Preaching HR, practising torture
The subject of “extraordinary rendition”, the term used by US officials to give a glossy veneer to the repulsive practice of abduction, transportation to secret cells in third countries and torture of high value detainees (HVDs) authorised by the highest in the US administration, has come up again. In the US terminology, HVDs stands for key terrorist suspects and they have been subjected to such treatment without judicial process.
A recent 72-page report prepared by Swiss Senator Dick Marty and presented to the Council of Europe last Friday has brought to light several European governments’ collusion in this illegal act, in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights and despite their vehement opposition to the invasion of Iraq.
The total number of suspects interrogated at European locations or elsewhere in the world — 20 countries are supposed to have been involved in the operation that has come to be known as “global spider’s web” — is not known, though only recently six human rights organisations alleged that 39 of them were still held. There has been at least one case of mistaken identity, Khaled al-Masri, and he was released after long and painful detention but without due recompense or even apology. There could be any number of others in this category.
The glaring unconstitutionality of the crime was such that it should have remained the focus of public attention since its disclosure in September 2005, until at least all those involved, including the top government echelon at Washington and the European leaders complicit in its execution, had been brought to book. But then 9/11 has unveiled more starkly than ever before the evil instinct of Western leadership going berserk that the rendition-torture was just one among several other means, known or unknown to the public, of subjecting suspects to agonising interrogation with to extract confession. The focus kept on shifting, therefore.
Guantanamo Bay at the US naval base in Cuba, Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Bagram in Afghanistan are well known black holes where psychopaths were let loose to regale in their game to their hearts’ content and aspiring psychopaths were broken in to practise the techniques they had not dreamt of. Washington’s treachery to the cause of human rights of which it is the foremost protagonist did not remain confined to these sites.
Romania and most notably Poland where “black sites” were located were among the seven member countries of the Council of Europe as pointed out by Senator Marty whose team had been trying to get at the bottom of the rendition story for the past two years. These black sites were “run directly and exclusively by the CIA”, with local officials only lending logistical support. The barbaric practice of rendition was first made public by The Washington Post in September 2005.
How much the US media lives up to the general perception of fiercely preserving its freedom and exposing official wrongdoing can be judged from WP’s omission of the names of Poland and Romania, under the administration’s advice, and merely mentioning ‘countries in Eastern Europe’. ABC’s website removed the two countries’ names soon after they had appeared. The tragedy of Iraq where the invaders are guilty of committing massive human rights violations could, most probably, have been averted if the US media, indeed the entire Western media, had not given currency to their governments’ lies and, instead, gone into the truth of the yarn about weapons of mass destruction that President Saddam Hussein was ready to use and his links with Al-Qaeda. Dissident, sane voices were summarily smothered.
There is little doubt left that the media was promoting a cause it shared with the government: advancing imperialist interests through the forcible occupation of Iraq’s energy resources in order to maintain the US (Western, in other words) global hegemony, but failing to foresee that the war would prolong, the American casualties would rise and the public would get weary of the military operation.
The specific mention in the Marty report of Poland and Romania as “black sites” established with the express approval of former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski and former and current Romanian Presidents, Ion Ilescu and Traian Basescu respectively, has provoked angry denials from them. But the evidence against them is overwhelming. Senator Marty’s sources include US intelligence contacts, which for obvious reasons did not want their identities to be disclosed, but would be ready to give evidence once there was ‘change in the political climate’, suggesting that they would speak up when the American administration was favourably disposed to getting at the truth.
Besides, New York-based Human Rights Watch has done a painstaking job of studying CIA rendition flight pattern and matching it with the testimony of detainees to conclude, “two destinations of the flights in particular stood out…Szymany Airport in Poland…and Mikhail Koqalniceanu military airfield in Romania”. More than 1,000 covert CIA flights, says the Marty report, crossed European airspace or stopped at European airports during these years. Researches tried to keep track, as far as possible, of the flight record and passenger list of aircraft directly or indirectly connected with the CIA.
With this evidence and President Bush’s admission last September that a network of secret prisons did exist though he did not say where they were located, the denial by the Polish and Romanian leaders falls flat. It is also quite evident that the sordid drama stretching from 2003 to 2005 could not have been enacted without the knowledge and permission of top political leaders and intelligence bosses of these countries. Like them, those from whose territories suspects were abducted and transferred (Italy, for example) or whose airports were used for transporting them (like Germany, England and Ireland — the three countries with the highest number of flights passing across their airspace or landing on their airports), but remained shamefully silent about their role, deserve to be suitably dealt with under the law.
Germany and Italy have also been accused of strongly obstructing investigation into their part under the pretext of “state secret”, lending weight to the argument that they have skeleton in their cupboards to hide. The pity is that many European countries have been on record criticising the US for detention without trial at Guantanamo Bay, yet surprisingly they quietly went along with this illegal operation. The reason they shy away from facing embarrassing questions is that they could not possibly justify their connivance before the public or the European Human Rights Commission.
The story of extraordinary rendition badly exposes the hypocrisy of the US as well as the West about the values they avowedly hold sacred. When it comes to promoting their perceived strategic interests, they could throw these values out of the window without the slightest qualms of conscience.
Mazhar Qayyum Khan
The writer is a former Ambassador
E-mail: [email protected]
Source: The Nation
Date:6/19/2007
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