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Check out opensocietyfoundations.org, opensocietyfoundations.org.
They're the ones who put out this new study, Globalizing Torture, CIA Secret Detention, an Extraordinary Rendition.
That's opensocietyfoundations.org.
And they're also running this piece, sort of a truncated version, 20 Extraordinary Facts About CIA Extraordinary Rendition and Secret Detention.
Our guest is Amrit Singh.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
Good.
Thank you.
Very happy to have you here.
Appreciate you joining us.
I guess, please take us through this.
I admit I was not able to read the whole report.
I've been reading the Leverett's book, but I did read the 20 highlights, I guess, additional facts.
Can you take us through, I guess, first of all, the biggest headline out of this report was that 54 separate national governments in the world cooperated with the U.S. government on the Extraordinary Rendition Export for Torture program.
Is that correct?
That's correct.
This report identifies as many as 54 governments, and that's actually more than a quarter of the total number of governments that are recognized by the U.S. State Department today.
It shows the incredible scale and sweep of the program, and it shows that the United States not only diminished itself by directly engaging in torture and rendition, but also diminished itself by co-opting these governments into violating international law along with the CIA.
And now, of course, in America, if you're a government employee, you can do anything to anyone, and you have sovereign immunity like the King of England never possessed.
But what about these other 54 countries?
Are they, does anybody file in charges?
Has it broken out into a big scandal around the world?
Well, Italy is the only country thus far to criminally convict officials for their involvement in extraordinary rendition, particularly in the case of an Egyptian national known as Abu Omar, who was extraordinarily rendered to Egypt after being abducted off the streets of Milan.
But there are other governments that were complicit, and a handful of them, only a handful, have actually done anything about it.
And Sweden, for example, did compensate Emma de Guiza and Muhammad al-Zahiri for their rendition from Sweden to Egypt with the involvement of the CIA.
Emma de Guiza and Muhammad al-Zahiri were abducted in Sweden, transferred to the CIA, and then taken to Egypt, where they were subjected to electric shocks, among other kinds of torture.
And Sweden compensated them.
But there was no criminal inquiry in Sweden.
There are other investigations that are pending, including in Poland.
But again, it's not clear that those investigations are effective.
Poland's investigation now has been pending for more than five years.
So, you know, this is an issue that is subject to enormous secrecy, both on the part of the United States and on the part of partner governments.
Well, and now, this is sort of a personal point, but I've got to bring it up.
I forget if it was the President or the Prime Minister of Poland called my wife Larissa Aleksandrovna a liar for reporting that at least one of the buildings where they were torturing people in Poland was a former Nazi base.
And then when, after the Nazis lost, the Soviets took it over.
And so first it belonged to the Nazis, then to the communists, and then the United States of America used it as a torture dungeon.
And, of course, the European Commission and everybody else who looked into it found that her reporting was 100% accurate and that actually it was the President of Poland who was a liar and a torturer.
Well, I think, you know, it really does, it is ironic to say the least that the CIA was occupying the same military intelligence facility that had this history.
And not only were several individuals held in Poland, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was subjected to torture there, to waterboarding, in fact, but the U.S. government has apparently continued to deny requests for information from the Polish authorities relating to the investigation.
So now, obviously, when you report on 54 countries involved in this, some of these countries we've had no idea, right?
I mean, I think people paying attention already knew that they were giving some people over to Bashar al-Assad in Syria to torture, to Hosni Mubarak, some people were tortured in Morocco, in Thailand.
But 54 countries, many of these countries, this is the very first that anyone's heard that they were participating in this program in any way, correct?
Well, the information compiled in this report is all from public sources.
So people may have known about this, but they would have known about these facts in isolation.
This report puts them all together.
I see.
And now, in some of these cases, is it just, you know, they allowed planes to land there and refuel and take off again?
Or it's always, you know, what's the minimum amount of participation that gets categorized here?
Well, the report documents a continuum of complicity, ranging from directly capturing prisoners and torturing them, detaining them, to hosting secret CIA prisons, to providing domestic airspace and airports for the transportation of detainees.
All right.
Now, could you please tell us about Gul Rahman?
Yes.
Gul Rahman was an Afghan national who was captured in Afghanistan in 2002 by U.S. agents and Pakistani security forces.
Sorry, I beg your pardon.
He was captured in Islamabad in 2002, and he was subsequently transferred to Afghanistan.
And he froze to death in the CIA prison known as Fault Pit.
And this is after a CIA officer ordered guards to strip him naked, chain him to the concrete floor, and leave him there overnight without blankets.
This man just died in CIA custody.
And a CIA Office of Inspector General Investigation subsequently determined that the CIA's top officer at the prison had displayed poor judgment.
But no one was ultimately punished.
And in 2011, Rahman's case became a case to be criminally investigated by the Justice Department.
But again, the Justice Department summarily announced that it would not pursue charges in his case.
Okay.
Now, one of America's new allies in Libya is a guy named Belhaj, who apparently had been kidnapped and tortured by the CIA and the MI6, and brought to Thailand before being sent back to Muammar Qaddafi to be tortured some more from us.
Do you have – is he featured in your report?
Do you know about him?
Yes.
He is also featured.
He is one of many Libyans who were subjected to rendition along with the involvement of the U.S., and who was tortured in Libya after being rendered there.
And how many other Libyans were involved?
Do you know?
I should know that off the top of my head, but I think several.
And this guy, he's now suing in England, right?
That's right.
He has a suit in England currently pending.
See, I think that's funny.
He didn't even bother trying to file a suit in America, right?
That's right.
The unfortunate truth is that U.S. courts have abdicated their constitutional responsibility to hold officials accountable for this kind of horrific abuse.
Virtually all cases brought by rendition victims have been dismissed on one ground or another, including the state's secret grounds.
So there is really no legal recourse before U.S. courts for these kinds of crimes.
And now it says here that Syria was one of the most common destinations for rendered suspects, as were Egypt and Jordan.
And I guess – I think that's really something that I did not know.
I knew about Mar-a-Rar and a couple of others.
Do you have any kind of ballpark estimate for how many different people were renditioned to Assad's Syria?
We do not have a total number, but we do know that it was one of the most common destinations.
That's interesting.
And now, do you know about – was it CIA guys hanging around in the dungeon doing the torturing, or they just let Assad take care of it for them?
Well, we – again, you know, there were about – the CIA rendered about nine individuals to Syria between December 2001 and October 2002.
And Mar-a-Rar, as you mentioned, is, of course, one of them.
There were others – Abdul-Halim Dalak, Noor Al-Din, Omar Ghamish, Baha Mustafa Jageel, Bara Abdul Latif, Mustafa Nasser, and Yasser Tanawi and Haider Zamar.
These were individuals who were also rendered to Syria.
Again, we don't know all of the facts about whether the CIA was hanging around there.
We do – obviously, there were close – the CIA was, as a general matter, in close contact with intelligence officials who were actually doing the interrogation.
In many instances, we know generally that questions were supplied by the CIA.
So it wouldn't be surprising that – if there was close contact.
Mm-hmm.
Well, now, I guess the conventional wisdom, sort of, kind of, anyway, I think is – well, I don't know how conventional it is.
Around here, anyway, the way we think about it is that Guantanamo was full of a bunch of nobodies who were basically bought by the CIA or sold by Pakistani headhunters.
And, you know, it was basically just a big PR stunt in that you didn't have any real al-Qaeda guys.
Very few – I guess Qatani was there.
But there were very few real al-Qaeda guys there at all until 2005 when they closed the black sites and they finally brought Ramzi bin al-Shib and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and some of these others to Guantanamo.
But I wonder if you guys have any kind of ballpark estimate on the percentage of people taken to the black sites in the first place, whether they were brought to Guantanamo later or not, but who actually were, you know, either mistaken identity or they had also just been sold by the Pakistani headhunters or something else.
How many of these people – I mean, not like it's okay to torture someone just for being friends of bin Laden, but I wonder how many of these people had nothing whatsoever to do with any of this stuff they were being accused of and were part of this CIA rendition program.
Do you know?
Well, it's hard to, again, put a definitive number of any of this because of the extreme secrecy associated with these operations.
But nonetheless, the case of Khalid al-Masri obviously comes to mind.
He's an absolutely innocent man who was on vacation in Macedonia in December of 2003 when he was abducted by Macedonian officials, basically acting in concert with CIA officials, and detained and abused for 23 days in Macedonian custody before being transferred to the CIA at Skopje Airport where he was stripped, sodomized, and subjected to other kinds of abuse before finally being flown to Afghanistan to be held in the salt pit in CIA custody and subjected to further abuse.
Mr. al-Masri's case was represented by the Open Society Justice Initiative before the European Court of Human Rights in an action against the government of Macedonia.
Significantly, the European Court just last year that Macedonia violated the European Convention by participating in his extraordinary rendition.
And moreover, the court found that the CIA's treatment of Mr. al-Masri at Skopje Airport amounted to torture.
And this is a case of mistaken identity.
The CIA captured him because his name resembled that of an al-Qaeda terrorist suspect.
In fact, Mr. al-Masri was completely innocent, but he still not received any kind of apology or acknowledgement or compensation from the U.S. government.
In fact, what the U.S. government did was after detaining him for about four months in Afghanistan, it just dumped him on the roadside in Albania without explanation or apology.
Well, yeah, and that poor guy was just a grosser.
And then wasn't part of that story that they knew he was innocent after only a few weeks or something like that, but then they kept him anyway?
That's correct.
That's really quite incredible.
I mean, there's a lot of explaining to be done in the case of Mr. al-Masri, both by the U.S. government and also by the German government.
You know, we need to know when did the German government know about his case?
What did they do to stop it?
And what have they done to facilitate an acknowledgement of what happened to Mr. al-Masri, given that he is, after all, a German national?
Yeah.
You know, I read number 17 here about al-Masri.
And, you know, I'm just thinking this is, you know, what I was raised to understand America, you know, as what we're about and whatever.
And this is, I think, this summary here of his treatment is just couldn't be more of the exact opposite.
In fact, you talk about his mock execution.
There's a new movie out, of course, the Ben Affleck movie about getting the American hostages out of Iran in 1979, where part of the horror of those savages is that they put the Americans through a mock execution.
And this is just the worst thing that you could do to somebody, line them up in front of the firing squad and then drive fire.
And, you know, they believe they're about to be shot to death.
And the guy even, I think, in the movie breaks down crying.
That's it.
He can't stand it anymore, this torture.
And that's what America does.
That's correct.
Mr. al-Masri was subjected to mock executions in Poland.
He was, you know, there's an interrogator who cocked a gun to his head and also sort of stuck a power drill next to his head.
He was subjected to other kinds of abuse, including, you know, sexual abuse directed at his mother and stress positions until his arm was almost dislocated.
Again, those are facts, incidentally, the facts relating to the mock execution of Mr. al-Masri.
Those are facts that are documented in a document that's now public.
The CIA's Office of Inspector General Report specifically describes the abuse that Mr. al-Masri was subjected to.
And notwithstanding the fact that that abuse has been specifically acknowledged now by the U.S. government, there still has been no accountability for the torture that is documented there.
Well, and it seems like threatening to rape people's mothers is kind of a common theme here, too.
I'm sorry, his name is Cotter, poor Omar Cotter, who they coerced into admitting to some made-up nonsense.
They did that to him.
And I think people, when they hear that, oh, yeah, somebody said something bad about your mom.
They threatened her or whatever.
But we're talking about people who are very severely captured and cannot, you know, get away, cannot get to their mother to try to protect her.
And their mother is being quite credibly threatened.
It's not like any of these people should, you know, that we should expect them to think, oh, now the CIA, they might torture me, but they wouldn't hurt my mom or something.
It's a very credible threat that, yeah, we're going to rape your mother.
I mean, that's serious.
That's torture itself, to say that to someone, to deliver a credible threat like that to someone who is absolutely helpless to prevent it.
Absolutely.
That's what all of these, the whole point, actually, of the CIA program was to hold people in captivity outside the reach of the law, both in terms of its secret detention operations, the holding of prisoners in secret CIA black sites, and the outsourcing of abusive interrogations to governments like Syria known to employ torture.
The whole point of these operations was to insulate the United States from any kind of review, from any kind of accountability.
The theory was that if it wasn't done on U.S. soil, then that would protect the United States.
Right.
Well, and apparently, I mean, their theory held basically the Justice Department assigned a prosecutor to do a preliminary investigation into whether they should do a preliminary investigation into only two cases of CIA murder, and then they decided that there wasn't enough to move their preliminary investigation any further.
That's it.
Even though everybody knows that they're in violation of at least the war crimes laws and the anti-torture statutes and false imprisonment and every other kind of thing that's already, you know, that have been felonies on the books since long before 9-11-2001.
That's correct.
There is absolutely no accountability here.
The Justice Department investigation did not look into abuses that were authorized by its own Office of Legal Counsel, and we have several memoranda that are now in the public domain that go into excruciating detail about the kinds of torture techniques that the Office of Legal Counsel reviewed and cleared for use.
Well, Leon Panetta admitted the other day, too, that despite what people may have seen at the movie theater, they didn't need torture to get Osama bin Laden at all.
That's correct, and that's a view that is actually confirmed by Senator Feinstein.
And, in fact, Senator Feinstein, Levin, and McCain specifically wrote in a letter to the makers of Zero Dark Thirty that these interrogation techniques are unreliable and ineffective.
Well, and what's funny about that is everybody knows that.
Everybody already knew that, right?
I mean, people falsely confess in a local murder case or something like that, and then people wonder why, but they already know the answer, right?
Because they put them in a little room with two fat, smelly cops with bright hot lights, and the cops made it to where the suspect would say anything just to get out of that room right then.
And they get false information that way all the time, just local cops being local cops.
So it seems pretty obvious, especially when you look at Jonathan Landay's work at McClatchy, etc., that most of this torture had nothing to do with trying to prevent an attack or find out the truth of an attack.
They were trying to get, you know, phony bases for putting out an orange alert every two or three days, and they were trying to torture people into implicating Saddam Hussein for being in an alliance with Osama bin Laden.
Well, yeah, I think there's a full truth about all of this that has to really come out.
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has just recently approved in December a 6,000-page report on CIA detention and interrogation, and Senator Feinstein said that this report will resolve once and for all whether the United States should be using coercive interrogation techniques.
Right, and that's why they won't release it.
Right.
All right, well, so I'm sorry because I'm just honestly not prepared enough for this interview today.
Is there something really important that I might have missed that you think that the people really ought to be aware of here?
Well, I think that it's time for accountability.
It's time for disclosure, and it's time for accountability not only on the part of the United States but also on the part of these numerous governments that cooperated in these flagrantly illegal operations.
It's our hope that this report will compel governments to come forward with information and that there will be some further momentum gained in the movement for accountability.
Right on.
All right, well, thank you very much for your time, Amrit.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you.
Bye.
All right, everybody, that is Amrit Singh from opensocietyfoundations.org.
The new report is called Globalizing Torture, CIA Secret Detention, an Extraordinary Rendition.
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