US Torture By Proxy in Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Libya etc

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The United States and Western powers call for Bashar Al-Assad of Syria to be sent to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague based on a policy of systematic torture of detainees. Report HRW. The US, China and Syria are amongst the few countries who have not signed the ICC charter.

Extraordinary Rendition and Outsourcing Torture as a United States Policy

(LA Times) March 11, 2005 – President Bush declared in his State of the Union address, “Torture is never acceptable, nor do we hand over people to countries that do torture.” Considering what’s come to light since then, the most charitable conclusion is that Bush is completely out of the loop.

In recent weeks, past and present administration officials have confirmed that since September 2001 the Central Intelligence Agency has dispatched between 100 and 150 terror suspects to countries where fine points of law and human rights don’t stop beatings, drugging or long isolation.

Before the 9/11 attacks, the CIA occasionally engaged in this indefensible practice, known as “extraordinary rendition.” But afterward, Bush gave the agency wider license to export prisoners in terror-related cases who hadn’t been tried or even charged with any crime. Despite his State of the Union declaration, the president has apparently not revoked that authority.

U.S. law and international conventions bar sending prisoners to another nation unless there are strong assurances of humane treatment. The CIA says with a straight face that it gets those assurances before delivering suspects to jailers in Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Pakistan — countries that have such abysmal human rights records that promises of decent treatment are a joke.

Bush has argued that tough new rules of engagement are necessary to fight stateless terrorists. But morality aside, what intelligence of value have U.S. officials gleaned from suspects who’ve been handed off to modern-day dungeons?

Case of Maher Arar, arrested and rendered to Syria for Interrogation

A case in point: In 2002, federal agents arrested Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian engineer, at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York because his name appeared on a terrorist watch list. Although Arar insisted that he was not a terrorist, the U.S. delivered him to Syrian interrogators. After months in a windowless room and regular beatings with thick electric cables, he said, he confessed to anything they wanted just to stop the torment. A year later, Arar was released without charges.

My case reveals insincerity of human rights commitments by the U.S.

More about Syria’s war crimes below the fold …

Annals of Justice: Outsourcing Torture

(The New Yorker) – In 1996, for example, the State Department stymied a joint effort by the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. to question one of bin Laden’s cousins in America, because he had a diplomatic passport, which protects the holder from U.S. law enforcement. Describing the C.I.A.’s frustration, Scheuer said, “We were turning into voyeurs. We knew where these people were, but we couldn’t capture them because we had nowhere to take them.” The agency realized that “we had to come up with a third party.”

The obvious choice, Scheuer said, was Egypt. The largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid after Israel, Egypt was a key strategic ally, and its secret police force, the Mukhabarat, had a reputation for brutality. Egypt had been frequently cited by the State Department for torture of prisoners. According to a 2002 report, detainees were “stripped and blindfolded; suspended from a ceiling or doorframe with feet just touching the floor; beaten with fists, whips, metal rods, or other objects; subjected to electrical shocks; and doused with cold water [and] sexually assaulted.” Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s leader, who came to office in 1981, after President Anwar Sadat was assassinated by Islamist extremists, was determined to crack down on terrorism. His prime political enemies were radical Islamists, hundreds of whom had fled the country and joined Al Qaeda. Among these was Ayman al-Zawahiri, a physician from Cairo, who went to Afghanistan and eventually became bin Laden’s deputy.

Annals of Torture: End Of The Story?