US sent hundreds of terror suspects to foreign prisons
Michael Givel
Independent/UK
US sent hundreds of terror suspects to foreign prisons
By Rupert Cornwell in Washington
07 March 2005
The CIA has transferred an estimated 100 and 150 terrorist suspects to
foreign countries for questioning - and, it is widely alleged, torture
- since rules governing the American policy of "rendition" were relaxed
immediately after the September 2001 terrorist attacks.
The disclosure, in The New York Times yesterday, throws new light on a
practice fiercely criticised by human rights groups, who claim
Washington is ignoring the standards it urges on others. Among the
countries to which detainees have been sent are Syria, Saudi Arabia,
Egypt and Jordan, all named in the State Department's annual report on
human rights worldwide as countries that use torture in their
prisons.
The practice of rendition long predates the terrorist attacks in New
York and Washington, but it was previously applied on a specific
case-by-case basis, needing approval by several government departments.
According to George Tenet, the former CIA director, 72 suspects were
moved in this way, some of them from foreign countries into the US from
abroad, before 11 September 2001.
But since then the traffic has grown much heavier, under a directive
approved by President Bush shortly after 11 September, allowing far
greater latitude to the CIA. In recent days, several cases, where
individuals were quietly sent back to their countries of birth and then
held incommunicado and beaten and tortured before being released with
no charges being brought, has brought the controversy to a new pitch.
In one instance, Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen born in Syria was
picked up at JFK airport in New York and sent to Syria where he claims
to have been imprisoned for 12 months and beaten. Another detainee,
Mamdouh Habib, an Egyptian-born Australian, was detained in Pakistan in
late 2001 and says he suffered similar treatment in prisons in Egypt,
Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay, before being released in January. Mr
Habib's lawyer has described rendition as "outsourcing of torture".
A similar debate surrounds the case of Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, a US citizen
and son of Jordanian immigrants, accused of being an al-Qa'ida member
and plotting to assassinate President Bush. Mr Abu Ali says the US
authorities prodded the local police to detain him while he was
studying in Saudi Arabia. There, he says, he was tortured, before being
returned to the US for trial.
In every instance the complaint against the US is the same, that, in
violation of previous US practice and the spirit of international
treaties outlawing torture, it routinely handed over prisoners to
countries where the use of torture was commonplace.
US officials told the Times that rendition was just one among several
methods of dealing with terrorist suspects, and that it had made every
reasonable effort to ensure that transferred prisoners were treated
properly. The Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales - under fire himself
for endorsing more permissive policies on torture when he was White
House counsel during Mr Bush's first term - insists that the US in no
way condones torture.
In another move, Washington has begun a major overhaul of its
counterintelligence operations, to carry the battle directly against
agents of al-Qa'ida and the intelligence services of Iran and other
countries considered hostile to America. Henceforth, the separate
counterintelligence branches of the currently fragmented US
intelligence community will be united in a new Office of the National
Counterintelligence Executive.