Yet Another Evil Tale of Rendition and Torture

By Meteor Blades

Since the megamedia began their belated awakening, it's become an all-too-familiar horror story. Police show up at the door, arrest a family member, drive somewhere and hand their prisoner over to often-masked English-speakers who transport him to a secret location where he is held incommunicado for months or years, during which he is tortured in various ways. If he survives - he may not - he is released without apology or explanation, or transferred from prison to prison, or carted off to Guantánamo for an extended stay. Or, as happened in Italy three years ago, U.S. intelligence agents collaborate with their foreign counterparts to kidnap the fellow right off the streets and fly him wherever they like: Egypt, Morocco, Libya, Thailand, Afghanistan, Eastern Europe.

Rendition. How many of these cases there are we may never know.

The New York Times reports on another one this morning:

[An Algerian named Laid Saidi who was living in Tanzania] is one of a handful of men to publicly claim they were seized in the [U.S.] rendition program and then mistreated or tortured, before being released without charge or explanation. Like prisoners released from the American military detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, they represent not only a mounting political problem, but a potential legal problem for the United States and its allies that have participated in the extrajudicial abductions.

After being held for a week in a prison in the mountains of Malawi, Mr. Saidi said, a group of people arrived in a sport utility vehicle: a gray-haired Caucasian woman and five men dressed in black wearing black masks revealing only their eyes.

The Malawians blindfolded him, and his clothes were cut away, he said. He heard someone taking photographs. Then, he said, the blindfold was removed and the agents covered his eyes with cotton and tape, inserted a plug in his anus and put a disposable diaper on him before dressing him. He said they covered his ears, shackled his hands and feet and drove him to an airplane where they put him on the floor.

"It was a long trip, from Saturday night to Sunday morning, " Mr. Saidi recalled. When the plane landed, he said, he was taken to what he described as a "dark prison" filled with deafening Western music. The lights were rarely turned on.

Men in black arrived, he said, and he remembers one shouting at him through an interpreter: "You are in a place that is out of the world. No one knows where you are, no one is going to defend you."

He said the interrogators left him chained for five days without clothes or food. "They beat me and threw cold water on me, spat at me and sometimes gave me dirty water to drink," he said. "The American man told me I would die there." ...

In Tanzania, Saidi had briefly headed the Al Haramain Islamic Foundation, a now-dismantled Muslim charity that the U.S. has identified as financing terrorist groups. I cannot pretend to know whether Saidi was doing what he says they accused him of doing. Perhaps so. If he was, it in no way justifies the barbaric treatment to which he claims to have been subjected. That is why civilized nations have trials in which the accused can defend themselves.

In prison, Mr. Saidi said, he was interrogated daily, sometimes twice a day, for weeks. Eventually, he said, his interrogators produced an audiotape of the conversation in which he had allegedly talked about planes.

But Mr. Saidi said he was talking about tires, not planes, that his brother-in-law planned to sell from Kenya to Tanzania. He said he was mixing English and Arabic and used the word "tirat," making "tire" plural by adding an Arabic "at" sound. Whoever was monitoring the conversation apparently understood the word as "tayarat," Arabic for planes, Mr. Saidi said.

"When I heard it, I asked the Moroccan translator if he understood what we were saying in the recording," Mr. Saidi said. After the Moroccan explained it to the interrogators, Mr. Saidi said, he was never asked about it again.

"Why did they bring me to Afghanistan to ask such questions?" he said in the interview. "Why didn't they ask me in Tanzania? Why did they have to take me away from my family? Torture me?"

Because they could. Because there was nobody there to defend him, just as his interrogator said. Because, even though the Bush Regime does not condone torture, its minions engage in it. Not to do so would make them quaint wimps. Because, as we well know, instead of supporting an international criminal justice system with teeth, Mister Bush and his cowardly backers would rather do things their way, outside the reach of both international and U.S. law. If somebody gets maimed or dies in the process, well, that's just too bad. They're just wogs anyway and, even if they're not terrorists, they probably cheered the events of Nine-Eleven.

As I said, we'll probably never know how many rendited prisoners there are in the Bush Regime's gulag. We may never even know how many prisons.

One is, according to a February story in the Times (of London), under construction in Morocco

The United States is helping Morocco to build a new interrogation and detention facility for Al-Qaeda suspects near its capital, Rabat, according to western intelligence sources.

The sources confirmed last week that building was under way at Ain Aouda, above a wooded gorge south of Rabat's diplomatic district. Locals said they had often seen American vehicles with diplomatic plates in the area.

The construction of the new compound, run by the Direction de la Securité du Territoire (DST), the Moroccan secret police, adds to a substantial body of evidence that Morocco is one of America's principal partners in the secret "rendition" programme in which the CIA flies prisoners to third countries for interrogation.

And there are some so far unverifiable reasons to believe that one may exist in Libya now that Muammar Kadafi has become one of Mister Bush's ironic allies in the war on terror, that country coincidentally being the locale of the largest pool of petroleum in all of Africa.

U.S. intelligence cooperation with Kadafi has helped him tighten his grip on dissent. Particularly galling to anyone with a human heart is the CIA's collaboration with Musa Kusa, head of Libya's foreign intelligence service, who is suspected of having had direct ties to the Lockerbie bombing of Pan Am 103 and to the plot to kill Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Abdullah, who became king in August 2005 after the death of King Fahd.

The Los Angeles Times reported in September 2005:

According to a State Department report this year, Kusa's agency was part of an "extensive security apparatus" overseeing a "pervasive surveillance system." Security forces have held numerous detainees for years without charge or trial, and torture was routinely used on political foes, the report says. Methods allegedly included beatings, electric shock, pouring lemon juice on open wounds, breaking fingers "and allowing the joints to heal without medical care," suffocation with plastic bags and hanging by the wrists. ...

In October 2001, Libya's Justice Ministry offered $1 million for information leading to the detention of six exiles, including [Ashur] Shamis [a prominent London-based Libyan exile and longtime proponent of democratic reform], who was accused of funneling money from a bank robbery in Libya to Al Qaeda. The following year, Interpol issued a "wanted" notice for Shamis and several other Kadafi foes on the basis of a request from the Libyan government. Shamis was charged with terrorism and illegal possession of firearms.

Shamis, who has been a vocal critic of Al Qaeda and who has lived near London for most of the last 30 years, was detained at the Orlando, Fla., airport when he came to the U.S. in 2002. He was questioned by local authorities and the FBI, who acknowledged, he said, that he was being interrogated on the basis of information from the Libyan government. Shamis returned to Britain after a night in jail.

"I said to the [U.S. authorities], 'Kadafi used to be Public Enemy No. 1 and now you are arresting people based on his information,' " Shamis said. "The Americans are desperate for any and all information after 9/11, and Kadafi is happy to capitalize on that." ...

The CIA has also allowed Kadafi's intelligence officers to interrogate Libyan prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, according to Clive Stafford Smith, an attorney who represents 38 detainees there. Among his clients is Omar Deghayes, whose family fled to Britain from Libya in 1986, six years after Deghayes' father, a lawyer and dissident, was arrested and executed by Kadafi's regime.

At the end of World War II, the U.S. protected Nazi war criminals in hopes that they might be useful conduits for intelligence about the Soviet Union. But at least they weren't allowed to interrogate prisoners or threaten them with torture and death. Mister Bush and his Mentors have clearly made some adjustments since then.

Comments

[DHinMI]

I was thinking of the Nazi analogy just as I got to it. It's really amazing that in so many ways the Bush administration appears determined to ignore or even distort the historical record of failure regarding collaboration with evil powers and regimes. Like their use of secret evidence and the witless actions of many of the anti-terrorism prosecutors in the DoJ, they're willing to accept any crap evidence to implicate someone in terrorism. On the domestic level the accusations are often made to the DoJ by disgruntled family members or people who stand to gain materially by the incarceration of the individual. On the international level, the claims are made for political reasons, like the Libyan example you cite. On the strategic level, you have Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, and increasingly of late the Iranian exile groups. That on every level the Bush administration can so easily be manipulated by people, groups or governments that can induce actions that benefit the accusers is something worthy of a good analysis. What's the mindset or the political assumption that leads the Bushies to value the ability to act with impunity on such shaky and often self-serving accusations, often to the detriment of national interests and often leading to political damage to the administration (as in the case of the numerous failed terrorism trials in the US)? There's some type of screwed up world view at work here.

[Mimikatz]

It has been proven over and over that torture doesn't work nearly as well as interrogation by cajolement, as the FBI teaches. But the latter takes skill and patience and an understanding of the subject, something sorely lacking in the Bush Regime.

There is an article in the July 10 & 17 "New Yorker" by Lawrence Wright about a young Lebanese-American FBI agent named Ali Soufan who was head of the Cole bombing investigation. He was a master of interrogation using the standard FBI techniques of befriending the witness and exploiting his psychological weaknesses. Plus he spoke Arabic and had an encyclopedic knowledge of the Koran. The long and short of it is that he probably could have put the pieces of the 9/11 plot together if the CIA had given him the information he kept requesting. But they didn't, because of turf and suspicions of his boss, John O'Neill.

The article (Wright will come out with a book next month called "The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11") is worth the price of the magazine. The accounts of his interrogations show how it can and should be done.