Outsourcing torture

On January 27th, President Bush, in an interview with the Times, assured the world that “torture is never acceptable, nor do we hand over people to countries that do torture.” Maher Arar, a Canadian engineer who was born in Syria, was surprised to learn of Bush’s statement. Two and a half years ago, American officials, suspecting Arar of being a terrorist, apprehended him in New York and sent him back to Syria, where he endured months of brutal interrogation, including torture.
  article

Who are you going to believe? Your president or an Arab foreigner?

In Afghanistan, the CIA's secret U.S. interrogation center in Kabul is known as "The Pit," named for its despairing conditions. In Iraq, the most important prisoners are kept in a huge hangar near the runway at Baghdad International Airport, say U.S. government officials, counterterrorism experts and others. In Qatar, U.S. forces have been ferrying some Iraqi prisoners to a remote jail on the gigantic U.S. air base in the desert.

The Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where a unit of U.S. soldiers abused prisoners, is just the largest and suddenly most notorious in a worldwide constellation of detention centers -- many of them secret and all off-limits to public scrutiny -- that the U.S. military and CIA have operated in the name of counterterrorism or counterinsurgency operations since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

[...]

These prisons and jails are sometimes as small as shipping containers and as large as the sprawling Guantanamo Bay complex in Cuba. They are part of an elaborate CIA and military infrastructure whose purpose is to hold suspected terrorists or insurgents for interrogation and safekeeping while avoiding U.S. or international court systems, where proceedings and evidence against the accused would be aired in public. Some are even held by foreign governments at the informal request of the United States.

[...]

Although some of those held by the military in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo have had visits by the International Committee of the Red Cross, some of the CIA's detainees have, in effect, disappeared, according to interviews with former and current national security.

[...]

None of the arrangements that permit U.S. personnel to kidnap, transport, interrogate and hold foreigners are ad hoc or unauthorized, including the so-called renditions. "People tend to regard it as an extra-judicial kidnapping; it's not," former CIA officer Peter Probst said. "There is a long history of this. It has been done for decades. It's absolutely legal."

[...]

In fact, every aspect of this new universe -- including maintenance of covert airlines to fly prisoners from place to place, interrogation rules and the legal justification for holding foreigners without due process afforded most U.S. citizens -- has been developed by military or CIA lawyers, vetted by Justice Department's office of legal counsel and, depending on the particular issue, approved by White House general counsel's office or the president himself.
  WaPo article

The Justice Department has again asserted ”state secrets privilege” in seeking to dismiss a lawsuit by Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian citizen who was detained in the United States in 2002 and sent against his will to Syria, where he says he was tortured until his release a year later.

[...]

Arar was transported to Syria under a U.S. government program known as ”extreme rendering” -- taking detainees to countries where prison authorities are known to practice torture.

The program has been used extensively by the CIA, which uses leased Gulfstream business jets for its flights. The U.S. government has acknowledged that it engages in ”extreme rendering”, but insists that countries to which its prisoners are taken provide ”diplomatic assurance” that they will be treated humanely.

It is generally thought that the rendering practice may be responsible for some of the ”ghost detainees” from Iraq and Afghanistan -- U.S. prisoners whose identities have been hidden from the International Committee of the Red Cross.
  Common Dreams article

Here is a sure-fire nomination for the most outrageous quote of the week: "Accusations that we are torturing people tend to be mythology." These are the words an unnamed Egyptian official questioned by The Washington Post about prisoner abuse. However, here are the facts of the case the paper was inquiring about. An Egyptian-born Australian citizen, who was a prisoner at the U.S. Naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, charges that the American government forcibly transferred him to Egypt, where he was tortured for six months, before being returned to American custody. He has petitioned a U.S. Federal Court to block plans to send him back to an Egyptian prison a second time.
  ZZPat January 17, 2005 article

Rumors, snapshots, and speculations have been circulating on airplane geek sites and political message boards for some time now about "N379P." This and other registration numbers are believed to belong to a plane used by the CIA to transport detainees to interrogation sites -- in foreign countries known to subject prisoners to torture. A story in the Chicago Tribune has more, and begins with an attempt to track down the name under which the craft is registered. None of the known registration numbers are listed in the FAA database.
  article January 11, 2005

The Guantanamo Bay Express and another jet used by military, have been sold off by the phantom company that 'owned' them.

[...]

FIRST we exposed them, and they hope that changing the registration of the aircraft will cover their tracks.

Then more activists found out the new registration, and it got published on websites worldwide within 24 hours.

So, now the phantom company that 'owned' the Guantanamo Bay Express and the equally mysterious 737 has 'sold' them on to two more dodgy companies, in an obvious attempt to blur the chain of evidence.
  Indymedia article December 10, 2004

Update 2:00 pm:

MATTHEWS: Welcome back to HARDBALL.

During his confirmation hearings, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales argued that the U.N.‘s ban on cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, degrading treatment, of terrorist suspects does not apply to U.S. interrogation of foreigners in other countries.

And in this week‘s “New Yorker” magazine, Jane Mayer reports that the rendition secret extraordinary rendition program — that‘s what it‘s called - to capture terrorist suspects and then send them overseas has expanded beyond its original intent.

[...]

My notion of rendition is, we catch a bad guy, somebody we think is a bad guy. He is not a soldier. He is a terrorist. We don‘t want to use the rubber hose on him or whatever, so we send him to a nice pleasant jail cell in Cairo four levels down in the dark, and that‘s where we get the truth out of him. Is that what rendition is?

JANE MAYER, “THE NEW YORKER”: That is what they‘re doing. But that‘s how it was in the old days.

Now we‘re also taking some of these guys into our own hands. We‘re having them beat up in another country and then we‘re putting them in places like Guantanamo or if they‘re really high-value suspects, we‘re taking them ourselves. The CIA has got people in detention facilities almost all around the world.

MATTHEWS: So, generally, your story, you talked about Syria as an example in your piece. I was amazed that the Syrians were on our side.

MAYER: Early on, they were. They‘re not now. Before the war in Iraq, they were trying to work with us. And, after the war in Iraq, they‘ve stopped doing that. We‘re mostly using Egypt at this point. We‘re using Jordan a lot, too, to outsource some of these things.
  Hardball transcript