[News] Outsourcing Torture (& Other US Inventions)

[News at freedomarchives.org]

OUTSOURCING TORTURE
The secret history of America's "extraordinary rendition" program.


JANE MAYER, New Yorker, 2/14/05
<http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?050214fa_fact6>http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?050214fa_fact6 


On January 27th, President Bush, in an interview with the Times, assured
the world that "torture is never acceptable, nor do we hand over people to
countries that do torture." Maher Arar, a Canadian engineer who was born in
Syria, was surprised to learn of Bush's statement. Two and a half years
ago, American officials, suspecting Arar of being a terrorist, apprehended
him in New York and sent him back to Syria, where he endured months of
brutal interrogation, including torture. When Arar described his experience
in a phone interview recently, he invoked an Arabic expression. The pain
was so unbearable, he said, that "you forget the milk that you have been
fed from the breast of your mother*"

Rendition was originally carried out on a limited basis, but after
September 11th, when President Bush declared a global war on terrorism, the
program expanded beyond recognition-becoming, according to a former C.I.A.
official, "an abomination." What began as a program aimed at a small,
discrete set of suspects-people against whom there were outstanding foreign
arrest warrants-came to include a wide and ill-defined population that the
Administration terms "illegal enemy combatants." Many of them have never
been publicly charged with any crime. Scott Horton, an expert on
international law who helped prepare a report on renditions issued by
N.Y.U. Law School and the New York City Bar Association, estimates that a
hundred and fifty people have been rendered since 2001. Representative Ed
Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts and a member of the Select Committee
on Homeland Security, said that a more precise number was impossible to
obtain. "I've asked people at the C.I.A. for numbers," he said. "They
refuse to answer. All they will say is that they're in compliance with the
law."

Although the full scope of the extraordinary-rendition program isn't known,
several recent cases have come to light that may well violate U.S. law. In
1998, Congress passed legislation declaring that it is "the policy of the
United States not to expel, extradite, or otherwise effect the involuntary
return of any person to a country in which there are substantial grounds
for believing the person would be in danger of being subjected to torture,
regardless of whether the person is physically present in the United States*"

SEE ALSO:

IN THE PENAL COLONY, Lisa Hajjar, The Nation Magazine (an excellent review 
of recent books on the subject).
<http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050207&s=hajjar>http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050207&s=hajjar 



FOLLOWING A PAPER TRAIL TO THE ROOTS OF TORTURE
Michiko Kakutani, New York Times, 2/8/05
<http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/08/books/08kaku.html>http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/08/books/08kaku.html 


As soon as the repugnant photos of torture at Abu Ghraib prison - the
pyramid of naked prisoners, the groveling man on a dog leash, the hooded
man with outstretched arms - hit the airwaves and newspaper stands, they
became iconic images: gruesome symbols of what went wrong with the war and
postwar occupation of Iraq, and for many in the Muslim world, the very
embodiment of their worst fears about American hegemony.

They have become a potent propaganda tool for terrorists, and at the same
time, they remain so repellant and perverse that they have served to
bolster the "few bad apples" argument - the suggestion not only that the
photographed abuses were perpetrated by "a kind of 'Animal House' on the
night shift," in one investigator's words, but also that the larger problem
was confined, as the Bush administration has asserted, to a few soldiers
acting on their own.

"The Torture Papers," the new compendium of government memos and reports
chronicling the road to Abu Ghraib and its aftermath, definitively blows
such arguments to pieces. In fact, the book provides a damning paper trail
that reveals, in uninflected bureaucratic prose, the roots that those
terrible images had in decisions made at the highest levels of the Bush
administration - decisions that started the torture snowball rolling down
the slippery slope of precedent by asserting that the United States need
not abide by the Geneva Conventions in its war on terror.

Many of the documents here have been published before (most notably in Mark
Danner's incisive 2004 volume "Torture and Truth"), but "The Torture
Papers" contains some material not collected in earlier books. More
important, the minutely detailed chronological narrative embodied in this
volume, which has appeared piecemeal in other publications, possesses an
awful and powerful cumulative weight. As one of its editors. Karen J.
Greenberg, executive director of the Center on Law and Security at the New
York University School of Law, observes, it leaves the reader with "a clear
sense of the systematic decision to alter the use of methods of coercion
and torture that lay outside of accepted and legal norms."

The book is necessary, if grueling, reading for anyone interested in
understanding the back story to those terrible photos from Saddam Hussein's
former prison, and abuses at other American detention facilities*

---

GUANTANAMO CAPTIVES CLAIM FALSE CONFESSIONS
Associated Press, 2/8/05
<http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6929947/>http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6929947/

Nearly a dozen prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp contend they
were wrongly imprisoned after repeated abuse by U.S. troops in Afghanistan
and Pakistan, including beatings with chains, electric shock and sodomy,
their lawyer said Monday.

"These are classic stories of men who ended up in Guantanamo by mistake,"
charged attorney Tom Wilner, who represents 11 Kuwaiti prisoners held in
the detention center at the U.S. Navy base in eastern Cuba.

Most of his clients say they falsely confessed to belonging to
Afghanistan's ousted Taliban regime or the al-Qaida terrorist network as a
way to stop the abuse, Wilner said. He said one is too angry over his
treatment to discuss details of his case, but all argue their detentions
are unjustified.

Human rights groups and defense lawyers have long charged that some
information used as the basis for incarcerations at Guantanamo Bay resulted
from abuse or torture. Many of the 545 prisoners there have been held for
more than three years, most without charge. About 150 have been let go, but
officials have not given explanations for their release*

---

LAWYER SAYS U.S. FORCES ABUSED KUWAITI PRISONERS
Will Dunham, Reuters, 2/7/05
<http://www.swissinfo.org/sen/swissinfo.html?siteSect=143&sid=5522469>http://www.swissinfo.org/sen/swissinfo.html?siteSect=143&sid=5522469 


WASHINGTON - U.S. forces abused several Kuwaiti prisoners now held at
Guantanamo Bay by beating them with chains, sodomizing them and giving them
electrical shocks, the detainees' lawyer said on Monday.

Human rights lawyer Tom Wilner, who represents the 11 Kuwaitis locked up as
foreign terrorism suspects at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,
described the abuses in notes after meeting with the men last month.

The notes -- declassified by the U.S. government -- detailed conversations
with six of the men, and said the other five recounted similar treatment.

Maj. Michael Shavers, a Pentagon spokesman, would not offer a
point-by-point rebuttal of the allegations. But he said, "It is important
to note that al Qaeda training manuals emphasize the tactic of making false
abuse allegations."

The worst of the abuse, which Wilner labeled torture, took place at the
hands of U.S. forces at detention facilities in Afghanistan and Pakistan
before the men were taken to Guantanamo, first used to detain terrorism
suspects in January 2002, he said.

"All of them were hung from their wrists and beaten, sometimes beaten with
chains. At least one was hung upside from his ankles and beaten. They were
all beaten, they said, until they would pass out," Wilner said.

"They were stripped naked and kept naked for extended periods of time. They
were taunted while naked by female guards. At least one of them was
sodomized. At least two of them were subjected to electric shocks while
hanging from their wrists," Wilner added, with the shocks applied using
metal paddles placed under the men's arms.

Wilner said the Kuwaitis were chained in painful positions for such long
periods of time that they would urinate and defecate on themselves*

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