It's not publicly known how much Boeing, the nation's No. 2 defense contractor, earned from the flights.
The CIA, a stand-alone agency, does not reveal its contracts and agency work can be billed through other government departments, including the Pentagon. Jeppesen has done $7.7 million in defense contracting since Boeing bought it in 2000, based on a review of Pentagon records.
Grey says he plans to soon post on the Internet "assorted aviation documents including Jeppesen planning data" that confirm Boeing's role (Update: Grey posted the flight logs recently at www.ghostplane.net.).
The documents include, he says, a 2004 Boeing-arranged flight on the Boeing jet from Morocco through Spain and on to Afghanistan, which coincides with the Masri case.
Masri was mistaken as an Al Qaeda suspect and arrested by Macedonia officials on New Year's Eve 2003.
In a Virginia federal lawsuit filed against ex-CIA Director George Tenet and others, Masri says he was "forcibly abducted" in Macedonia and handed over to U.S. officials.
He was beaten, drugged, and eventually flown to a CIA prison in Afghanistan, he says.
Five months after his abduction, the suit notes, "Mr. El-Masri was deposited at night, without explanation, on a hill in Albania" — and that was two months after U.S. officials realized they made a mistake, the suit says.
'State Secrets'
The lawsuit was thrown out earlier this year, not because it lacked merit but because it could lead to disclosure of state secrets, a federal judge ruled.
Masri is appealing and Wizner, his attorney, was scheduled to make his arguments this week before a Virginia appeals court.
"Obviously," says Wizner, "before we can add Boeing to the suit, we have to get it reinstated. It's a real hurdle — the CIA is, in effect, claiming immunity, that they're never liable in such cases."
He's buoyed by three federal court rulings in recent months that rejected similar government-secrets argument — all of them cases involving challenges to warrantless eavesdropping authorized by President Bush.
"If the el-Masri suit can continue, we would try to develop evidence that people within Jeppesen were aware that detainees were being subjected to human rights abuses on these flights," Wizner says.
"If we can show that, Boeing should by all rights be a defendant."
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If torture is good, and black is white then day is night and wrong is right Are these the truths for which you fight? If not, then pass it on.
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AMY GOODMAN: We're joined by Stephen Grey, who is a journalist with the Sunday Times, who exposed the story this week, how the U.S. is operating these secret flights. Can you tell us further about these flights, who the people are, and how you found out about them?
STEPHEN GREY: Well, first of all, it has remained something of a mystery, the whole story.
Obviously, bit by bit, the whole — this kind of secret world is unraveling.
And we are getting more and more information about the individual cases, where these planes are being used.
What it exposes is the tentacles of a wider system whereby prisoners are being taken in the war on terror, not only to Guantanamo, but to many other place and those places include the prisons of so-called allies of the U.S. and Britain, around the world.
Those countries which are allies of the U.S. include countries where torture is routine.
Obviously, the concerns that many people have are that these kind of transfers basically allow the U.S. to pass prisoners into the hands of the secret police of other countries to do the kind of interrogation, torture in fact, of prisoners that the U.S. is not allowed to do itself.
Kind of torture by proxy.
AMY GOODMAN: The company, can you talk about that?
STEPHEN GREY: Yeah. I mean, I think the company is not that important in a sense.
These are private planes. They're being leased. They're not marked.
That's the point about them. They can appear anywhere, and you have, you know, innocent-looking, if you like, executive jets parked on the runways of airports around the world.
No one is to know they're actually planes run by the U.S. military and intelligence services.
So, they have a perfect cover, if you like.
But it's — what's happening is that — I mean, they're hired from a company that operates in Massachusetts, and others.
But you know, they're probably just a normal, private company. What they're doing is leasing it out. They only work for the government.
As I say, the plane is not just used for carrying prisoners. It's also used for transferring of interrogators and also regular V.I.P. and defense and intelligence officials from Washington.
But what we have found is at least four cases which have emerged where this plane has been seen actually picking up prisoners, and in the first case which we discovered, the prisoner was — the two prisoners were taken from Sweden to Egypt, and at the time — this has happened just after September 11, and it's been going on since, but in this case, just after September 11, two prisoners were taken on board.
The Swedish government never mentioned the U.S. at the time.
They said they were just sending — extraditing two prisoners.
What actually happened was that the U.S. was there with the secret plane.
They stripped these men of their clothes, handcuffed them, put them in diapers, gave them sedatives against their will, put them on the plane, and took them to Egypt.
And since then, we have discovered these planes — these prisoners complained of being very seriously tortured with electric shocks all over their bodies as a result of being taken to Egypt.
That's the consequence of this kind of process which we know is rendition. DemocracyNow.org November 17th, 2004 |
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CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons
Debate Is Growing Within Agency About Legality and Morality of Overseas System Set Up After 9/11 By Dana Priest Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, November 2, 2005; Page A01 The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement. The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.
The hidden global internment network is a central element in the CIA's unconventional war on terrorism. It depends on the cooperation of foreign intelligence services, and on keeping even basic information about the system secret from the public, foreign officials and nearly all members of Congress charged with overseeing the CIA's covert actions.
The existence and locations of the facilities — referred to as "black sites" in classified White House, CIA, Justice Department and congressional documents — are known to only a handful of officials in the United States and, usually, only to the president and a few top intelligence officers in each host country.
The CIA and the White House, citing national security concerns and the value of the program, have dissuaded Congress from demanding that the agency answer questions in open testimony about the conditions under which captives are held. Virtually nothing is known about who is kept in the facilities, what interrogation methods are employed with them, or how decisions are made about whether they should be detained or for how long.
While the Defense Department has produced volumes of public reports and testimony about its detention practices and rules after the abuse scandals at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and at Guantanamo Bay, the CIA has not even acknowledged the existence of its black sites. To do so, say officials familiar with the program, could open the U.S. government to legal challenges, particularly in foreign courts, and increase the risk of political condemnation at home and abroad.
But the revelations of widespread prisoner abuse in Afghanistan and Iraq by the U.S. military — which operates under published rules and transparent oversight of Congress — have increased concern among lawmakers, foreign governments and human rights groups about the opaque CIA system. Those concerns escalated last month, when Vice President Cheney and CIA Director Porter J. Goss asked Congress to exempt CIA employees from legislation already endorsed by 90 senators that would bar cruel and degrading treatment of any prisoner in U.S. custody.
Although the CIA will not acknowledge details of its system, intelligence officials defend the agency's approach, arguing that the successful defense of the country requires that the agency be empowered to hold and interrogate suspected terrorists for as long as necessary and without restrictions imposed by the U.S. legal system or even by the military tribunals established for prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay.
The Washington Post is not publishing the names of the Eastern European countries involved in the covert program, at the request of senior U.S. officials. They argued that the disclosure might disrupt counterterrorism efforts in those countries and elsewhere and could make them targets of possible terrorist retaliation.
The secret detention system was conceived in the chaotic and anxious first months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when the working assumption was that a second strike was imminent.
Since then, 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?' "
Researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report. © 2005 The Washington Post Company |
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Comment
By 'rendering' suspects to torturers America sinks to the moral level of Saddam
Henry Porter Sunday December 11, 2005 The Observer The word rendition was an odd one in the context. It seemed to imply long-standing procedures, an obscure diplomatic formality perhaps. It was some weeks later that I began to puzzle at the word used by my American contact over lunch in London and which, come to think of it, was accompanied by a series of nods and glances. I understood what it was to render something - although not perhaps someone - and I knew what a rendition was in the context of musical and dramatic performance, but what did it mean in the new war against terror? And what was 'extraordinary rendition'? This was in the dying weeks of 2001. Sometime early the following year I saw him again; this time he was on his way back from Afghanistan where he had been contracted to the US military in a quasi intelligence role. He was in exultant, kick-arse form. The war against the Taliban had been won; al-Qaeda was in flight and its members were being hunted down across the globe. I asked him again about renditions. He revolved his eyes and looked away as though to say I was being dim, which maybe I was. But the problem with rendition, I explained, was that it was such an ambiguous term. A rendition can mean nothing more than a delivery, an exchange, or a return by agreement. Or it can refer to the process of extracting fat from meat by applying heat. Which did he mean? He shook his head. Rendition was delivery and it had nothing to do with fat and meat, and anyway he wanted to talk about something else. And extraordinary rendition? Well, buddy, use your imagination. Sometime later I learned that rendition referred to the outsourcing of the interrogation of untried terrorist suspects, and that 'extraordinary renditions' could either refer to the capture and transport of suspects in the utmost secrecy, or to the performance of the suspect under extreme conditions - that is to say the information produced by torture. It wasn't clear which, but I suspected it covered both. As far as I was aware the phrase had not appeared in the media. But there was nothing hard for me to go on. I had no dates, places or names of individuals, and it seemed unlikely that I would get enough to write a piece of journalism. So I started drafting a novel called Empire State and that made things a lot easier because once you go from factual reporting to fiction people tend to talk more. It was then that I heard a story about five Egyptian al-Qaeda suspects being arrested in Albania and flown to Egypt. The important part was that this had happened before 11 September 2001 - during the Clinton administration - proof that rendition was an established CIA practice. So I flew to Tirana, stayed in the Rogner Hotel and waited for various contacts I had been given to return my calls. If you hang about in the Rogner sooner or later you meet everyone you need and with a help of a fixer - one of the few Albanian males I met who was not suffering some mild psychotic disorder - I got to the bottom of the story of how five men were trapped by the electronic surveillance of the local intelligence service and were transported to Cairo by the CIA. They were all tortured and two were hanged. Since it had all happened in 1998 people didn't mind talking about it. Only when I asked about current operations against al-Qaeda in the Balkans did the shutters come down. I left Tirana for Cairo and after many false trails found the facilities where these things were likely to have happened. I also learned that American intelligence officers were part of the process. They did not simply leave the rendered suspects, but remained on hand to receive information produced by the interrogation. That America was collaborating with torturers was shocking, but it was seeing these facilities that brought home to me the terror and despair of the men who were wrung dry before being executed. Rendition is profoundly wrong and it happens to be against American law. In 1998 the US Congress passed legislation that confirmed the policy of the United States 'not to expel, extradite, or otherwise effect the involuntary return of any person to a country in which there are substantial grounds for believing the person would be in danger of being subjected to torture, regardless of whether the person is physically present in the United States'. Outsourcing torture is also against International law, but still the secret flights continue across the world and through European airspace - 400 over the United Kingdom alone. Countless suspects have disappeared into various facilities never to be heard of again. We get hot under the collar about the CIA's 'black sites' in Europe but nothing is done. Last Thursday the Law Lords ruled that the secret tribunals hearing cases related to terrorism suspects could not consider evidence that wouldn't be acceptable in a criminal trial - in other words that which is produced by torture. This is an important ruling for Liberty and the other human rights organisations that fought the case, but it will have no effect on renditions, for as I learned during my trips in 2002, they occur in an entirely different dimension to the criminal justice system of civilised countries. Renditions service the 'intelligence community', not the law courts. They are about gaining information, not proof. Last week on a trip to Europe, the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, clarified her country's policy by saying that America would meet its treaty obligations in respect of torture. Two points need to be remembered from her statement. The first is that it was flagged by her aides as an important shift in policy, from which we may therefore conclude that the CIA had been directly involved in the mistreatment of suspects. The second is that at no stage did Rice deny or condemn the practice of outsourcing torture to countries such as Egypt. Read her assurances carefully and you realise that she did not address the main issue about rendition. As though to underline this, senior al-Qaeda suspects being questioned in Europe were transferred to North Africa prior to her landing in Europe last week. Are we Europeans content as long as the torture is not going on in our backyard? It would seem so, but in Britain we should remember that during the war, when we faced a greater threat than the one posed by al-Qaeda, we did not resort to torture. The late Colonel T. A. Robertson, a friend of my family's, was known as TAR in MI5, where for much of the Second World War he directed the B1(a) section responsible for tracking down Abwehr agents. He would no more have contemplated torture than amputating his own right hand. No doubt this charming man was as hard as nails but he was also civilised and, like the rest of his generation, fought for civilisation. We affirm and protect civilisation by behaving within its constraints, not by shipping blindfolded men into dungeons where they are plugged into the electricity supply. If only the Prime Minister had thought for a few moments before rising in the House of Commons last week to support renditions, he might have recalled that on that very day the court listening to the trial of Saddam Hussein heard evidence from women who claimed to have been tortured by the dictator's secret police. What is the moral difference between Saddam's behaviour and the American renditions? There is none. For the dirty secret about torture is that it is not simply to gain unreliable information but that it is a weapon of punishment and extreme terror, which is deployed in exactly the same way by America as it was by Saddam. Knowing that, imagine yourself a Muslim and then see what you think about extraordinary renditions. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005 |
December 5, 2005
The CIA's Rendition Flights to Secret Prisons
By LILA RAJIVA
D ana Priest's recent Washington Post article, "Anatomy of a CIA 'rendition' gone wrong"(1) only confirms what those who have watched the torture scandal closely already know. Abu Ghraib was no anomaly but the most visible tip of a widespread but clandestine policy. Priest reveals details about a case in which the CIA used German, Macedonian, Albanian and Afghan authorities and European air space and terminals to "render" a German citizen snatched up abroad for interrogation and torture, without any material cause.
Here's the case that's now causing a furor in Europe:
Khaled al-Masri, a German citizen resident in Ulm, Germany, went on a trip to Macedonia, was arrested by local authorities on New Year's Eve, 2003 and held for over 3 weeks in a motel. Then, he was handcuffed, blindfolded, stripped by masked men, drugged, diapered and flown to Afghanistan, on the basis of a "hunch" by a counter-terrorist chief in the CIA. The hunch was no more than the fact that Masri's name resembled that of an associate of one of the 9-11 hijackers
Masri was imprisoned for five months by Afghans and possibly Americans and claims he was tortured. A bus driver confirms that Masri was snatched up by border guards on the date he alleges; forensic analysis of his hair shows malnutrition during the time he claims he was imprisoned; flight logs confirm that a CIA front company flew a plane out of Macedonia on the day he says he was abducted.
Back in the US, Masri's passport and story held up and in May 2004, around the time when the Abu Ghraib scandal first burst into public view in America, the White House sent U. S. ambassador in Germany, Daniel R. Coats, on a special mission to German Interior Minister Schily, an ardent Bush supporter, to inform him of the error and tell him to keep the details secret should Masri go public.
Later in May, Masri claims he was visited in prison by a man he says was German, who told him that he was going to be released without documents that might confirm his story because the Americans would never admit to a mistake. He was released, flown out to Albania - Macedonia wouldn't admit him - and dumped onto a narrow country road at dusk. From there he was escorted to the international airport at Tirana by armed men and rejoined his family in Lebanon where they'd gone.
Masri's attorneys say they intend to file a lawsuit in U.S. courts this week. Neither the CIA nor the German ministry which was told about the case, is talking.
Masri's story is given support by other news pouring in from all over Europe in the last week:
December 1: The British Guardian reports that over 300 CIA flights have landed at European airports and that CIA planes visited Germany and Britain over 200 times, if chartered flights are included. According to the NY Times, there were 94 flights in Germany, 76 in Britain, 33 in Ireland, 16 in Portugal, 15 in Spain and Czechoslovakia each and two chartered flights that made stopovers in France. French officials say they had no knowledge of the clandestine flights. If so, the flights certainly violated French sovereignty.(2)
December 2: Le Figaro in France adds that the first flight was made on March 31, 2002 by a Lear jet that stopped in Brest en route from Iceland to Turkey, via Rome. The crew was reportedly alone. The second flight, which stopped over near Paris on July 20, 2005, from Norway, was a Gulfstream III jet that landed six times at Guantanamo.(3)
December 3: Berliner Zeitung in Germany reports that CIA aircraft used European airports minimally 15 times this past year and says that America's Ramstein Air Base (Germany) was a hub for the flights between 2002 and 2004. (4)
December 4: The Council of Europe, the foremost human rights watchdog in Europe, headed by Swiss senator Dick Marty and using satellite imagery, makes its first closed door report in Paris on "black sites" in eastern Europe and the flights in Europe. Marty also cites the illegal abduction in February 2003 of accused terrorist and Egyptian cleric Abu Omar from Milan to Germany and then Egypt, where he was reportedly tortured. (5)
Human Rights Watch identifies the Kogalniceanu military airfield in Romania and Poland's Szczytno-Szymany airport as probable sites based on flight logs of the CIA aircraft between 2001 to 2004. Other airports possibly used were Palma de Majorca in Spain's Balearic Islands, Larnaca in Cyprus, and Shannon in Ireland. The CIA flight logs were analyzed by Mark Galasco, a senior military analyst with the organization who was formerly a civilian intelligence office with the Defense Intelligence Agency. Not someone who can be easily dismissed as anti-American. (6)
Meanwhile, Poland and Romania as well as another ten nations deny having CIA facilities in their territory while Austria and Denmark are investigating US violations of their air space. There are over six investigations into flights in various countries.
To all this the White House has tried outright denial. Stephen Hadley, the National Security Advisor, told Fox News Sunday on December 4,
The Torture-Go-Round "... we comply with U.S. law. We respect the sovereignty of the countries with which we deal. And we do not move people around the world so that they can be tortured."But when asked on CNN's "Late Edition" specifically if the U.S. operates secret prisons in Europe, Hadley side-stepped a clear-cut denial, preferring to fudge, "there is a lot of cooperation at a variety of levels on the war on terror." Hadley is lying on all three counts he cites: 1. As the flight logs and investigative reports document, the US is moving people around the world to be tortured. 2. Since all 25 member states have signed the European Convention on Human Rights, and the International Convention Against Torture, secret torture cells would indeed be a violation of the laws of foreign countries. If officials in this country did not know about these flights, as seems to be the case, then the US did indeed violate their national sovereignty. 3. The United Nations Convention Against Torture was also ratified by the U.S in 1994, and it requires "substantial grounds for believing" that a detainee will be tortured abroad.Since Syria, Jordan, Egypt and many of the other countries where suspects have been rendered have turned up all too frequently as violators in human rights monitoring and have been cited by the State Department itself, the US cannot plausibly argue as it has, that it does not have "substantial grounds for believing" rendered suspects would be tortured there. Its own officials are on record saying just the opposite. Vincent Cannistraro, the CIA's former counterterrorism director, told Newsday about an al-Qaeda suspect taken to Egypt, "They promptly tore his fingernails out and he started to tell things." (February 6, 2003). Former CIA agent Bob Baer told The New Statesman, "If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear — never to see them again — you send them to Egypt," Since CIA officials knew the fate in store of those rendered, the US is in utter violation of international laws on torture which are binding on it. It's not necessary anymore to hedge discussion of the program with words like "alleged," for Masri is only the latest in a long line of renditions without cause/due process of any kind: Mamdouh Habib, an Egyptian-born Australian citizen, seized by a CIA team in Pakistan in October 2001, sent to Egypt, burned, electrocuted and beaten till he bled in his sleep from his nose, mouth, and ears, was dumped in Guantanamo and then released without being charged; Mohamedou Oulad Slahi, a Mauritanian and former Canada resident, taken by the CIA to Jordan for interrogation for 8 months, was sent to Guantanamo and released; Muhammad Saad Iqbal Madni, an Egyptian imprisoned by Indonesia authorities in January 2002, flown to Egypt for interrogation, was returned to the CIA four months later, held for 13 months in Afghanistan, then sent to Guantanamo and later released; Maher Arar a naturalized Canadian citizen, kidnapped in New York in September 2002, was taken to Syria, held in a coffin and tortured with metal whips. He proved to have no ties to terrorism and was released. Masri is telling the truth. There is just too much testimony from detainees that makes substantially the same charges, too many CIA admissions and leaks, too many eye-witness reports, the meticulously analyzed flight logs and even supporting medical evidence. The Masri case is without any doubt an illegal operation involving authorities in at least five countries - Macedonia, Afghanistan, Germany, Albania, and the U.S. Let me spell that out. In pursuit of the global war on terror, the U.S. government, apparently conspiring with foreign intelligence, has snatched a citizen of one country off the streets of another for no credible reason whatsoever, violating the sovereignty of several foreign countries in the process. It has then sent him to still another foreign country for torture for several months. And, having found itself mistaken, it has confiscated/withheld the documents necessary for the victim to substantiate a legal claim against the US government. There was no formal charge, there was no notification of the family, there were no witnesses called, there was no lawyer provided, there was no explanation or restitution offered. Again, note. The CIA held these prisoners in contravention of the laws even of the torturing countries. Even Egypt, Syria or Jordan have legal systems - however harsh - that would have necessitated charges and a legal defense. But as ex-FBI agent Dan Coleman has stated, "We're taking people, and keeping them in our own custody [my emphasis] in third countries. That's an enormous problem....There was a process there [in Egypt]," Coleman says. "But what's our process? We have no method over there other than our laws"and we've decided to ignore them. What are we now, the Huns? If you don't talk to us, we'll kill you?" (7) What is also clamoring to be asked is if the black sites allegedly in Eastern Europe - and according to the Post article, also in Thailand - are really all that there are to the story? Given the extraordinary sensitivity of the whole program, what are the chances that CIA leaks tell the whole story? What about Uzbekistan, Indonesia, Pakistan, and many other countries partnered with the US in the global war on terror who have dismal human rights records. Uzbekistan has recently been in the news about just that. Craig Murray, the former British ambassador there, told 60 Minutes that Uzbek citizens, captured in Afghanistan, were flown back to Tashkent on an American plane operating on a regular basis. Uzbeki torture techniques include drowning, suffocation, rape, and immersion in boiling liquid. Murray calls these techniques "medieval" but there is not one that has not been used by the US, not only in the war on terror" but within US prisons. When Murray complained that British intelligence was using information elicited by torture, he was recalled and quit the foreign service.(8) Indonesia is another strong candidate to have black sites, since the Asian tsunami last year provided the perfect justification and cover for US spy satellites and military to enter the area. Just this past November 23, the Bush administration announced it will lift a six-year arms embargo and resume full relations with the Indonesian military providing aid to "support US and Indonesian security objectives, including counterterrorism, [my emphasis] maritime security and disaster relief." (9) And what about Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean? The US has vehemently denied a black site there, but what credibility do such denials have? Could the focus on Eastern Europe turn out to be an elaborate feint or a secondary story, as so much else in the uncovering of this story? Masri claims he was not tortured but beaten. How many unknown victims permanently "disappeared"? Finally, let's not forget that the Masri case was known at the highest level and concealed with the knowledge of then National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. And for good reason. At a time when the administration was frantically dismissing Abu Ghraib as a case of a "few rotten apples," Masri's case shows it for what it really was - a reckless policy put in place by the administration in violation of US and international laws. Lila RajivaLila Rajiva is a free-lance journalist and author of "The Language of Empire: Abu Ghraib and the American media," (Monthly Review Press). Notes: 1. Dana Priest, "Anatomy of a CIA rendition gone wrong," Washington Post, December 4, 2005. Also, Dana Priest, "CIA Hold Terror Suspects in Secret Sites," Washington Post, November 2, 2005. 2. "Twist to terror suspects row as logs show 80 CIA planes visited UK," Guardian, UK, December 1, 2005 and "Reports of Secret U.S. Prisons in Europe Draw Ire and Otherwise Red Faces," Ian Fisher, NY Times, December 1, 2005. 3. "Paper: CIA flights made stopovers in France," AP, December 2, 2005. 4. "CIA's secret detainee flights concern Germany," AP November 26, 2005. 5. "Many Hints of CIA prison flights," AP, November 22, 2005. 6. "EU to probe reports of secret CIA prisons," AP, November 3, 2005 7. "Outsourcing Torture," Jane Meyer, New Yorker, February 7/14, 2005. 8. "CIA Flying Suspects To Torture?" CBS Sixty Minutes, March 6, 2005. 9. http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/23/152214. |
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Unspeakable grief and horror
...and the circus of deception killing continues...
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I think it's quite probable there was a kind of transfer site, a black site, in Poland. 
Jozef Pinior, Polish politician
