Click to enlarge. (Max Fisher — The Washington Post)

See full article at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/02/05/a-staggering-map-of-the-54-countries-that-reportedly-participated-in-the-cias-rendition-program/

After Sept. 11, 2001, the CIA launched a program of “extraordinary rendition” to handle terrorism suspects. The agency’s problem, as it saw it, was that it wanted to detain and interrogate foreign suspects without bringing them to the United States or charging them with any crimes. Their solution was to secretly move a suspect to another country. Sometimes that meant a secret CIA prison in places such as Thailand or Romania, where the CIA would interrogate him. Sometimes it meant handing him over to a sympathetic government, some of them quite nasty, to conduct its own “interrogation.”

The CIA’s extraordinary rendition program is over (?), but its scope is still shrouded in some mystery. A just-out report, released by the Open Society Foundation, sheds new light on its shocking scale. According to the report, 54 foreign governments somehow collaborated in the program. Some of those governments are brutal dictatorships, and a few are outright U.S. adversaries.

Their participation took several forms. Some, such as Poland and Lithuania, allowed the CIA to run secret prisons in their countries. Many Middle Eastern, Central Asian and European countries handed over detainees to the CIA, some of whom those countries captured on the agency’s behalf. Other states, particularly in the Middle East, interrogated detainees on the CIA’s behalf, such as Jordan, which accepted several Pakistanis. Several, such as Greece and Spain, allowed flights associated with the CIA program to use their airports.

Here’s what the Open Society report has to say about the staggeringly global participation in the CIA program, including a full list of the countries it names:

The report also shows that as many as 54 foreign governments reportedly participated in these operations in various ways, including by hosting CIA prisons on their territories; detaining, interrogating, torturing, and abusing individuals; assisting in the capture and transport of detainees; permitting the use of domestic airspace and airports for secret flights transporting detainees; providing intelligence leading to the secret detention and extraordinary rendition of individuals; and interrogating individuals who were secretly being held in the custody of other governments. Foreign governments also failed to protect detainees from secret detention and extraordinary rendition on their territories and to conduct effective investigations into agencies and officials who participated in these operations.

The 54 governments identified in this report span the continents of Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America, and include: Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Canada, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Djibouti, Egypt, Ethiopia, Finland, Gambia, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Iceland, Indonesia, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Libya, Lithuania, Macedonia, Malawi, Malaysia, Mauritania, Morocco, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Syria, Thailand, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, Uzbekistan, Yemen, and Zimbabwe.

I was most curious about the involvement of two governments that are very much adversaries of the United States: those of Iran and Syria. It’s clear that, in both cases, it was an enemy-of-my-enemy calculus. Iran and Syria are both enemies of al-Qaeda and have struggled against Sunni Islamist extremism (Syria’s government is secular, Iran’s is Shia). Here’s the report’s section on Iran:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maher_Arar

 Maher Arar (Arabic: ماهر عرار) (born 1970) is a telecommunications engineer with dual Syrian and Canadian citizenship who has resided in Canadasince 1987. Arar’s story is frequently referred to as “extraordinary rendition” but the US government insisted it was a case of deportation.^{[1][2][3][4][5]}

Arar was detained during a layover at John F. Kennedy International Airport in September 2002 on his way home to Canada from a family vacation inTunis. He was held without charges in solitary confinement in the United States for nearly two weeks, questioned, and denied meaningful access to a lawyer. The US government suspected him of being a member of Al Qaeda and deported him, not to Canada, his current home and the passport on which he was travelling, but to Syria, even though its government is known to use torture.^[6] He was detained in Syria for almost a year, during which time he was tortured, according to the findings of a commission of inquiry ordered by the Canadian government, until his release to Canada. The Syrian government later stated that Arar was “completely innocent.”^[7][8] A Canadian commission publicly cleared Arar of any links to terrorism, and the government of Canada later settled out of court with Arar. He received C$10.5 million and Prime Minister Stephen Harper formally apologized to Arar for Canada’s role in his “terrible ordeal”.^[9][10]

As of December 2011, Arar and his family remained on the US No Fly List.^[11] His US lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights filed a lawsuit,Arar v. Ashcroft, which sought compensatory damages on Arar’s behalf and also a declaration that the actions of the US government were illegal and violated his constitutional, civil, and international human rights. After the lawsuit was dismissed by the Federal District Court, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal on November 2, 2009. The Supreme Court of the United States declined to review the case on June 14, 2010.

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/11/3/appeals_court_rules_in_maher_arar

Read Stephen Grey’s Washington Post online chat from Wednesday, November 7, 2007, where he discusses his story, “Extraordinary Rendition.”

In a crowded city in northern Egypt, FRONTLINE/World investigative reporter Stephen Grey tracks down a man who was once one of the CIA’s “ghost prisoners.” The bulky, bearded man he finds is Abu Omar al-Masri, an Egyptian cleric who had moved to Milan, Italy.

“I was kidnapped on the 17th February, 2003,” he tells Grey. “Then I disappeared from history.”

Abu Omar had been preaching at a mosque in Milan. The Italian police began to suspect that he was recruiting young Muslims to wage jihad against Americans. The CIA put him under surveillance, believing he was plotting a bomb attack on a school bus of American children. One day, CIA agents suddenly snatched him off the streets of Milan and loaded him on to a secret Gulfstream jet. The next thing he knew, he was back in Egypt, where he says he was interrogated and tortured.

“They started to beat me,” says Abu Omar, “with their fists, with sticks, with truncheons.”

Abu Omar says his torture lasted 14 months; the worst of it taking place at the secret police headquarters in Cairo. To date, more than 60 prisoners are believed to have been sent there by the United States.

This is the dark story of “extraordinary rendition,” says Grey, a secret program in which the United States captures terror suspects around the world and flies them to countries like Egypt, Syria or Morocco, where, critics say, torture is routine.

“We cannot deny that there could be some excesses, some acts of cruelty by security officers,” Egyptian General Ahmad Omar tells Grey. But he denies that torture is state policy and he insists that Egyptian and U.S. intelligence agencies are justified in taking action against those suspected of terrorist activities.

Now released from jail, Abu Omar maintains his innocence, saying he’s willing to defend himself in court if the Egyptians or the Americans ever charge him with a crime. Guilty or not, Abu Omar and his rendition have become a disaster for the CIA. Italian police investigating the case were able to identify the CIA agents involved. They are set to go on trial, in absentia, on charges of conspiracy to kidnap — a rare and politically embarrassing instance of a U.S. ally in Europe trying CIA agents in court.

For the last four years, Stephen Grey has been investigating stories of extraordinary rendition like Abu Omar’s. The Bush administration hasn’t spoken about Abu Omar, but under increasing pressure to reveal information about terror suspects apprehended and jailed secretly, they’ve officially acknowledged dozens of cases like his. They claim that when they send terror suspects to other countries, they get assurances they won’t be tortured, but even former CIA officials admit those claims are worthless.

“You can say we asked them not to do it, but you have to be honest with yourself and say there’s no way we can guarantee they are going to do that,” says Tyler Drumheller, who ran CIA operations in Europe at the time Abu Omar was kidnapped and “rendered” to Egypt. “Once you turn them over you have no control over that.”

Drumheller had mixed feelings about renditions abroad, but he was even more concerned about a plan put forward after 9/11 for the CIA to hold prisoners themselves in secret jails.

“We are an intelligence service, an espionage service,” insists Drumheller. “Not jailers, not a policeman, not interrogators. We debrief people; we don’t interrogate them. Everything that the military didn’t want to do or felt uncomfortable doing ended up in the lap of the CIA.”

After the war began in Afghanistan in 2002, the CIA set up its first secret jails or “black sites.” One of them, located just outside Kabul, was known as the “dark prison.”

“The dark prison was run by the Americans,” a former inmate, Bisher al-Rawi, tells Grey. “It wasn’t Afghani people flying the aircraft, it wasn’t Afghani people who sort of shackled me and did whatever they did to me. It was Americans.”

Bisher al-Rawi is an Iraqi-born British resident, who once acted as a messenger between an al Qaeda suspects in London and British intelligence. In 2002, while he was on a business trip to Gambia in West Africa, the CIA had al-Rawi and several colleagues arrested. Bound, gagged and hooded by American agents, al-Rawi was drugged and put on a plane to Afghanistan.

Transferred to the “dark prison,” al-Rawi says he was confined to a cell where, “You can’t see the end of your nose” and where he was subjected to continuous eerie music.

Eventually, he was transferred to Guantanamo Bay, where he spent four years before being released without charge in early 2007. Al-Rawi believes he was held, like many others, just on the hope he’d offer new intelligence.

The “dark prison” in Afghanistan was one of the first CIA “black sites,” but not the last.

By early 2003, the United States was negotiating secret agreements with governments in Eastern Europe to set up black sites on their territory. A report this summer by the Council of Europe declared it had proof of two CIA black sites, one on the east coast of Romania, the other at an airbase in Poland.

“Methods of interrogation were ‘enhanced’, which is a euphemism.  It’s totally unacceptable,” says Dick Marty who led the European investigation of the CIA black sites. “There was waterboarding, when you pretend to drown someone, and you only stop when he’s unable to breathe. Sleep deprivation, bright lights, loud noise. These are all methods of torture.”

The CIA went to great lengths to cover up evidence of the flights that brought men to the Polish black site, but Grey obtains the flight plan of a Gulfstream jet that left three passengers there, including, it appears, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9-11 attacks.

The problem for the CIA was what to do with such prisoners in the long term, since they were being detained outside the U.S. legal system. Under pressure, President Bush announced in September 2006 that the CIA black sites were finally being emptied.

The plan was to bring the al Qaeda prisoners before military tribunals, but their prosecutions may be compromised because they were held for years in CIA secret prisons and subjected to interrogations using extreme techniques.

“We really have created a mess here, a terrible mess,” says Lawrence Wilkerson, who served in the U.S. State Department during the Bush administration. “For the people who are involved in it.  For the legal system that will have to sort it out, under a new president.  For the country.  For our reputation.  For our prestige around the world.  This has been incredibly damaging.”

New questions about the future of extraordinary rendition have now surfaced a world away in East Africa. Grey travels to Mombasa, Kenya, a Muslim city on the Indian Ocean to chase down a rumor of a rendition that took place earlier this year.

This is also the region where al Qaeda declared war on America in 1998 with simultaneous bombings on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed more than 200 people, mostly Africans. The man accused of coordinating the attacks, Fazul Abdullah, alias Harun, has never been caught.

Fazul was said to be hiding in Somalia. Last December, when Ethiopia moved its army into Somalia, the United States went after him, launching bombing raids against the country’s suspected al Qaeda hideouts. Thousands fled for the Kenyan border. Some were picked up in a dragnet by the Kenyan anti-terrorist police and disappeared without a trace.

Outraged Muslims in Mombasa began to protest and a Kenyan human rights lawyer took up the cause. The activist, Alamin Kimathi, shows Grey a flight manifest he obtained as part of the court case. It is rare documentary evidence of an extraordinary rendition. The Kenyans had taken a page out the CIA’s handbook. Eighty-five people, including 11 children, had been put on the planes. The passenger list includes Fazul Abdullah’s wife and daughters.

Kimathi tells Grey he believes the wife and children were “hostages…pure and simple,” detained in an effort to “smoke out” Fazul Abdullah. The tactic did not work.

A former FBI agent involved in anti-terrorist work, Jack Cloonan, says he believes the Kenyans would not have acted without the knowledge and support of the U.S. “It would be naïve frankly in this day and age to think that the FBI or the CIA, primarily the CIA, is not witting of what’s going on. In point of fact I’d suggest to you that they probably were witting and they were the power brokers behind the scenes pushing this forward.”

The prisoners were “rendered” on a Kenyan plane to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, a U.S. ally, which has its own conflicts with neighboring Muslim countries.

Grey believes this could be an indication of a new way in which renditions are being carried out by third countries, while U.S. officials remain in the shadows.

“It’s disappointing,” says former FBI special agent Jack Cloonan.  “The thing that you saw in Africa, where people are being held incommunicado and have no legal representation and potentially abused, is unacceptable. You’re setting up yourself for revenge by al Qaeda and other Islamists.”

This fall, President Bush was forced once more to defend rendition and secret detention. “I have put this program in place for a reason,” Bush told reporters. “When we find somebody who may have information regarding a potential attack on America, you bet we’re going to detain them, and you bet we’re going to question them.”

Despite criticism of “extraordinary renditions” by many CIA insiders, the president has now signed a new executive order that clears the way, once again, for the CIA to interrogate terrorist suspects in secret black sites. See full article and supporting evidence at https://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/rendition701/video/video_index.html

Jessica ElgotBecome a fan

jessica.elgot@huffingtonpost.com

Extraordinary Rendition And The Axis Of Evil, How ‘Enemy’ Nations Iran, Syria, Libya Cooperated With CIA

Posted: 05/02/2013 12:43 GMT  |  Updated: 05/02/2013 20:40 GMT

 See full article at: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/02/05/extraordinary-rendition-axis-of-evil-iran-syria-cia_n_2621401.html

As US President George W Bush made his famous speech about the “axis of evil”, and his administration named countries including Iran, Iraq, Syria and Libya as enemies of the US, his security forces were co-operating, directly and indirectly, with those same countries to kidnap, imprison and torture citizens.

A groundbreaking report published on Tuesday shows that more than 50 countries, a quarter of the world’s nations, cooperated with the CIA’s extraordinary rendition programme – many of them nations publicly hostile to the US.

Canadian citizen Maher Arar, who was tortured in Syria after his rendition, told HuffPost UK the report, by the Open Society Foundation, was further proof that the US government “cooperated with dictatorial regimes that they condemned publicly but cooperated with clandestinely.”

 

An Iranian cleric walks past a mural on the wall of the former US embassyThe Open Society Foundation found that Iran, Syria and Libya all directly or indirectly transferred individuals into American hands.

In March 2002, in his State of the Union address, Bush accused three governments of supporting terrorism and seeking weapons of mass destruction, the so-called Axis of Evil: Iran, Iraq and North Korea, which “threaten the peace of the world”.

In May of that year, the list was expanded by Undersecretary of State John Bolton, who named Syria, Libya and Cuba as “beyond the Axis of Evil”, an expansion of Bush’s original claims.

But the report found that in the same month Bush named Iran as one-third of the Axis of Evil, Tehran, then under President Mohammad Khatami, was involved in capturing 15 individuals and transferring them to the Afghan government, 10 of which were later handed over the Americans.

At least six were later held in secret CIA detention.

The report’s author Amrit Singh said: “Because the hand-over happened soon after the US invasion of Afghanistan, Iran was aware that the United States would have effective control over any detainees handed over to Afghan authorities.”

Extraordinary Rendition Report Finds More Than 50 Nations Involved In Global Torture Scheme

Labour MP Yasmin Qureshi, a member of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Extraordinary Rendition, told The Huffington Post UK it was indicative of a “two-pronged approach” to fighting terror.

“Beneath the surface, the countries are all carrying out their own agendas.

“Iran may have been happy to help hand over members of the Taliban or al-Qaeda to the US, behind the scenes or indirectly. Iran is predominantly Shia and they are Sunnis.

“The attitude is ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend.’ If it’s in the country’s interest, they will deal with their enemies in private, while decrying them in public.”

Reprieve investigator Dr Crofton Black told HuffPost UK: “We don’t understand nearly enough about the collaboration of all of the countries surrounding Afghanistan, with what went on in the early days.

“The power politics in the region is something we do not talk about enough.”

Syria, named as part of the axis of evil in May 2002 by Bolton, was one of the “most common destinations for rendered suspects,” according to the report.

But the CIA extraordinarily rendered at least nine individuals to Syria, whose government was headed by the current beleaguered leader Bashar al-Assad, between December 2001 and October 2002.

Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian who was tortured in SyriaOne of the most well-known cases is Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian who was transferred to Damascus from New York by the CIA in 2002.

He received £7.3m in compensation from Canada, who issued an apology “inaccurate and unfairly prejudicial” intelligence provided by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to the US.

Arar told HuffPost UK: “The US government has for long had double standards in matters related to foreign policy.

“There is no better example than that of the practice of extraordinary rendition where the current and previous administrations cooperated with dictatorial regimes that they condemned publicly but cooperated with clandestinely.

“The OSF report is not a surprise to me, as I have experienced the fruits of this cooperation first hand, but this revelation may be a surprise to people who still believe the US government still adheres to the rule of law in matters related to national security.”

Many of the extraordinary renditions coincided with George Bush’s Axis Of Evil speechArar was detained for more than 10 months in a tiny grave-like cell seven feet high, six feet long, and three feet wide, beaten with cables, and threatened with electric shocks, among other forms of torture.

Libya, which was also named as part of the axis of evil by Bolton, “detained, interrogated, and tortured extraordinarily rendered individuals, and also permitted use of its airspace and airports for the CIA’s extraordinary rendition operations.”

Human Rights Watch found in 2012, after the fall of Colonel Gaddafi, that Western governments cooperated with a “forcible return and subsequent interrogation of Gaddafi opponents in Libya.”

Several of the cases appear to have intimately involved the UK government.

A leading Libyan opponent of Colonel Gaddafi, Sami al Saadi, was forcibly returned to the north African country in a joint operation with the UK and US, where he was tortured. In December 2012, he won a £2.23m settlement with the UK government.

Saadi was forced on board a plane in Hong Kong – having sought for years to avoid the agents of the Libyan dictator –with his wife and four young children, in an alleged joint UK-US-Libyan operation.