The United States does not transport, and has not transported, detainees from one country to another for the purpose of interrogation using torture. The United States does not use the airspace or the airports of any country for the purpose of transporting a detainee to a country where he or she will be tortured.
So insisted Condoleeza Rice in December 2005 as she departed for Europe to appear before the EU’s Committee on the alleged use of European countries by the CIA for the transport and illegal detention of prisoners.
Not so, says the Committee. The U.S. interprets the United Nations Convention against Torture far too strictly, especially the prohibition on any renditions that may lead to extradited prisoners being subjected to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.
This week, the Committee announced the adoption of its lengthy report, along with recommendations that individual European countries pursue investigations and strictly regulate third countries’ secret services’ activities. It urges closure of Guantanamo, with the return of European detainees to their respective countries. On February 13 the full European Parliament, 785 members directly elected by citizens of European Union States, will vote on the report.
Two broad conclusions:
(1) The U.S. extraordinary rendition program contravenes established international human rights — as well as the Treaty on European Union — as it ensures suspects are not brought before a court but are transferred to third countries to be interrogated, where they could be tortured.
(2) Governments must cease the practice of attempting to limit their responsibilities by asking for diplomatic assurances from countries they will not torture the suspects.
European airspace and airports have been used by CIA front-companies in order to bypass the legal obligations for state aircraft… thus enabling persons suspected of terrorism to be transferred illegally to the custody of the CIA or the US military or to other countries (including Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Afghanistan) which frequently use torture during interrogations…
At least 1245 flights operated by the CIA flew into European airspace or stopped at European airports 2001 – 2005, though not all were used for extraordinary rendition. So many hundreds of flights through European airspace and airports could not have taken place without the knowledge — and tacit rendition cooperation — of the respective country’s security service.
The Committee did meet with hostility within the EU. Poland was the worst. The Belgians were uncooperative. Austria sent only something written. Current and former Secretaries-General of NATO, Lord Robertson and Jaap de Hoop Sheffer, refused to appear or provide access to the full text of the 2001 decision providing blanket over flight and landing clearances for US aircraft engaged in anti-terrorism operations.
Individual cases illustrate the extent of rendition activities in Europe:
- Sweden expelled Egyptian nationals who were seeking asylum there, based solely on diplomatic assurances from the Egyptian government of no torture, empty guarantees, as it happened. Swedish security police remained passive at the airport during the degrading treatment and horrible physical abuse of the men by US and Egyptian security agents.
- The CIA kidnapping of Egyptian cleric Abu Omar, with the assistance of the Italian military secret services, in Milan, taken to a joint U.S.-Italian Air Base, flown to Ramstein Air Base in Germany, then to Cairo, where he was tortured and abused for months. Milan’s public prosecutor has issued arrest warrants for 26 U.S. nationals, CIA agents.
- Murat Kurnaz, a German-born Turk held four years at Guantanamo.
- Four citizens and two residents of Bosnia and Herzegovina, all of Algerian origin, still in Guantanamo.
The Bosnia and Herzegovina government is the only one to acknowledge responsibility for its illegal actions in participating in the extraordinary rendition. The US government had threatened it with cessation of diplomatic relations unless it arrested the six men immediately. - German national, Khaled El-Masri, an innocent victim of American rendition now represented by the ACLU in El-Masri v. Tenet. He was abducted January 2004 while on holiday in Macedonia, held initially in a hotel for 23 days, beaten, drugged, and transported to a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan, where he was subjected to inhumane conditions and coercive interrogation.
After the CIA officers realized their mistake and notified CIA head Tenet, El-Masri remained in detention for two more months. In May 2004 he was abandoned on a hill in Albania, never having been charged with a crime, and returned his belongings, including his passport stamped in Albania that day. The NYT reported more details of his capture.
As Knucklehead related in his diary today, the United States refuses to remove Canadian citizen Arar from its no-fly watch list even though Canada has just announced a settlement with the man, whom it had allowed to be taken under the U.S. rendition program to Syria, where he was tortured. The defense (“national security privilege”) to the El-Masri case shows that even where its mistakes have ended with the horrible abuse of innocent people (and their families), the United States government — unlike its more civilized northern neighbor — refuses to apologize or explain. Bush arrogance and intractability is pervasive.
Human Rights Watch reviewed the EU committee’s report in November 2006. It explains more on the absence of any legal effect of diplomatic assurances. The U.K.’s MOU’s with Jordan, Libya, and Lebanon, as a U.K. parliamentary committee concluded last May, leave transferred individuals at substantial risk of being tortured.
Statewatch maintains a page devoted to reports and documents about the CIA’s use of European countries for rendition.
Amnesty International’s page on the CIA’s rendition program features many more details about cases and CIA-operated aircraft landings. It believes the number of rendition victims is in the hundreds.
Last March, Senator Harry Reid deplored congressional refusal to hold the Bush Administration accountable.
Despite numerous troubling reports about detainee abuse as a result of Bush Administration’s detention, interrogation, and rendition policies and questions about the role of the intelligence community, the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee has refused to formally investigate these actions.
This week, the chair of EU’s CIA Activities Committee hopefully applauded the vigorous oversight intentions of the new Democratic majority in Congress. It was admirable tact.
World moral leadership is not ours to claim. Maybe it belongs to no one. Yet, look. There is Europe with all its squabbles, poised to take back its sovereignty in unison, abandoning complicity with our shameful practices to the gutter.
What sounded so traditionally American came from a small, culturally mixed group in Brussels:
The fight against terrorism cannot be won by sacrificing the very principles that terrorism seeks to destroy, notably that the protection of fundamental rights must never be compromised…