Extraordinary rendition or torture by proxy is a procedure used by the government of the United States and other Western countries whereby foreign suspects are sent to another country for interrogation. As described in various reports in the media, individuals to whom it is applied are arrested, blindfolded, shackled, and sedated, and transported by private jet or other means to the destination. The US agency involved may provide the relevant foreign intelligence service with a list of questions it wants answered. It is acknowledged and even expected that these suspects may be tortured despite official assurances to the contrary. Although Egypt has been the most common destination, suspected terrorists have been renditioned to other countries, such as Jordan and Syria.

Contents

1 Treaty obligations 2 1990s 3 Post 9/11 4 Torture by proxy 5 Reference 6 External links

Treaty obligations

The UN Convention against Torture (UNCAT) Article 3 states:

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.

2. For the purpose of determining whether there are such grounds, the competent authorities shall take into account all relevant considerations including, where applicable, the existence in the State concerned of a consistent pattern of gross, flagrant or mass violations of human rights.

Any state that is a signature of the UNCAT and passes an individual to another state where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture would be in breach of their treaty obligations, which most Western governments would be reluctant to do.

1990s

The procedure was developed by Central Intelligence Agency officials in the mid-1990s who were trying to track down and dismantle militant Islamic organizations in the Middle East, particuarly Al Qaeda. At the time, the Agency was reluctant to grant suspected terrorist due process under American law, as it could potentially jeopardize its intelligence sources and methods. The solution the agency came up with, with the approval of Clinton administration, was to send suspects to Egypt, where they were turned over to the Egyptian mukhabarat, which has a reputation for brutality. This arrangement appealled to the Egyptians, as they had been trying to crack down on Islamic extremists in that country and a number of the senior members of Al Qaeda were Egyptian. It was convenient for the US because torture is banned under both US and international law.

The first individual to be subjected to rendition was Talaat Fouad Qassem, one of Egypt's most wanted terrorists, who was arrested with the help of US intelligence by Croatian police in Zagreb in September 1995. He was interrogated by US agents on a ship in the Adriatic sea and was then sent back to Egypt. He disappeared while in custody, and is suspected by human rights activists of having been executed without a trial.

In the summer of 1998, a similar operation was mounted in Tirana, Albania. Wiretaps showed that five Egyptians had been in contact with Zawahiri , Osama bin Laden's deputy. During the course of several months, Shawki Salama Attiya and four militants were captured by Albanian security forces collaborating with US agents. The men were flown to Cairo for interrogation. Attiya later alleged that he had electric shocks applied to his genitals, was hung from his limbs, and was kept in a cell with dirty water up to his knees. Shortly thereafter, a letter was published in a London Arabl-language daily by a group calling itself Internatinal Islamic Front for Jihad, threatened to retaliate against the US for the operation. Two days later, the US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were blown up, killing two hundred and forty. Although the connection cannot be absolutely proven, circumstances suggest there was some relation between the two events.

Post 9/11

While extraordinary rendition was originally developed by the CIA, the Justice Department and the Defense Department now also do renditions. Initially, the procedure was applied primarily to individuals for whom there were outstanding arrest warrants. After the 9/11 attacks, however, the program was greatly expanded and came to encompass individuals for whom there were but vague suspicions. Critics charge that the program has "spun out of control", and used against large numbers of individuals, perhaps one hundred or more. In some cases, suspects to whom the procedure has been applied have later appeared to be innocent. [1]

In October 2001, Mamadouh Habib , an Egyptian-born citizen with Australian nationality, was detained in Pakistan, where he was interrogated for three weeks, and then flown to Egypt in a private plane. From Egypt, he was later flown to a US airbase in Afghanistan, and then on to Guantanamo Bay, from where he was finally released without charges in January 2005.

In December of the same year, two Egyptians who had been seeking asylum in Sweden, Mohammad Al-Zery and Ahmed Agiza, were arrested by Swedish police and brought to an airport. An executive jet with an American registration was waiting with a crew of masked men. Within hours, they were flown to Egypt, where they were imprisoned, beaten, and tortured. A Swedish diplomat visited them several weeks later. Agiza was charged with being an Islamic militant and he was sentenced to 25 years. Al-Zery wasn't charged, and after two years in jail he was sent to his village in Egypt.

In 2003, Khaled el-Masri, a Kuwait-born citizen with German nationality, was kidnapped by US agents in Macedonia. While on vacation in Macedonia Macedonian police, apparently acting on a tip, took him off a bus, held him for three weeks, then took him to the Skopje airport where he was turned over to the CIA. El-Masri says he was injected with drugs, and after his flight, he woke up in an American-run prison in Afghanistan containing prisoners from Pakistan, Tanzania, Yemen and Saudi Arabia. El-Masri claimed he was held five months and interrogated by Americans through an interpreter. He wasn't tortured but he was beaten and kept in solitary confinement. Then, after his five months of questioning, he was simply released. "They told me that they had confused names and that they had cleared it up, but I can't imagine that," El-Masri told ABC News. "You can clear up switching names in a few minutes." He was flown out of Afghanistan and dumped on a road in Albania, from where he made his way back home in Germany. Using a method called isotope analysis, scientists at the Bavarian archive for geology in Munich subsequently analyzed several strands of his hair and verified his story. During a visit to Washington, German Interior Minister Otto Schily was told that American agents admitted to kidnapping el-Masri, and indicated that the matter had somehow gotten out of hand. [2]

In yet another case which received large amounts of media coverage, a Syrian-born Canadian, Maher Arar, was detained at Kennedy International Airport on 26 September, 2002, by US Immigration and Naturalization Service officials while changing planes after returning to Montreal from vacation with his family in Tunisia, where his wife was born. After being held without access to legal representation, he was taken to Syria, where he was interrogated and tortured by Syrian intelligence. Arar was eventually released a year later after it was determined he had no ties to terrorist groups.

Proponents of extraordinary rendition, and the similarly controversial concept of unlawful combatant, argue that torturing terror suspects, however distastful, is necessary to help prevent further terrorist attacks, which may only be a matter of hours or days away. Critics argue, however, that such practices are unethical, unconstitutional, and skirt the Geneva Conventions. Even within the US goverment, opinions are divided; the State Department opposes ignoring the Geneva Conventions, and has warned the Bush administration that not only could US soldiers be denied protection of Conventions but that President Bush could also be prosecuted for war crimes.

Aside from ethical issues, pragmatic reservations have also arisen about the practice. For one, it appears that while torturing a suspect frequently results in a confession, the confessions tend to be useless; a suspect will say nearly anything to end his or her suffering. Some investigators argue that better results are achieved by treating suspects with respect, allowing them due process, and arranging plea bargains with defense lawyers.

In addition, evidence obtained illegally or under duress is inadmissable in US courts, and this hampers court cases against suspected terrorists in the US. The trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person to be indicted in the US in connection with the 9/11 attacks, has run aground because of Moussaoui's requests for access to confidential documents and the right to call al-Qaida members held in captivity in Guantánamo as witnesses, a demand rejected by government attorneys on the grounds that it would compromise confidential sources.

Torture by proxy

In 2003, Britain's Ambassador for Uzbekistan, Mr. Craig Murray made accusations that information was being extracted under extreme torture from dissidents in that country, and that the information was subsequently being used by Britain and other western, democratic countries which disapproved of torture.

The accusations did not lead to any investigation by his employer, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and he resigned after disciplinary action was taken against him in 2004. No misconduct by him was proven. The Foreign & Commonwealth Office itself is being investigated by the National Audit Office because of accusations of victimisation,bullying and intimidating its own staff, as reported in the Sunday Times on 20 March 2005.

Murray later stated that he felt that he had unwittingly stumbled upon what has been called "torture by proxy". He thought that Western countries moved people to regimes and nations where it was known that information would be extracted by torture, and made available to them. If it was true that a country was doing this and it had signed the UN Convention Against Torture then that country would be in breach of Article 3 of that convention.

Reference

"Terror by Proxy", by Jane Mayer, The New Yorker, 14/21 February 2005

External links

• "Torture by proxy - How immigration threw a traveler to the wolves" (Sfgate.com)
• "Markey pledges battle on rendition practice" (Boston Globe, November 30, 2004)
• "Torture by Proxy" (New Yorker, online edition)
• "It's Called Torture" (Op-Ed by Bob Herbert, New York Times, February 28, 2005)
• "CIA Flying Suspects To Torture?" (CBS News, March 6, 2005)
• "CIA given free hand for `rendition,' says official" (Tapei Times, 8 March 2005)
• "Hair used to verify Afghan abduction claim" (Paktribune.com, February 04, 2005)
• "Torture by Proxy" Published on Friday, March 11, 2005 by the Los Angeles Times
• "The envoy silenced after telling undiplomatic truths", The Daily Telegraph 23 October 2004
• "Flight to torture: where abuse is contracted out" London Times, 26/03/05