This is the hanger at Johnson County Airport, N.C., where the Central Intelligence Agency runs its rendition program.
This morning, the New York Times front-pages the fuzzy details:
When the Central Intelligence Agency wants to grab a suspected member of Al Qaeda overseas and deliver him to interrogators in another country, an Aero Contractors plane often does the job.
NYT: Free Reg
Did they say Tashkent? The capital of Uzbekistan? What do they do to prisoners in Uzbekistan?
Guardian
No shit?
:::flip:::
There must be a reason we deliver up suspects for immersion in boiling liquids. Former CIA case officer, Reuel Marc Gerecht offers up one plausible motivation.
The large-scale renditions to Uzbekistan that the New York Times has reported on were probably mostly of this petty, Guantanamo-avoidance type. Central Asian Islamic extremists picked up in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban have probably not yet fully embraced the overriding America-focused hatred of al Qaeda (though with continued U.S. backing of Uzbek president-for-life Islam Karimov, this might change).
Culturally and linguistically, these al Qaeda-allied militants have limited operational range; they are what Ahmed Shah Massoud, the murdered leader of the Afghan Northern Alliance, once called “Islamist cannon-fodder” for the Taliban. Whatever information the Uzbek security service could beat out of these men would be considered a tangential benefit to the CIA–while removing them from its hands, or the hands of the U.S.-backed government in Kabul, would be a blessing. Transfers of such detainees further cement the 14 years of pretty warm relations between Langley and Tashkent’s security and intelligence services–easily, according to active-duty CIA officers, the best liaison cooperation the agency has enjoyed with any Central Asian state since the crack-up of the Soviet Union.(emphasis mine)
It is not good to be considered “Islamist cannon-fodder” by the Taliban, and to be considered an ingredient for stew by the CIA. These low-level bad-guys are really in a pickle. The White House doesn’t exactly feel comfortable explaining itself or our policies vis-a-vis Tashkent. Even the Moonie Times can’t resist the urge to snark:
“We have an obligation not to render people to countries if we believe they would torture them,” White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters Monday. “And we do — and we do get assurances on those matters.”
But at the same time McClellan seemed at a loss to explain what other reason there might be for turning a suspect over to Uzbekistan.
“I’m not going to get into talking about specific intelligence matters,” he said when questioned about the choice of Uzbekistan as a destination for rendition.
Moonie Times
Reuel Marc Gerecht makes an excellent case for eliminating the rendition program. And he uses the example of using Syria to gather intelligence to drive home his point:
The mind spins thinking how agency officials would phrase the sourcing notes on intelligence collected from Syrian debriefings:
Information collected by a foreign intelligence service that the United States now strongly suspects is aiding Iraqi insurgents; this intelligence service also has a long history of operationally aiding Palestinian terrorist organizations and the Lebanese Hezbollah, and colluding with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps; this intelligence service may also have arranged the murder of Lebanon’s former prime minister, Rafik Hariri, and is one of the great drug-smuggling organizations in the world. However, in this particular instance, we believe we have properly calibrated this service’s possible ulterior motives and deem the intelligence collected by this service to be worthy of dissemination to the intelligence community for its consideration.
Weekly Standard
Mr. Gerecht points out that it is a basic tenet of intelligence gathering that you never relinquish control of your asset. If we need Arab specialists we can ask for them from friendly services in Jordan or Egypt. Farming out bad guys to Syria and Uzbekistan makes no sense from an intelligence gathering stand point. We can’t trust those countries to gather good intelligence, let alone to share it with us. We are clearly not sending people to those countries because it gets us reliable intelligence. We are doing it because we want to scare the living crap out of other detainees that might have good intelligence. We are doing it to get worthless detainees off our hands. We are using low-level bad guys as guinea pigs in a larger game.
Whatever the merits of this twisted and deeply immoral practice, the public relations damage alone should lead the administration to realize that the downside far exceeds the upside.
Renditions must stop.
I honestly don’t know what else to say… my numbness circuit breaker has kicked in… when I get it reset a little later, and I figure out what to say, it will be going strait to here… to the office of the honorable Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina… even though she seems to be nothing more than a ReDublican toadie, you would think that the former head of the Red Cross should know that this is occurring on her watch and in her own back yard… If she does nothing… well… “Senator Dole Condones Torture” will be an excellent campaign issue for the next Democratic candidate for the office…
“Senator Dole condones torture…” I am starting to wonder if ANY of our elected officials have a problem with torture, or if they ALL think it’s just a fine idea. Wouldn’t want to seem weak on tort-, I mean terror, dontcha know…
Arar was being honored for his courage by the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations, a mainstream advocacy organization. The audience gave him a heartfelt standing ovation, but there was fear mixed in with the celebration. Many of the prominent community leaders kept their distance from Arar, responding to him only tentatively. Some speakers were unable even to mention the honored guest by name, as if he had something they could catch. And perhaps they were right: The tenuous “evidence”–later discredited–that landed Arar in a rat-infested cell was guilt by association. And if that could happen to Arar, a successful software engineer and family man, who is safe?
In a rare public speech, Arar addressed this fear directly. He told the audience that an independent commissioner has been trying to gather evidence of law-enforcement officials breaking the rules when investigating Muslim Canadians. The commissioner has heard dozens of stories of threats, harassment and inappropriate home visits. But, Arar said, “not a single person made a public complaint. Fear prevented them from doing so.” Fear of being the next Maher Arar.
The fear is even thicker among Muslims in the United States, where the Patriot Act gives police the power to seize the records of any mosque, school, library or community group on mere suspicion of terrorist links. When this intense surveillance is paired with the ever-present threat of torture, the message is clear: You are being watched…If you misstep, you could disappear onto a plane bound for Syria, or into “the deep dark hole that is Guantánamo Bay,”…
But this fear has to be finely calibrated. The people being intim-idated need to know enough to be afraid but not so much that they demand justice. This helps explain why the Defense Department will release certain kinds of seemingly incriminating information about Guantánamo–pictures of men in cages, for instance–at the same time that it acts to suppress photographs on a par with what escaped from Abu Ghraib…
“Obviously, intelligence agents have an incentive to hide the use of unlawful methods,” says the ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer. “On the other hand, when they use rendition and torture as a threat, it’s undeniable that they benefit, in some sense, from the fact that people know that intelligence agents are willing to act unlawfully. They benefit from the fact that people understand the threat and believe it to be credible.”
And the threats have been received….Nazih Hassan, president of the Muslim Community Association of Ann Arbor, Michigan, describes this new climate. Membership and attendance are down, donations are way down, board members have resigned–Hassan says his members fear doing anything that could get their names on lists. One member testified anonymously that he has “stopped speaking out on political and social issues” because he doesn’t want to draw attention to himself.
This is torture’s true purpose: to terrorize–not only the people in Guantánamo’s cages and Syria’s isolation cells but also, and more important, the broader community that hears about these abuses. Torture is a machine designed to break the will to resist–the individual prisoner’s will and the collective will.
This is not a controversial claim. In 2001 the US NGO Physicians for Human Rights published a manual on treating torture survivors that noted: ..The aim of torture is to dehumanize the victim, break his/her will, and at the same time, set horrific examples for those who come in contact with the victim. In this way, torture can break or damage the will and coherence of entire communities.”
Yet despite this body of knowledge, torture continues to be debated in the United States as if it were merely a morally questionable way to extract information, not an instrument of state terror….Torture “doesn’t work. There are better ways to deal with captives,” CIA director Porter Goss told the Senate Intelligence Committee on February 16. …The Army’s own interrogation field manual states that force “can induce the source to say whatever he thinks the interrogator wants to hear.”
And yet the abuses keep on coming–Uzbekistan as the new hot spot for renditions;…And the only sensible explanation for torture’s persistent popularity comes from a most unlikely source. Lynndie England, the fall girl for Abu Ghraib, was asked during her botched trial why she and her colleagues had forced naked prisoners into a human pyramid. “As a way to control them,” she replied.
Exactly. As an interrogation tool, torture is a bust. But when it comes to social control, nothing works quite like torture. link
Finally found this, I had meant to post it here earlier. I think Miss Klein states it very well.
This article is the best answer I can think of to BooMan’s “why?” and also explains why “public relations” are not a concern.
Arar Commission, Canadian Government Inquiry.
Good job
While I totally agree with the substance of your article, I think we must keep the full picture of how this administration has dealt with people captured from the beginning of this fictitious “War on Terror”.
We know that “rendition” is patently illegal according to the Convention Against Torture. Further, as in our Constitution, no State may enact statutes which would reduce the rights under CAT:
2. This article is without prejudice to any international instrument or national legislation which does or may contain provisions of wider application.
Article 3. [“Rendition”]
1. No State Party shall 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.
The earlier article by Dana Priest in WaPo in December covered some of the ground. The addition of the Times article should increase the presssure to abandon the practice.
We also have administration personnel on record acknowledging violation of the broader provisions of CAT.
Taken together these items constitute a prima facie case that this adminstration violated the UN Convention Against Torture including Article 1. Actions they knew were illegal, and were taken in the face of advisories by experts in the intelligence and defense communities that the practice was useless. And the most damning indictment of all: that violation by the U.S. would strip protection under CAT for our forces worldwide.
Rendition is only a piece of this puzzle. Other sources have written the practice goes back to at least the Clinton administration. My fear is that in attempting to focus on that one piece, the public’s attention may be drawn away from the larger issue.