Page 1 of 3 Extraordinary rendition, extraordinary mistake
By Sangitha McKenzie Millar
Mamdouh Habib, an Australian citizen, was living in Sydney with his wife and
four children when he took a trip alone to Pakistan to find a home for his
family. When Habib boarded a bus for the Islamabad airport to return home,
Pakistani police seized him and took him to a police station, where he was
subjected to various crude torture techniques, including electric shocks and
beating.
At one point, he was forced to hang by the arms above a drum-like mechanism
that administered an electric shock when touched. Pakistani police asked him
repeatedly if he was with al-Qaeda and if he trained in Afghanistan. Habib
responded "No" over and over until he passed out.
After 15 days in the Pakistani prison, Habib was transferred to
United States agents who flew him to Cairo. When he arrived, Omar Solaimon,
chief of Egyptian security, informed him that Egypt receives US$10 million for
every confessed terrorist they hand over to the US.
Habib stated that during his five months in Egypt, "there was no interrogation,
only torture". His skin was burned with cigarettes, and he was threatened with
dogs, beaten, and repeatedly shocked with a stun gun. During this time, he
heard American voices in the prison, but Egyptians were in charge of the
torture. In Michael Otterman's book American Torture: From the Cold War to Abu
Ghraib and Beyond, Habib said he was drugged and began to hallucinate:
"I feel like a dead person. I was gone. I become crazy." He remembers admitting
things to interrogators, anything they asked: "I didn’t care ... at this point
I was ready to die."
He was transferred back to the custody of US agents in May 2002. They flew him
first to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, then to Kandahar. After several weeks,
American agents sent Habib to Guantanamo Bay. Three British detainees who have
since been released from the prison described Habib as being in a "catastrophic
state" when he arrived. Most of his fingernails were missing and he regularly
bled from the nose, mouth, and ears while he slept.
Habib was held at Guantanamo Bay until late 2004, when he was charged with
training 9/11 hijackers in martial arts, attending an al-Qaeda training camp in
Afghanistan, and transporting chemical weapons.
A Chicago human rights lawyer took his case and detailed all of Habib's
allegations of torture in court documents. After the case garnered national
attention through a front-page story in The Washington Post, Habib became a
liability for the US government. Rather than have his testimony on the torture
he suffered in Egypt become a matter of public record, US officials decided to
send him back to Sydney in January 2005 - more than three years after seizing
him in Pakistan.
Unfortunately, Habib's case isn’t unusual. There is substantial evidence that
the United States routinely and knowingly "outsources" the application of
torture by transferring terrorism suspects to countries that frequently violate
international human rights norms.
As details of the extraordinary rendition program have emerged, politicians,
journalists, academics, legal experts, and policymakers have raised serious
objections to the policy. It has captured the attention of US legislators, and
both the House and Senate Committees on Foreign Relations as well as the House
Committee on the Judiciary have held hearings to analyze the policy and examine
related cases.
Senator Joseph Biden, chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and
the Democratic vice presidential nominee, expressed concern that "rendition, as
currently practiced, is undermining our moral credibility and standing abroad
and weakening the coalitions with foreign governments that we need to
effectively combat international terrorism". As the public continues to learn
more about the program, calls to end extraordinary rendition have increased,
and the next presidential administration will likely be forced to take a stand
one way or another on the issue.
The origins of extraordinary rendition
At the most basic level, the term "rendition" refers to the practice of seizing
and transferring a person from one country to another, usually for the purpose
of criminal prosecution. Ordinary rendition is common in international
relations and involves the surrendering of persons to foreign jurisdictions, in
accordance with a treaty or enabling statute, and through a stipulated
procedure. "Extraordinary rendition" involves rending persons to non-judicial
authorities outside of treaty and legal processes. This is usually accomplished
through kidnapping and forced transfer from one country to another.
"In many cases of extraordinary rendition, it appears that the seized persons
are expressly delivered to foreign jurisdictions to circumvent ...
constitutional rights," writes David Weissbrodt and Amy Bergquist. "They are
rendered in a manner to specifically deprive them of due process and civil
liberties protections."
In contrast to extradition, the suspect does not go through the legal system of
the country where he is arrested. These persons are sometimes called "ghost
detainees" and are outside the protections of domestic or international law in
any practical sense.
Extraordinary rendition evolved out of pre-9/11 practices intended to
facilitate judicial processes. Only after 9/11 did it become a purposive way to
evade US legal prohibitions against torture. In fact, the United States has
practiced ordinary rendition since the 1800s, rendering criminal suspects from
overseas to be tried in the United States, and these prosecutions were twice
endorsed by the US Supreme Court. However, in the 1980s, the United States
began rendering suspects to other countries as well, in order to expand
counterterrorism efforts.
In the 1990s, CIA officers reportedly collaborated with Egyptian interrogators
to such an extent that US officials would provide their Egyptian counterparts
with a list of questions in the morning and would receive answers by evening -
illustrating how the US encouraged and relied on Egyptian interrogation
techniques. Former CIA official Michael Scheuer ran rendition operations from
1995 until 1999 and takes credit for creating the extraordinary rendition
program in 1995.
The first suspect sent to Egypt was Talaat Fouad Qassem, an Egyptian linked to
the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. In late 1995, he was
kidnapped in Croatia, interrogated by US agents on a ship on the Adriatic Sea,
then handed over to Egypt. Human rights experts believe he was tortured, then
executed - no record of any trial exists. "When the CIA delivered Talaat Fouad
Qassem to the Egyptian authorities, it was certainly aware of how he would be
treated," writes Aziz Z Huq.
In 1998, another suspect, Shawki Salama Attiya, was seized in Albania and flown
to Cairo by the CIA in a private jet. Attiya later told The New Yorker that he
suffered electrical shocks to his genitals, was hung from his limbs, and was
kept in a cell in filthy water up to his knees. According to Daniel Benjamin,
former director for counterterrorism policy on the National Security Council
during the tenure of former president Bill Clinton, the United States required
the receiving country to have some kind of legal process against the suspect,
such as an arrest warrant or indictment.
Rendition guidelines required that subjects could only be sent to countries
that gave assurances that they would not be tortured and whose compliance was
monitored by the State Department and the intelligence community. "At a
minimum, countries with indisputably lousy human rights records (say, Syria)
were off-limits," observes Benjamin. "Now, though, the Bush team seems to have
dramatically eroded such safeguards."
According to a former FBI interrogator cited in Otterman's book, after the 9/11
attacks rendition "really went out of control". In the aftermath of the attacks
the program has accelerated, in part due to expedited procedures approved by
President George W Bush, affording more flexibility to the CIA. On September
17, 2001, America's rendition policy changed in scale and purpose when Bush
signed a secret presidential finding that authorized the CIA to capture, kill,
or detain members of al-Qaeda anywhere in the world.
"The administration's avowed aim was to allow the transfer of suspects to
jurisdictions with laxer constraints on coercive interrogation," writes Huq.
"Torture thus became a primary goal, not merely a collateral consequence, of
rendition to third countries. In this respect, the post-9/11 extraordinary
rendition system is qualitatively different from the rendition programs that
preceded it."
By late 2001, the CIA was inundated with prisoners captured in Afghanistan
during Operation Enduring Freedom. The US-led campaign had netted thousands of
detainees. According to several reports, the CIA and other intelligence
agencies have up to 100 high-value detainees in custody held "off the books" in
unknown locations. Of the approximately 100 detainees believed to have been
"rendered" in the last six years, 39 remain unaccounted for.
According to former attorney general Alberto Gonzales, "We do not transport
anyone to a country if we believe it more likely than not that the individual
will be tortured." However, as Otterman notes, an official quoted in The
Washington Post explained it differently: "We don't kick the [expletive] out of
them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the [expletive] out of
them." Scheuer, father of the extraordinary rendition program, concedes that
"the bar was lowered after 9/11".
Extraordinary rendition in practice
The opaque and confidential nature of the CIA's covert program of extraordinary
renditions is perhaps best illustrated by the case involving Iraqi national
Hiwa Abdul Rahman Rashul. In summer 2003, Kurdish soldiers captured Rashul in
Iraq and handed him over to CIA agents, who flew him to Afghanistan for
interrogation. Rashul was flown back to Iraq after a legal advisor for the US
administration balked at the transfer. At this point then-secretary of defense
Donald Rumsfeld, at the behest of then-CIA director George Tenet, ordered that
Rashul be hidden from the International Committee of the Red Cross and not be
given a prisoner number. His status remains unknown.
Suspects sent abroad for interrogation have returned with horrific tales of
abuse. One example is Canadian software engineer Maher Arar, who was held in
Syria for almost a year in a basement cell less than one meter wide by two
meters deep. Arar notes in Otterman's book that he was regularly beaten by
Syrian interrogators: "The cable [was] a black electrical cable, about two
inches thick. They hit me with it everywhere on my body. They mostly aimed for
my palms, but sometimes missed and hit my wrists; they were sore and red for
three weeks. They also struck me on my hips and lower back ... I could hear
other prisoners being tortured, and screaming and screaming."
After Arar's release in October 2003, the Syrian ambassador to the United
States conceded that Syria had found no evidence of Arar's complicity in
terrorism.
Top-level officials have admitted that the program is attractive for dealing
with terrorists. Tenet testified before congress, "It might be better sometimes
for ... suspects to remain in the hands of foreign authorities, who might be
able to use more aggressive interrogation techniques." Vice President Dick
Cheney has said that when dealing with terrorism, "We're operating through sort
of, you know, a dark side."
The extraordinary rendition program sends suspects to countries with atrocious
human rights records, such as Egypt and Syria, both of which have been
consistently cited in US State Department reports for using torture. As early
as 1994, the State Department concluded that in Egypt, "torture is used to
extract information ... Detainees are frequently stripped to their underwear;
hung by their wrists with their feet touching the floor or forced to stand for
prolonged periods; doused with hot and cold water; beaten; forced to stand
outdoors in cold weather, and subjected to electric shocks"
These findings have been verified each year in the State Department's annual
reports. Principal methods of torture and abuse included stripping and
blindfolding victims; beating victims with fists, whips, metal rods, or other
objects; using electric shocks; and sexual abuse, including sodomy. Some
victims, including women and children, reported sexual assaults or threats of
rape against themselves or family members.
Human rights groups and the media have documented numerous cases of torture:
The Egyptian Organization for Human Rights stated that between 1993 and July
2007 it documented more than 567 cases of torture inside police stations,
including 167 deaths that the organization concluded were caused by torture and
mistreatment.
The same holds true for Syria, which the State Department annually cites for
systematic use of torture. The 2007 US State Department Country Report on Syria
concludes: "Local human rights organizations have cited numerous cases of
security forces
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