'54 countries' helped in
rendition support By Charles Recknagel
An
international human rights group says 54 foreign
governments participated in the US intelligence
agency's secret detention and rendition operations
following terrorist attacks on the United States
on September 11, 2001.
The new
report, prepared by the New York-based Open
Society, is the most extensive description yet
prepared by a nongovernmental organization
concerning a highly classified program run by the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
The
report details the fates of 136 known victims of
the CIA's program to detain suspected terrorists
and transfer them without legal process across
national borders. Many of the suspects were
transferred to foreign governments that used
torture or sent to
clandestine sites operated
by the US intelligence agency itself.
The
report, which comes more than 10 years after the
2001 attacks, says the CIA's goal was to place the
detained suspects "beyond the reach of law" where
they were subject to human rights abuses.
Amrit Singh, the author of the report,
suggests the foreign governments' involvement in
the secret program means they share responsibility
along with the United States for its abuses.
"The report shows that 54 governments were
complicit in various ways," she says, "including
by hosting CIA secret prisons on their territory,
by capturing detainees, by transferring them to
different locations, by providing intelligence
that led to their capture, and numerous other ways
that basically made them complicit in a web of
torture operations around the world."
Singh, speaking from New York, says she
found evidence that 25 countries in Europe, 14 in
Asia, and 13 in Africa lent some sort of
assistance to the CIA in addition to Canada and
Australia.
'Still no
redress' According to the Open Society
report, Afghanistan and Romania were among the
countries where there were secret prisons run by
the CIA. The report says that Azerbaijan,
Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, the Czech Republic,
Macedonia, Romania, and Uzbekistan were among the
countries that allowed planes carrying suspects
detained by the CIA to overfly or transit their
territory.
It also claims that Azerbaijan,
Georgia, Iran, and Macedonia were among the
countries that themselves detained suspects and
turned them over to the CIA.
Moreover, the
report maintains that Iran was involved in the
capture and indirect transfer of individuals to
the CIA. It says that "in March 2002, the Iranian
government transferred 15 individuals to the
government of Afghanistan, which in turn
transferred 10 of these individuals to the US
government."
Syria, Egypt, and Jordan were
the most common destinations for rendered
suspects, according to the report. Pakistan
"captured detained, interrogated, tortured, and
abused individuals subjected to CIA secret
detention," as did Afghanistan.
Singh says
that the United States and most of its partner
governments have yet to meaningfully acknowledge
their role in perpetrating violations or to
provide appropriate redress to the victims. She
calls it their moral obligation to do so.
"As a matter of law and as a moral
obligation, it is incumbent on the United States
and all of its partner governments to own up to
the truth of what they did and to provide redress
for the human rights violations that they
committed," she says. "It is important not only as
a matter of justice but also to ensure that this
does not happen again."
Fierce
debate The CIA's secret operations remain a
subject of fierce debate in the United States,
where members of the former administration of
President George W Bush say they helped to
safeguard the United States against further
terrorist attacks.
US President Barack
Obama banned the use of what the Bush
administration termed "enhanced interrogation
techniques." But Obama rejected calls for a
national commission to investigate the practices
when he took office in 2009, saying he wanted to
look forward, not backward.
Human rights
activists say he has revived the controversy by
nominating John Brennan to be the new head of the
CIA. Brennan, whose senate confirmation hearing is
on February 7, was the director of the CIA's
National Security Counterterrorism Center under
Bush. He defended rendition practices on the PBS
Newshour program in 2005.
"I think
it's an absolutely vital tool," he told the TV
broadcaster. "I have been intimately familiar now
over the past decade with the cases of rendition
that the US government has been involved in and I
can say without a doubt that it has been very
successful as far as producing intelligence that
has saved lives."
In a 2007 interview with
CBS News, Brennan said enhanced interrogation
tactics have produced "a lot of information...
that the agency has in fact used against the real
hard-core terrorists. It has saved lives."
He has since distanced himself from the
Bush-era policies by saying he never supported the
controversial practice of waterboarding to extract
information from detainees.
According to
Singh, the exact application of policies today is
uncertain.
"There have been some reports
that renditions into the United States for
purposes of criminal prosecution are continuing,"
she says. "The precise details of those cases are
not fully known, but that apparently is still
ongoing. Whether or not the transfers [to foreign
countries] are taking place for the purposes of
detention and interrogation is unclear."
Convictions and
lawsuits Congress launched its own
investigations into the CIA's secret programs
after the September 11 attacks but the results
remain classified.
The new report is
almost sure to add fuel to the debate in the
United States as well as in some of the countries
that participated in the program. In recent years,
several victims of the program have successfully
filed lawsuits over their abduction or abuse.
On February 1, an appeals court in Milan
reversed a lower court's acquittal of a former CIA
station chief in Italy and two other Americans in
the 2003 abduction of Egyptian cleric Osama Hassan
Mustafa Nasr from a Milan street. The decision
means the three, who had previously been acquitted
on the grounds of diplomatic immunity, now join 23
other Americans convicted for the abduction in
absentia by Italy in 2009.
And in
December, the European Court of Human Rights ruled
that Macedonia violated the rights of German
citizen Khaled el-Masri before he was forwarded to
a secret CIA detention facility in Afghanistan.
The court ruled that his ill-treatment at the
Skopje airport, where he was held incommunicado
and abused, amounted to torture.
Copyright
(c) 2013, RFE/RL Inc. Reprinted with the
permission of Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW,
Washington DC 20036
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