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<font face="Verdana" size=2>May 7, 2008<br>
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<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/mariner05072008.html" eudora="autourl">
http://www.counterpunch.org/mariner05072008.html<br><br>
</a></font><h1><font size=4><b>Torture, Rendition and International Law
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Torture After Dark
</b></font></h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4>By JOANNE
MARINER <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=6 color="#990000">I</font>
<font face="Verdana" size=2>n September 2001, five days after the
terrorist attacks that shocked the nation, Vice-President Dick Cheney
announced on "Meet the Press" that the US government would need
to start working "the dark side."<br><br>
"We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence
world," he explained. "A lot of what needs to be done here will
have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and
methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we're going
to be successful. That's the world these folks operate in, and so it's
going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to
achieve our objective." <br><br>
In the months and years that followed, the public got occasional glimpses
of Cheney's shadowy, no-holds-barred world. Even though, as Cheney
promised, that world was shrouded in secrecy, journalists and human
rights activists sometimes managed to see into it. <br><br>
Maher Arar, a Canadian-Syrian telecommunications engineer, gave the
public a detailed picture of that world in November 2003, when he told
the story of his rendition to torture. Arar was detained at JFK Airport
in September 2002, and then sent by the United States to Syria, via
Jordan. He was held there in a dark, coffin-like cell, and brought out to
be beaten with electrical cables. <br><br>
"The cable is a black electrical cable, about two inches
thick," Arar explained in a narrative of his experiences. "They
hit me with it everywhere on my body." <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000"><b>Convention Against
Torture</b> <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>More stories like Arar's have since
emerged. We now know that the CIA rendered people to several countries
that practice torture as a matter of routinecountries that include
Egypt, Jordan, Libya and Syria. <br><br>
These renditions are and were illegal under international law. In
particular, they violate U.S. obligations under the
<a href="http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/h_cat39.htm">Convention
against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or
Punishment</a>, a treaty the United States ratified in 1994. <br><br>
According to the Convention against Torture, torture is "any act by
which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is
intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from
him or a third person information or a confession," when it is
"inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or
acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official
capacity." States violate the Convention against Torture not only by
directly inflicting torture, but also, under article 3, when they
"expel, return ('refouler') or extradite a person to another State
where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in
danger of being subjected to torture." <br><br>
Rendition to torture is thus a clear violation of the prohibition against
torture. Indeed, in a 2006 report, the UN Committee against Torture, the
international expert body responsible for monitoring state compliance
with the Convention against Torture, condemned U.S. use of the practice.
It specifically found that the U.S. government's "rendition of
suspects, without any judicial procedure, to States where they face a
real risk of torture" violated the treaty. <br><br>
The committee called upon the United States to "cease the rendition
of suspects, in particular by its intelligence agencies, to States where
they face a real risk of torture." <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000"><b>Diplomatic
Assurances</b> <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>U.S. officials have tried to justify
the CIA rendition practices by arguing that, where necessary, the CIA
obtains assurances from the receiving country that detainees will not be
tortured. Yet Human Rights Watch and other groups have shown, as an
empirical matter, that such assurances are unreliable and do not provide
effective protection against torture. <br><br>
In a number of documented cases, people who have been returned to their
home countries on the basis of such assurances have faced torture and
other abuses. <br><br>
One such case involves two suspects, Ahmed Agiza and Muhammad al-Zery,
who were rendered by the United States to Egypt in December 2001. In a
ruling on the case, the Committee against Torture rejected the claim that
diplomatic assurances from the Egyptian government were sufficient to
protect against torture. As the Committee emphasized, the
"procurement of diplomatic assurances, which, moreover, provided no
mechanism for their enforcement, did not suffice to protect against this
manifest risk." <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000"><b>Apology and
Redress</b> <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=2>International human rights law
recognizes that victims of rights violations should be granted effective
remedies, and the Convention against Torture specifically provides that
torture victims have a right of access to the courts in order to obtain
fair and adequate compensation. <br><br>
To date, however, the US courts have proven hostile to victims of
rendition, dismissing a lawsuit brought by a group of rendition victims
that included Ahmed Agiza, as well as an earlier suit brought by Maher
Arar. While the Canadian government acknowledged wrongdoing and
compensated Arar for his suffering, the U.S. government did neither.
<br><br>
In choosing the dark side over compliance with the law, this
administration has been unapologetic.<br><br>
<b>Joanne Mariner</b> is a human rights lawyer. <br><br>
<br><br>
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