Tuesday, May 03, 2005

International exchange programs

Over the weekend the New York Times reported on evidence that the United States has regularly sent terror suspects to Uzbekistan, an “authoritarian state” known for beating and asphyxiating prisoners, boiling body parts, using electroshock on genitals and “plucking off fingernails and toenails with pliers.” The State Department’s 2005 report on Uzbekistan states bluntly: “The police force and the intelligence service use torture as a routine investigation technique.” But Uzbekistan’s role as a “surrogate jailer” for the United States has been “confirmed by a half-dozen current and former intelligence officials working in Europe, the Middle East and the United States.”

  Think Progress article

When CIA Airlines isn’t busy ferrying U.S. detainees to torture-friendly foreign countries, it’s apparently bringing men like Sudanese Maj. Gen. Salah Abdallah Gosh – who played a “key role” in actually directing the massacres in Darfur, according to U.S. officials – to America.

[...]

Mass killings? Coordinated rape campaigns? That hasn’t stopped the Bush administration from buddying up to Gosh, the top intelligence chief in Sudan, according to the Los Angeles Times. Just last week, the CIA brought him to Washington “for secret meetings sealing Khartoum’s sensitive and previously veiled partnership with the administration.” It’s all part of a White House plan to “forge a close intelligence partnership with the Islamic regime that once welcomed Osama bin Laden,” offering Sudan increased ties and “normalized” intelligence relations in return for coordination in crackdowns on al-Qaeda militants and other suspected terrorists.

  Think Progress article

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