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| International-UN-NGOs |
| CIA rendition program revealed |
| 2005-02-14 |
| MAMDOUH Habib and Maher Arar have much in common. Both were born in the Middle East but live in the West, both were detained by the US as suspected terrorists, and both claim to have been tortured under the CIA's top secret "extraordinary renditions" program. Few details are known of the renditions program. And the US Government intends keeping it that way: in a New York lawsuit begun by Arar, a Canadian citizen, the US is claiming "state secrets privilege" to avoid any discussion of the case. With virtually nothing officially acknowledged, details of the rules, scope and size of the program are sketchy at best. But former CIA officials say it does exist and, with the post-September 11 premium on the speedy acquisition of information on terrorism, appears to have expanded. Some lawyers believe more than 100 people have been "rendered" secretly to foreign governments. According to media reports, the CIA is using a white GulfstreamV jet to shift people around. One such jet has been logged on numerous trips from Washington to restricted-access US military bases and countries such as Egypt. There have also been the shocking allegations from people such as Habib and Arar - men the US insists are terrorist-linked and therefore not credible. Habib, 49, an Australian-Egyptian released last month from Guantanamo Bay, says he was kidnapped by Americans and sent to Egypt for six months of torture shortly after being arrested in Pakistan in October 2001. (He says an Australian official witnessed the transfer; Australia denies this.) Arar, 34, says the US grabbed him at a New York airport in September 2002 as he was returning to Canada after a holiday in Tunisia. He claims he was flown to Jordan by American pilots and then taken to Syria - where he was born - and tortured for nearly a year. In an interview with The New Yorker magazine published last week, Arar says the pilots identified themselves on the radio as "the special removal unit". Once in Syria, he claims, he was whipped with electrical cables, kept in a grave-like cell, and eventually confessed to anything he was asked. Only when the Canadian Government sought his release did Syria hand him back. "They are outsourcing torture because they know it's illegal," Arar says in The New Yorker of the CIA program. In Habib's case, he claims in a US court document that he was flown by Americans on a plane from Pakistan to Egypt. The New Yorker says flight logs of a GulfstreamV jet suspected of being used in renditions show it left Dulles airport outside Washington on April 9 for Cairo, about the time Habib says he was released and sent by the US to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. From there he went to Guantanamo Bay. Can any of this be true? Yes, says the man who helped set up the renditions program, former CIA officer and Islamic terrorist specialist Michael Scheuer. Scheuer, who spoke to The Australian, is wary of claims that Habib was tortured, but does not discount it. But he confirms the existence of the program itself - and says it would have made sense not only for Habib to be sent to Egypt, but for the US to have informed Australia of it. "In the times I was responsible for these kinds of operations, we only had one that I recall that was a dual-citizen of another country," he recalls. "And we did, indeed, inform that country of our intention to arrest and take this person to - I can't remember if it was Egypt - but the country was a traditional ally, and we did inform them beforehand and had their acquiescence." Australia denies that it was ever officially told that Habib was sent to Egypt. But the Howard Government says it believes Habib was in Egypt - it just won't say how it knows that. Scheuer says the renditions program was a response to a realisation at the CIA in 1996-97 that al-Qaeda and allies such as the Egyptian group Islamic Jihad posed a serious threat. When the intelligence was shown to the National Security Council of former US president Bill Clinton administration, "it clearly got their interest" and the agency was asked to dismantle and disrupt the network, and detain Islamic terrorists. "We said, 'Fine, OK, what do you want us to do with these people?' And basically, the response from the NSC was 'you figure that out'," Scheuer says. The plan the CIA produced was to focus on individuals who were wanted in a third country, and during Scheuer's tenure he worked most closely and frequently with Egypt. The idea was not to grab any terrorist and send them to a friendly Middle Eastern intelligence agency so they could be tortured, he stresses. Instead, the CIA would hunt down the terror suspect, and if they were wanted or had been convicted in absentia in their home country, they would be delivered back to them. The purpose was twofold - "to get them off the street and to find out if they knew anything pertinent to the protection of the US". The CIA would provide many of the questions for the interrogations. "I can't answer the case of Habib - what I can tell you is I was never involved in one of these operations where we did not supply areas of interest or specific questions we wanted answers to," he says. "That's Intelligence 101." Could ASIO material have been used by the Egyptians? Yes, but Scheuer says the CIA would only have passed on information drawn from Australian intelligence material with the permission of Australia. "If it was something that would help us form a better question, we would want to do it. But we would not do it without the permission of the originating service," he says. Why would the Egyptians be better at finding out than the CIA? They wouldn't, says Scheuer. "We simply had nowhere to take them and talk to them over a period of time," he says, while refusing to comment on claims that since the September 11 attacks the agency has acquired such foreign interrogation bases. "The policy was never thought through in terms of 'where do we take these people?"'. Scheuer says the FBI and Clinton administration did not want them in the US, where the legal process was too rigid, "and so the agency had to find a way to find the people, find a way to capture them, and then take them somewhere where some legal process would be undertaken against them". Egypt was a favourite, because there were many Egyptians associated with al-Qaeda, and the Egyptians - well known to the CIA for decades - were willing to help. But the Egyptians would also have to say that they would treat the prisoner in accordance with their laws. In every case, he says, CIA lawyers had to approve the rendition, and guarantees had to be obtained that the prisoner would be treated according to the country's legal system. But while he gives some credence to Habib's claim to be caught up in this program, he is not so sure about the claims of torture. "The view of the Egyptians as wanton torturers is Hollywood stuff," he says. "They're much more professional and effective than that. But I can imagine them using much more physical methods of persuasion than Americans would ever use." He says he has never heard of rooms filling with water that Habib claims to have been tortured in. "Certainly no one has ever said that to us," Scheuer says. "And frankly, it's not a question I'm going to look at very closely." Why not? "If I have authority to deal with a foreign service and the lawyers have cleared it, then my responsibility is to do my best to protect America using that relationship, and I'm not going to look very hard for something that would destroy one potential avenue of protecting American interests." And while Habib's allegations of Egyptian torture sound bizarre - he was allegedly electrocuted and hung on hooks, as well as shackled in rooms of rising water so he feared he would drown - that does not mean they are false. When Habib's lawyers claimed in January that he had been held down so a prostitute could smear him with menstrual blood at Guantanamo Bay, the allegation was so nightmarish it seemed he had lost his mind or was lying. Then, within a few days, a former US military translator at the base revealed in a draft from a book that such techniques had been used to try to shock the Muslim men into co-operating with their interrogators. And in the past few days, The Washington Post reported that a US military inquiry has learned of several more cases where women soldiers used sexually provocative tactics - and sometimes smeared prisoners with red ink as mock menstrual blood - to try to break the religiously devout inmates. The fake-blood claim underscores two important points now that Habib is back in Australia. It means that even the most repulsive and unlikely allegations about the treatment of terror suspects ought not be rejected out of hand. And, whatever the truth of Habib's terrorist links, it adds some credibility to his claims. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |
| #3 Um... were they members of AQ? Were they captured in uniform? If not, then they are owed nothing except a bullet in the brain. Offending someones' sensibilities is not torture. Moreover, nor is simply executing someone. (Mock executions are torture.) Notwithstanding that, if we don't enagage in torture of these individuals (effectively captured spies), it is merely because it is unseemly and ineffective, but these prisoners are due none of the courtesy we give to members of military organizations. And if the left doesn't like torture in principle, let 'em try and ban it in those countries who practice it as a matter of policy through their ineffectual protests (which never seem to happen). I can hear the crickets chirping... |
| Posted by: Mark E. 2005-02-14 12:22:11 PM |
| #2 The article doesn't say anything about these people being innocent of the crimes of which they are accused in their home country, just that the CIA delivered them there. We have a duty to try to protect the innocent, inasmuch as we can, but certainly not to protect the guilty. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2005-02-14 11:59:04 AM |
| #1 it adds some credibility to his claims. and we care...because.....Anyone, Bueller? |
| Posted by: 2b 2005-02-14 11:44:08 AM |