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The solution, they found, was extraordinary rendition, a program where individuals were sent to other countries with unscrupulous governments so they could do the dirty work of tormenting detainees and depriving them of due process.<\/p>\nThe top officials in the Bush administration were not ones to let the law get in their way. If they wanted to torture and detain people beyond what any conceivable interpretation of US law, even in Guantanamo, could allow, they were going to do it.<\/p>\n
The solution, they found, was extraordinary rendition, a program where individuals were sent to other countries with unscrupulous governments so they could do the dirty work of tormenting detainees and depriving them of due process.<\/p>\n
According to a new report by the Open Society Justice Initiative, the CIA rendered at least 136 individuals and at least 54 governments around the world participated in the program. Many of these people were completely innocent, something the CIA’s\u00a0Office of Inspector General called \u00a0\u201cerroneous renditions\u201d in their investigation of the program.<\/p>\n
Read of the report in the New York Times<\/em> here<\/a>. Read it in full here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Below are 20 findings covered in the report, provided by Open Society:<\/p>\n 1. At least 136 individuals were reportedly extraordinarily rendered or secretly detained by the CIA and at least 54 governments reportedly participated in the CIA\u2019s secret detention and extraordinary rendition program; classified government documents may reveal many more.<\/p>\n 2. A series of Department of Justice memoranda authorized torture methods that the CIA applied on detainees. The Bush Administration referred to these methods as \u201cenhanced interrogation techniques.\u201d \u201cEnhanced interrogation techniques\u201d included \u201cwalling\u201d (quickly pulling the detainee forward and then thrusting him against a flexible false wall), \u201cwater dousing,\u201d \u201cwaterboarding,\u201d \u201cstress positions\u201d (forcing the detainee to remain in body positions designed to induce physical discomfort), \u201cwall standing\u201d (forcing the detainee to remain standing with his arms outstretched in front of him so that his fingers touch a wall five four to five feet away and support his entire body weight), \u201ccramped confinement\u201d in a box, \u201cinsult slaps,\u201d (slapping the detainee on the face with fingers spread), \u201cfacial hold\u201d (holding a detainee\u2019s head temporarily immobile during interrogation with palms on either side of the face), \u201cattention grasp\u201d (grasping the detainee with both hands, one hand on each side of the collar opening, and quickly drawing him toward the interrogator), forced nudity, sleep deprivation while being vertically shackled, and dietary manipulation.<\/p>\n 3. President Bush has stated that about a hundred detainees were held under the CIA secret detention program, about a third of whom were questioned using \u201cenhanced interrogation techniques.\u201d<\/p>\n 4. The CIA\u2019s Office of Inspector General has reportedly investigated a number of \u201cerroneous renditions\u201d in which the CIA had abducted and detained the wrong people. A CIA officer told the Washington Post: \u201cThey picked up the wrong people, who had no information. \u00a0In many, many cases there was only some vague association\u201d with terrorism.<\/p>\n 5. German national Khaled El-Masri was seized in Macedonia because he had been mistaken for an Al Qaeda suspect with a similar name. He was held incommunicado and abused in Macedonia and in secret CIA detention in Afghanistan. On December 13, 2012, the European Court of Human Rights held that Macedonia had violated El-Masri\u2019s rights under the European Convention on Human Rights, and found that his ill-treatment by the CIA at Skopje airport in Macedonia amounted to torture.<\/p>\n 6. Wesam Abdulrahman Ahmed al-Deemawi was seized in Iran and held for 77 days in the CIA\u2019s \u201cDark Prison\u201d in Afghanistan. \u00a0He was later held in Bagram for 40 days and subjected to sleep deprivation, hung from the ceiling by his arms in the \u201cstrappado\u201d position, threatened by dogs, made to watch torture videos, and subjected to sounds of electric sawing accompanied by cries of pain.<\/p>\n 7. Several former interrogators and counterterrorism experts have confirmed that \u201ccoercive interrogation\u201d is ineffective. Col. Steven Kleinman, Jack Cloonan, and Matthew Alexander stated in a letter to Congress that that U.S. interrogation policy \u201ccame with heavy costs\u201d and that \u201c[k]ey allies, in some instances, refused to share needed intelligence, terrorists attacks increased world wide, and Al Qaeda and like-minded groups recruited a new generation of Jihadists.\u201d<\/p>\n 8. After being extraordinarily rendered by the United States to Egypt in 2002, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under threat of torture at the hands of Egyptian officials, fabricated information relating to Iraq\u2019s provision of chemical and biological weapons training to Al Qaeda. In 2003, then Secretary of State Colin Powell relied on this fabricated information in his speech to the United Nations that made the case for war against Iraq.<\/p>\n 9. Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded at least 83 times by the CIA. FBI interrogator Ali Soufan testified before Congress that he elicited \u201cactionable intelligence\u201d from Zubaydah using rapport-building techniques but that Zubaydah \u201cshut down\u201d after he was waterboarded.<\/p>\n 10. Torture is prohibited in all circumstances under international law and allegations of torture must be investigated and criminally punished. The United States prosecuted Japanese interrogators for \u201cwaterboarding\u201d U.S. prisoners during World War II.<\/p>\n 11. On November 20, 2002, Gul Rahman froze to death in a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan called the \u201cSalt Pit,\u201d after a CIA case officer ordered guards to strip him naked, chain him to the concrete floor, and leave him there overnight without blankets.<\/p>\n 12. Fatima Bouchar was abused by the CIA, and by persons believed to be Thai authorities, for several days in the Bangkok airport. Bouchar reported she was chained to a wall and not fed for five days, at a time when she was four-and-a-half months pregnant. After that she was extraordinarily rendered to Libya.<\/p>\n 13. Syria was one of the \u201cmost common destinations for rendered suspects,\u201d as were Egypt and Jordan. One Syrian prison facility contained individual cells that were roughly the size of coffins. \u00a0Detainees report incidents of torture involving a chair frame used to stretch the spine (the \u201cGerman chair\u201d) and beatings.<\/p>\n 14. Muhammed al-Zery and Ahmed Agiza, while seeking asylum in Sweden, were extraordinarily rendered to Egypt where they were tortured with shocks to their genitals. \u00a0Al-Zery was also forced to lie on an electrified bed frame.<\/p>\n 15. Abu Omar, an Italian resident, was abducted from the streets of Milan, extraordinarily rendered to Egypt, and secretly detained for fourteen months while Egyptian agents interrogated and tortured him by subjecting him to electric shocks. An Italian court convicted in absentia 22 CIA agents and one Air Force pilot for their roles in the extraordinary rendition of Abu Omar.<\/p>\n 16. Known black sites\u2014secret prisons run by the CIA on foreign soil\u2014existed in Afghanistan, Lithuania, Morocco, Poland, Romania, and Thailand.<\/p>\n 17. Abd al Rahim al Nashiri was secretly detained in various black sites. While secretly detained in Poland, U.S. interrogators subjected al Nashiri to a mock execution with a power drill as he stood naked and hooded; racked a semi-automatic handgun close to his head as he sat shackled before them; held him in \u201cstanding stress positions;\u201d and threatened to bring in his mother and sexually abuse her in front of him.<\/p>\n 18. President Obama\u2019s 2009 Executive Order repudiating torture does not repudiate the CIA extraordinary rendition program. \u00a0It was specifically crafted to preserve the CIA\u2019s authority to detain terrorist suspects on a short-term, transitory basis prior to rendering them to another country for interrogation or trial.<\/p>\n 19. President Obama\u2019s 2009 Executive Order also established an interagency task force to review interrogation and transfer policies and issue recommendations on \u201cthe practices of transferring individuals to other nations.\u201d The interagency task force report was issued in 2009, but continues to be withheld from the public. It appears that the U.S. intends to continue to rely on anti-torture diplomatic assurances from recipient countries and post-transfer monitoring of detainee treatment, but those methods were not effective safeguards against torture for Maher Arar, who was tortured in Syria, or Ahmed Agiza and Muhammed al-Zery, who were tortured in Egypt.<\/p>\n 20. The Senate Select Intelligence Committee has completed a 6,000 page report that further details the CIA detention and interrogation operations with access to classified sources. However, the report itself remains classified.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The top officials in the Bush administration were not ones to let the law get in their way. If they wanted to torture and detain people beyond what any conceivable interpretation of US law, even in Guantanamo, could allow, they were going to do it. The solution, they found, was extraordinary rendition, a program where […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":86,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-18077","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18077","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/86"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18077"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18077\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18083,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18077\/revisions\/18083"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18077"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18077"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18077"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=18077"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}