Sayhey
Apr 17, 2005, 11:05 AM
...The confirmation that US agents were involved in the Swedish case provided the first concrete evidence that since 9/11 the US has been involved in organising a worldwide traffic in prisoners. Official and journalistic investigations show that the US has systematically organised the repatriation of Islamic militants to countries in the Arab world and East Asia where they can be imprisoned and interrogated using methods forbidden to US agents. Some call it torture by proxy. Prisoners have been captured and transported by the US not only from Afghanistan and Iraq, but from Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, Albania, Libya, Sudan, Kenya, Zambia, Gambia, Pakistan, Indonesia and Malaysia.
The official term, coined by the CIA, is “extraordinary rendition”. No serving US official will discuss it in public. But a former senior official of the CIA, who left the agency last November, has provided a detailed and candid explanation. Michael Scheuer, who in the late 1990s headed the unit tasked with hunting down Osama bin Laden, was interviewed for a BBC Radio programme, File on Four. He confirmed the Swedish case was part of a much wider system.
Scheuer said the CIA invented rendition because it was ordered by the White House to deal with al-Qaida but had few options on what to do with terrorists it captured. “The practice of capturing people and taking them to third countries arose because the executive branch assigned to us the task of dismantling and disrupting and detaining terrorist cells and terrorist individuals,” he said. “And basically, when the CIA came back and said to the policymaker, where do you want to take them, the answer was - that’s your job. And so we developed this system of assisting countries to capture individuals overseas and bring them back to the particular country where they are wanted by the legal system.”
Among those at the centre of investigations into rendition is a lawyer at the Centre for Constitutional Rights, Barbara Olshansky. She is examining modern cases and how rendition is being justified legally. She believes the US is not only using third countries to interrogate prisoners but also its own offshore jail facilities run and operated by the CIA. She says that for more than 100 years the US seized fugitives outside its jurisdiction to bring them back to the US to face justice. General Manuel Noriega, the former president of Panama, was one high-profile example (1). That was ordinary rendition.
After the CIA began to fight al-Qaida, and especially since 9/11, extraordinary rendition emerged; the prisoner was captured, not for return to the US, but for transfer elsewhere. “Rendition started in the 1880s,” Olshansky says. “The US would always use any measure to get an individual back to be tried in front of a court here . . . Now this entire idea has been turned on its head. We now have extraordinary rendition, which means the US is capturing people and sending them to countries for interrogation under torture: rendering people for the purpose of extracting information. There is no planned justice at the end....”
Le Monde (http://mondediplo.com/2005/04/04usatorture)
The official term, coined by the CIA, is “extraordinary rendition”. No serving US official will discuss it in public. But a former senior official of the CIA, who left the agency last November, has provided a detailed and candid explanation. Michael Scheuer, who in the late 1990s headed the unit tasked with hunting down Osama bin Laden, was interviewed for a BBC Radio programme, File on Four. He confirmed the Swedish case was part of a much wider system.
Scheuer said the CIA invented rendition because it was ordered by the White House to deal with al-Qaida but had few options on what to do with terrorists it captured. “The practice of capturing people and taking them to third countries arose because the executive branch assigned to us the task of dismantling and disrupting and detaining terrorist cells and terrorist individuals,” he said. “And basically, when the CIA came back and said to the policymaker, where do you want to take them, the answer was - that’s your job. And so we developed this system of assisting countries to capture individuals overseas and bring them back to the particular country where they are wanted by the legal system.”
Among those at the centre of investigations into rendition is a lawyer at the Centre for Constitutional Rights, Barbara Olshansky. She is examining modern cases and how rendition is being justified legally. She believes the US is not only using third countries to interrogate prisoners but also its own offshore jail facilities run and operated by the CIA. She says that for more than 100 years the US seized fugitives outside its jurisdiction to bring them back to the US to face justice. General Manuel Noriega, the former president of Panama, was one high-profile example (1). That was ordinary rendition.
After the CIA began to fight al-Qaida, and especially since 9/11, extraordinary rendition emerged; the prisoner was captured, not for return to the US, but for transfer elsewhere. “Rendition started in the 1880s,” Olshansky says. “The US would always use any measure to get an individual back to be tried in front of a court here . . . Now this entire idea has been turned on its head. We now have extraordinary rendition, which means the US is capturing people and sending them to countries for interrogation under torture: rendering people for the purpose of extracting information. There is no planned justice at the end....”
Le Monde (http://mondediplo.com/2005/04/04usatorture)
