Extraordinary Rendition - A Tool for Torture

…torture is never acceptable, nor do we hand over people to countries that do torture
-- President George W. Bush in an interview on January 27, 2005

Rendition is just one element of the Administration’s New Paradigm. The C.I.A. itself is holding dozens of “high value” terrorist suspects outside of the territorial jurisdiction of the U.S., in addition to the estimated five hundred and fifty detainees in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. [Jane Mayer (1)]

The atrocities at Abu Ghraib prison committed on the detainees there by the U.S. interrogators caught the American public by surprise. Many sensibilities were hurt and some of the perpetrators were brought to justice. Since then, some other information is coming out in the press, which underlines the fact that such atrocities were not necessarily completely wanton and acts of malicious individuals; some of them were the results of clandestine planning to bypass the American law. Extraordinary rendition is one such device, which is used for torturing the detainees to extract quick information about other acts of terrorism that might have been planned by the al-Qaeda or other terrorist organizations.

American law does not condone torture hence it could not be used in the legal jurisdiction of the U.S. without bending or breaking the law. Extraordinary rendition (e.r.) was devised so that the terrorist detainees and other suspects could be coerced to confess by torture not within the U.S. but in foreign and friendly countries, which were willing to assist the U.S. to interrogate the detainees in its behalf. This artifice was developed in the 1990’s and further honed during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. One of its architects, Michael Scheuer, described how it was used. “Scheuer is a former CIA counter-terrorism expert who (had) helped establish the practice of rendition.” He left CIA in 2004 and wrote ‘Imperial Hubris’ under the pseudonym of Anonymous. The book became a best seller. He explained, “It was begun in desperation… At the time, he (Scheuer) was the head of the C.I.A’s Islamic-militant unit, whose job was to detect,

disrupt, and dismantle terrorist operations. His unit spent much of 1996 studying how al-Qaeda operated; by the next year, Scheuer said, its mission was to try to capture bin Laden and his associates. He recalled, “We went to the White House, which was then occupied by the Clinton administration, and they said, ‘Do it’. He added that Richard Clarke (author of ‘Against all Enemies’), who was in charge of counter-terrorism for the National Security Council, offered no advice. ‘He told me, figure it out by yourself,’” (1). He further elaborated how the e.r. finally came into being. Walking a straight and legal path would not produce the desired results hence some other innovative method was needed. According to Jane Mayer (1), Scheuer said, “In 1996, for example, the State Department stymied a joint effort by the C.I.A and the F.B.I. to question one of bin Laden’s cousins in America, because he had a diplomatic passport, which protects the holder from U.S. law enforcement… We were turning into voyeurs. We knew where these people were, but we couldn’t capture them… The agency realized that ‘we had to come up with a third party.’” The first country that came to the agency’s mind was Egypt, which was friendly, depended on the U.S. aid and would not flinch from using ruthless torture to extract information from the detainees. So the detainees whom the U.S. wanted to be interrogated under torture were delivered (rendered) to Egypt for this purpose. Egypt did the U.S.’s dirty work without any moral and legal scruples. The e.r. was begun in the beginning to deal with only a few high-value suspects but later on it was expanded. Jane Mayer (1) reported, “The extra-rendition program bears little relation to the system of due process afforded suspects in crimes in America. Terrorism suspects in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East have often been abducted by hooded or masked American agents, then forced on to a Gulfstream V jet….This jet, which has been registered to a series of dummy American corporations, such as Bayard Foreign Marketing, of Portland, Oregon, has clearance to land at U.S. military bases. Upon arriving in foreign countries, rendered suspects often vanish. Detainees are not provided with lawyers, and many families are not informed of their whereabouts.”


Later on, as the program expanded, Morocco, Syria, and Jordan were added to Egypt as the recipient countries of the extraordinary rendition suspects. All of them are notorious for inhuman torturing or even killing their prisoners.

The way prisoners were tortured in Egypt is reported by Jane Mayer (1). She described, “According to a 2002 report, detainees were stripped and blindfolded, suspended from a ceiling or doorframe with feet just touching the floor; beaten with fists, whips, metal rods, or other objects; subjected to electrical shocks; and doused with cold water (and) sexually assaulted.” The other rendition countries were no less brutal.

According to Jane Mayer (1), “In 1998, Congress passed legislation declaring that it is ‘the policy of the United States not to expel, extort, or otherwise effect 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.”

Despite this, the rendition program has further expanded so that the torture prisons are now operated directly by the C.I.A. in foreign countries such as Cuba, Thailand, Qatar, and Afghanistan. Dan Coleman who is a political non-partisan with a law and order mentality said, “Bad as the policy of rendition was before September 11th, … afterward, it really went out of control…. Now instead of just sending people to third countries, we’re handling them ourselves. We’re taking people and keeping them in our own custody in third countries,” (1).

The inherent hypocrisy in administering such a despicable program is indeed sordid. Writing in The New York Times (February 18, 2005), Bob Herbert asserted, “The administration is trying to have it both ways in its so-called war on terror.

It claims to be fighting for freedom, democracy and the rule of law, and it condemns barbaric behavior whenever it is committed by someone else. At the same time, it is engaged in its own barbaric behavior, while going out of its way to keep that behavior concealed from the American public and the world at large.”

One of the notorious cases of barbarism of the e.r. program, which was reported in the press recently and is also described by Bob Herbert is that of Maher Arar, a 34-year old native of Syria who emigrated to Canada as a teenager. He was arrested (due to mistaken identity) at John F. Kennedy airport on the afternoon of September 26, 2002, and was kept in custody until October 5, 2003. During his detention, he was brutalized ruthlessly. “He was never charged, and when he wasn’t being brutalized, he spent much of his time in an unlit, rat-infested cell that reminded him of a grave.”

Jane Mayer described Arar’s story in some additional detail. Arar was flown to Jordan and after ten hours, he was driveN to Syria where “they whipped his hands repeatedly with two-inch-thick electrical cables, and kept him in a windowless underground cell that he likened to a grave…Although he initially tried to assert his innocence, he eventually confessed to anything his tormentors wanted him to say. You just give up, he said. You become like an animal.”

Several cases of abuse and torture are reported in Afghanistan also. According to Guardian, (February 18, 2005), (Papers reveal Bagram abuse), “Hussain Abdulkadr Youssouf Mustafa, a Palestinan living in Jordan, told the lawyer, Clive Stafford-Smith, that he was sodomized by U.S. soldiers during his detention at Bagram air force base in 2002. He claims to have been blindfolded, tightly handcuffed, gagged and had his ears plugged, forced to bend down over a table by two soldiers, with a third pressing his face down on the table, and to have had his trousers pulled down. They forcibly rammed a stick up my rectum, he reports. It was excruciatingly painful… Only when the pain became overwhelming did I think I would ever scream. But I could not stop screaming when this happened.”

Torture does not yield any reliable information. The victim who is brutalized beyond endurance will confess to any thing which the tormentors want. What is the practical use of such information? It is not reliable; it’s worse than no information.

According to Jane Mayer (1), “Perhaps surprisingly, the fiercest internal resistance to this thinking has come from people who have been directly involved in interrogation; including veteran F.B.I. and C.I.A. agents. Their concerns are as much practical as ideological. Years of experience in interrogation have led them to doubt the effectiveness of physical coercion as a means of extracting reliable information.”

Those who sadistically justify such tactics are driven by vengeance. They proclaim, “All you need to know is that there was a ‘before 9/11’ and there was an ‘after 9/11’. After 9/11, the gloves came off.” The fact that it’s against law doesn’t matter. Consider the result of such a frenzy. Syria, which is proclaimed by the U.S. to be an evil state sponsoring terror and may very likely become a target of direct invasion by the U.S., was its partner in extraordinary rendition torture.

Reference

1. Jane Mayer, “Outsourcing Torture,” http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/020905M.shtml.