WASHINGTON - According to his memoirs,
Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel considered the secret
abduction and rendition to Germany of suspected
Resistance members - otherwise known as the
Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog) Decree - to
be the worst of all of the orders issued by Adolf
Hitler for the Western-occupied territories of the
Third Reich during World War II.
But the
fuehrer thought it would be effective in deterring
sabotage, which often claimed innocent civilian
lives, as well as those of German soldiers,
officers and civilian occupation officials. So he
decreed that, with the exception of those cases
where guilt could
be
established beyond a doubt, presumably through
torture, anyone arrested on suspicion of
"endangering German security" was to be
transferred to Germany under "cover of night".
"The prisoners are to be transported to
Germany secretly ...," according to the directive
issued in February 1942 by Keitel, then chief of
the German High Command. "These measures will have
a deterrent effect because [a] the prisoners will
vanish without leaving a trace, [and] [b] no
information may be given as to their whereabouts
or their fate."
"Effective intimidation,"
Keitel, who would be executed for war crimes in
1946, had written in an earlier directive, "can
only be achieved either by capital punishment or
by measures by which the relatives of the criminal
and the population do not know his fate."
While the Germans practiced this early
form of what Human Rights Watch (HRW) last year
called "a quintessential evil practiced by abusive
governments", primarily for its presumed value in
deterring others from participating in resisting
Nazi occupation, Nacht und Nebel was the
earliest known 20th century precursor of what the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) refers to as
"renditions".
The line between the two, of
course, is not a direct one. Nacht und
Nebel-type practices were used by the French
themselves with great elan in trying to suppress
successive uprisings in Algeria in the 1950s. Some
experts believe that subsequent French military
training programs, as much as Nazi fugitives such
as Klaus Barbie (the "Butcher of Lyon" during the
German occupation), introduced them to Latin
America, where they really came into their own in
the 1970s, when they were called "disappearances".
While the practice of "disappearances" has
since spread around the globe - according to HRW,
Iraq and Sri Lanka accounted for the most cases
between 1980 and 2003 - it was precisely in the
southern cone of Latin America that the technique
was successfully internationalized under
"Operation Condor".
The operation, which
was conceived and effectively headed by Chilean
president Augusto Pinochet, brought together the
intelligence agencies of Argentina, Paraguay,
Bolivia and Uruguay, as well as Pinochet's own
secret police chief, Manuel Contreras, in 1975.
Although not a charter member, Brazil also
participated.
Its purpose was to "enhance
communications among each other and integrate
tactical operations in tracking down, secretly
detaining, torturing and terminating [the lives
of] critics or suspected militants, who were often
referred to as 'terrorists'," according to Peter
Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the Washington-based
National Security Archive (NSA).
"Agents
from one nation would fly to another to
participate in brutal interrogations at secret
detention centers," Kornbluh wrote last week in
the Chilean newspaper, Siete. "Often the Condor
victim would be secretly rendered back to his
country of origin to another secret torture camp
for further interrogation before being killed." As
in occupied France, families would never be
informed.
"The terrorist problem is
general to the entire southern cone," Argentina's
foreign minister, Admiral Cesar Gazetti, told
then-secretary of state Henry Kissinger in 1976,
according to a secret US document obtained by the
NSA four years ago. "To combat it, we are
encouraging joint efforts to integrate with our
neighbors."
"Other parallels between
Condor and the CIA's rendition program are
despicably similar," Kornbluh told Inter Press
Service. "In fact, virtually from conception to
implementation to methodology of actual torture
practices to the mendacious denials that they are
taking place, they could be considered carbon
copies."
Thus, just as Condor was based on
multinational cooperation in which each member
knew what the other was doing on its territory, so
the US, at least according to Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice, has relied on the acquiescence,
if not active collaboration, of its allies in the
"war on terror". These include Eastern European
countries that have reportedly provided secret
detention centers, and certain Arab "friends",
such as Egypt and Morocco, where torture is
common.
The US "has fully respected the
sovereignty of other countries that cooperate in
these matters", Rice noted on Monday. Intelligence
cooperation between the US and Europe, she
stressed, has "helped protect European countries
from attack, helping save European lives".
Even some techniques are common, Kornbluh
wrote in Siete. "Condor victims were submitted to
what their Southern cone torturers called 'the wet
submarine', while President George W Bush has
reportedly authorized 'waterboarding', the CIA
equivalent."
There are also major
differences between CIA renditions and Condor;
among them, the fact that Condor's targets were
virtually all eventually killed, while the US has
merely tried to hold its suspected terrorists
incommunicado indefinitely.
And while
Condor officials brazenly denied their
responsibility for "disappearances", US officials
have simply refused to comment, citing, as Rice
did on Monday, fears that "intelligence, law
enforcement and military operations" could be
compromised.
And, in the kind of
legalistic subtlety of which the Condor regimes
seemed largely incapable, US officials have based
their insistence that they have done nothing that
violates US or international law - assertions that
cause nothing but consternation among human rights
experts - on carefully constructed sentences that,
on close examination, appear designed to mislead,
rather than to outright lie.
Thus, Rice
stressed on Monday that the US government had not
transported detainees to other countries "for the
purpose" of interrogation using torture, as
opposed, for example, to transporting to them to
other countries where torture is commonplace.
Such assertions may now be tested in a
court of law by Khaled el-Masri who, according to
the Washington Post, was detained by local
authorities while on holiday in Macedonia in 2003,
beaten, drugged and flown by a CIA rendition group
to a secret prison in Afghanistan.
He says
he underwent coercive interrogation and
confinement for five months before being released,
two months after the CIA concluded it was a case
of mistaken identity. Such cases no doubt also
plagued the German occupation in the Western
sector and Condor's overseers.
El-Masri,
who is, perhaps ironically, a citizen of Germany,
is suing former CIA director George Tenet with the
help of the American Civil Liberties Union. In
filing the suit in Washington on Tuesday, the
group said it was seeking to "reaffirm that the
rule of law is central to our identity as a
nation".
