54 countries aided CIA in renditions

Dubai: Some were picked up as they travelled through airports, others snatched as they slept in their beds — but all endured endless days of physical and psychological torture in secret prisons around the world.

All were rendered to dark cells, shadowy jails, illegal torture chambers in the most brutal regimes run by governments with scant regard for human rights — all to assist the US in its war on terror following the attacks of 9/11.

The dark work of the Central Intelligence Agency was abetted by the dirty deeds of 54 countries around the world, including Arab states, who helped move at least 136 people through a network of police and security forces, airport and transport officials, shady private jet companies, national governments and US and foreign captors willing and ready to use torture to exact intelligence.

The details of the global network are contained in a report prepared by the Open Society Justice Initiative, a New York-based rights advocacy group and released earlier this week.

The 216-page report “Globalising Torture” details the extent of international collusion in allowing the CIA to operate its secret and dark programme, sanctioned by the administration of President George W. Bush and his vice-president, Dick Cheney.

Sadly, the opening waterboarding scenes from Zero Dark Thirty isn’t the stuff of Hollywood — it’s a reality that was facilitated from governments around the world..

Amrit Singh, the author of the Open Society report and the daughter of the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, said she found evidence that 25 countries in Europe, 14 in Asia and 13 in Africa lent some sort of assistance to the CIA, in addition to Canada and Australia. They include Thailand, Romania, Poland and Lithuania, where prisoners were held, but also Denmark, which facilitated CIA air operations, and Gambia, which arrested and turned over a prisoner to the Agency

“The moral cost of these programmes was borne not just by the US, but by the 54 other countries it recruited to help,” Singh said.

For some former intelligence officials, such critiques of the aggressive operations against Al Qaida smack of second-guessing. Michael V. Hayden, the former CIA director, said in a panel discussion last week at the American Enterprise Institute that few voices called for restraint in the aftermath of 9/11.

“We are often put in a situation where we are bitterly accused of not doing enough to defend America when people feel endangered,” Hayden said. “And then as soon as we’ve made people feel safe again, we’re accused of doing too much.”

But Singh said that the US had flagrantly violated domestic and international law and that its efforts to avoid accountability were “beginning to break down”.

In December, the European Court of Human Rights found the CIA responsible for the torture of Khalid Al Masri, a German citizen abducted by the agency and taken to Afghanistan in a case of mistaken identification.

Similarly, this week, an Italian appeals court convicted a CIA station chief and two other Americans of the kidnapping of a radical cleric taken from the streets of Milan in 2003 and sent to Egypt. Twenty-three Americans had previously been convicted in the case.

“Secret detention and extraordinary rendition operations, designed to be conducted outside the US under cover of secrecy, could not have been implemented without the active participation of foreign governments,” the report says. “The United States and most of its partner governments have failed to conduct effective investigations into secret detention and extraordinary rendition.

The 54 countries allegedly participated in the CIA operations in various ways, including by hosting CIA prisons, helping capture and transport detainees, allowing the use of airspace and airports, providing intelligence and interrogating individuals, the report said.

“There is no doubt that high-ranking Bush administration officials bear responsibility for authorising human rights violations associated with secret detention and extraordinary rendition, and the impunity that they have enjoyed to date remains a matter of significant concern,” the report says.

The states identified include Pakistan, Afghanistan, Egypt and Jordan, where the existence of secret prisons and the use of torture has been well-documented for many years. But the list also includes states such as Ireland, Iceland and Cyprus, which are accused of granting covert support for the programme by permitting access to air space and airports by aircraft that the CIA used during its rendition operations.

Ironically, Iran, one of the states within former US president George W. Bush’s so-called axis of evil participated in the rendition programme, handing 15 individuals over to Kabul shortly after the US invasion of Afghanistan, in the full knowledge that they would fall under US control.

Syria, another state that does not enjoy friendly diplomatic relations with the US, is said to have been one of the “most common destinations for rendered suspects”.