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Extraordinary rendition

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File:Plane used by the CIA.jpg
One of the planes used by the CIA

Extraordinary rendition is a procedure practiced by the government of the United States (and possibly aided by other western countries) whereby criminal suspects are sent to countries in which torture is routinely used in interrogation. Critics have suggested this amounts to torture by proxy.

As described in various reports in the media, suspects have been arrested, blindfolded, shackled, and sedated, and transported by private jet or other means to the destination country. The reports also say that U.S. agencies have provided interrogators with lists of questions. Although Egypt has been the most common destination, suspected terrorists have been rendered to other countries, such as Jordan, Syria and Uzbekistan.

In a number of cases, suspects to whom the procedure is believed to have been applied later appeared to be innocent.

1990s

The procedure was developed by Central Intelligence Agency officials in the mid-1990s who were trying to track down and dismantle militant Islamic organizations in the Middle East, particularly Al Qaeda. At the time, the agency was reluctant to grant suspected terrorist due process under American law, as it could potentially jeopardize its intelligence sources and methods. The solution the agency came up with, with the approval of the Clinton administration, was to send suspects to Egypt, where they were turned over to the Egyptian mukhabarat, which has a reputation for brutality. This arrangement suited the Egyptians, as they had been trying to crack down on Islamic extremists in that country and a number of the senior members of Al Qaeda were Egyptian. The arrangement suited the US because torture is banned under both US and international law.

The argument for rendition made by defenders of the practice is that culturally-informed and native-language interrogations are more successful in gaining information from suspects. For instance, interrogators of one terrorist suspect prayed to Mecca five times per day in the presence of the suspect until he became willing to talk. Nevertheless, there have been many reports of the use of torture by these governments on suspects rendered to them.

The first individual to be subjected to rendition was Talaat Fouad Qassem, one of Egypt's most wanted terrorists, who was arrested with the help of US intelligence by Croatian police in Zagreb in September 1995. He was interrogated by US agents on a ship in the Adriatic sea and was then sent back to Egypt. He disappeared while in custody, and is suspected by human rights activists of having been executed without a trial.

In the summer of 1998, a similar operation was mounted in Tirana, Albania. Wiretaps showed that five Egyptians had been in contact with Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's deputy. During the course of several months, Shawki Salama Attiya and four militants were captured by Albanian security forces collaborating with US agents. The men were flown to Cairo for interrogation. Attiya later alleged that he had electric shocks applied to his genitals, was hung from his limbs, and was kept in a cell with dirty water up to his knees.

Post 9/11

While extraordinary rendition was originally developed by the CIA, the Justice Department and the Defense Department also do renditions. Initially, the procedure was applied primarily to individuals for whom there were outstanding arrest warrants. After the 9/11 attacks the program appears to have been expanded and some believe it now encompasses individuals for whom there are but vague suspicions. Critics charge that the program has "spun out of control", and has been used against large numbers of individuals. In a lengthy investigative report published by The New Yorker in February 2005, journalist Jane Mayer cited Scott Horton, an expert on international law who helped prepare a report on renditions issued by N.Y.U. Law School and the New York City Bar Association, as estimating that a hundred and fifty people have been rendered since 2001.

Proponents of extraordinary rendition, and the similarly controversial concept of unlawful combatant, argue that torturing terror suspects, however distasteful, is necessary to help prevent further terrorist attacks, which may only be a matter of hours or days away. Critics argue, however, that such practices are unethical, unconstitutional, and skirt the Geneva Conventions. Even within the US government, opinions are divided; the State Department opposes ignoring the Geneva Conventions, and has warned the Bush administration that not only could US soldiers be denied protection of the conventions but that President Bush could also be prosecuted for war crimes.

Aside from ethical issues, pragmatic reservations have also arisen about the practice. For one, it appears that while torturing a suspect frequently results in a confession, the confessions tend to be useless; a suspect will say nearly anything to end his or her suffering. Some investigators argue that better results are achieved by treating suspects with respect, allowing them due process, and arranging plea bargains with defense lawyers.

In addition, evidence obtained illegally or under duress is inadmissible in US courts, and this hampers court cases against suspected terrorists in the US. The trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person to be indicted in the US in connection with the 9/11 attacks, has run aground because of Moussaoui's requests for access to confidential documents and the right to call al-Qaida members held in captivity in Guantánamo as witnesses, a demand rejected by government attorneys on the grounds that it would compromise confidential sources.

The CIA and the White House strongly resist an indepth investigation into the details of rendition, regarding the subjects detained and the facilities used throughout the world. The entire procedure might be kept from scrutiny because it could result in legal challenges to the U.S. government, inside the U.S. as well as in those countries used for detention. For a more detailed discussion on these possible violations of U.S. and international law please see unlawful combatant.

Examples

  • A Pakistani newspaper reported that in the early hours of October 23, 2001 a Yemeni citizen, Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed, a 27-year-old microbiology student at Karachi University, was spirited aboard a private plane at Karachi's airport by Pakistani security officers.
  • In October 2001, Mamdouh Habib, an Egyptian-born citizen with Australian nationality, was detained in Pakistan, where he was interrogated for three weeks, and then flown to Egypt in a private plane. From Egypt, he was later flown to a US airbase in Afghanistan, and then on to Guantanamo Bay, from where he was finally released without charge in January 2005.
  • Mohammad Al-Zery and Ahmed Agiza, two Egyptians, who had been seeking asylum in Sweden, were arrested by Swedish police in December 2001. They were taken to an airport and put on an executive jet with an American registration with a crew of masked men. Within hours, they were flown to Egypt, where they were imprisoned, beaten, and tortured. A Swedish diplomat visited them several weeks later. Agiza was charged with being an Islamic militant and he was sentenced to 25 years. Al-Zery wasn't charged, and after two years in jail he was sent to his village in Egypt.
  • In 2003, Khaled el-Masri, a Kuwait-born citizen with German nationality, was detained by Macedonian agents in Republic of Macedonia. While on vacation in the republic, local police, apparently acting on a tip, took him off a bus, held him for three weeks, then took him to the Skopje airport where he was turned over to the CIA. El-Masri says he was injected with drugs, and after his flight, he woke up in an American-run prison in Afghanistan containing prisoners from Pakistan, Tanzania, Yemen and Saudi Arabia. El-Masri claimed he was held five months and interrogated by Americans through an interpreter. He wasn't tortured but he was beaten and kept in solitary confinement. Then, after his five months of questioning, he was simply released. "They told me that they had confused names and that they had cleared it up, but I can't imagine that," El-Masri told ABC News. "You can clear up switching names in a few minutes." He was flown out of Afghanistan and dumped on a road in Albania, from where he made his way back home in Germany. Using a method called isotope analysis, scientists at the Bavarian archive for geology in Munich subsequently analyzed several strands of his hair and verified his story. During a visit to Washington, German Interior Minister Otto Schily was told that American agents admitted to kidnapping el-Masri, and indicated that the matter had somehow gotten out of hand.
  • In June 2005, Italian judge Guido Salvini issued a warrant for the arrest of 13 persons said to be agents or operatives of the CIA. On February 17, 2003 they are alleged to have kidnapped Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, as he walked to his mosque in Milan for noon prayers. Omar was flown to Egypt for interrogation. His family and friends claim that he has been repeatedly tortured. Court documents in the case indicate that the 13 suspects were implicated, in part, by extensive cell phone records which allowed Milan police to reconstruct their movements for the nine days they were in the city. At the time of his disappearance, Italian police were investigating allegations that Nasr had tried to recruit jihadists. Salvini said the abduction was illegal because it violated Italian sovereignty and that it disrupted an ongoing police investigation. Egypt has refused Italian requests for information on the whereabouts of Nasr.

Treaty obligations

The UN Convention against Torture (UNCAT) Article 3 states:

1. No State Party shall expel, return ("refouler") or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.
2. For the purpose of determining whether there are such grounds, the competent authorities shall take into account all relevant considerations including, where applicable, the existence in the State concerned of a consistent pattern of gross, flagrant or mass violations of human rights.

Any state that is a signatory of the UNCAT and passes an individual to another state where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture would be in breach of their treaty obligations, which most Western governments would be reluctant to do.

Other countries

In 2003, Britain's Ambassador for Uzbekistan, Craig Murray made accusations that information was being extracted under extreme torture from dissidents in that country, and that the information was subsequently being used by Britain and other western, democratic countries which disapproved of torture.

The accusations did not lead to any investigation by his employer, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and he resigned after disciplinary action was taken against him in 2004. No misconduct by him was proven. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office itself is being investigated by the National Audit Office because of accusations that it has victimised, bullied and intimidated its own staff, as reported in the Sunday Times on 20 March 2005.

Murray later stated that he felt that he had unwittingly stumbled upon what has been called "torture by proxy". He thought that Western countries moved people to regimes and nations where it was known that information would be extracted by torture, and made available to them. If it was true that a country was doing this and it had signed the UN Convention Against Torture then that country would be in breach of Article 3 of that convention.

See also

Reference

External links

2005

2004

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