Ghost Planes

In an earlier diary, CIA torture flightlogs now available, the amazing smintheus posted an important update to Germans documented American torture in 2001.

If you consider documentation of the CIA's kidnapping flightlogs a smoking gun, I'm in complete agreement.

We thought we knew about rendition; a nice word for kidnapping.  Until Stephen Grey's Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program, did we know that thousands of individuals have been flown away to be tortured at CIA black sites around the world, with the full knowledge of the U.S. Government and in the name of the American people?

The damning truth is on the front page of today's Washington Post.  The suspicions of many human rights activists have now been documented by the CIA flightlogs.

Who will be next?

The CIA, working with other intelligence agencies, has captured an estimated 3,000 people, including several key leaders of al Qaeda, in its campaign to dismantle terrorist networks. It is impossible to know, however, how many mistakes the CIA and its foreign partners have made.

Unlike the military's prison for terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba -- where 180 prisoners have been freed after a review of their cases -- there is no tribunal or judge to check the evidence against those picked up by the CIA. The same bureaucracy that decides to capture and transfer a suspect for interrogation-- a process called "rendition" -- is also responsible for policing itself for errors.

I won't go into detail about the despicable treatment of Khaled El Masri here, as you can read about that in smintheus' diary.  Our government's error was such that Mr. El Masri will never known a day without pain for the rest of his life.

On the 23rd day of his motel captivity, the police videotaped Masri, then bundled him, handcuffed and blindfolded, into a van and drove to a closed-off building at the airport, Masri said. There, in silence, someone cut off his clothes. As they changed his blindfold, "I saw seven or eight men with black clothing and wearing masks," he later said in an interview. He said he was drugged to sleep for a long plane ride.

Masri said his cell in Afghanistan was cold, dirty and in a cellar, with no light and one dirty cover for warmth. The first night he said he was kicked and beaten and warned by an interrogator: "You are here in a country where no one knows about you, in a country where there is no law. If you die, we will bury you, and no one will know."

Maher Arar was an "error."

Abu Zubaydah?  He was an "error," too.

At this time, Zubaydah's status is unknown.  We don't know whether or not Abu Zubaydah is even alive.

From the Washington Post story by Dana Priest:

The CIA inspector general is investigating a growing number of what it calls "erroneous renditions," according to several former and current intelligence officials.

No, no.  An error is forgetting to return a phone call. The road you should have taken (and would have, if you had remembered your map.  The typo because you forgot to proofread.  Careless errors do NOT result in:

• Egypt. Suspension from a ceiling or doorframe; beatings with fists, whips, metal rods, and other objects; administration of electric shocks; being doused with cold water; sexual assault or threat with sexual assault.
• Jordan. Beatings on the soles of the feet; prolonged suspension in contorted positions; beatings.
• Morocco. Severe beatings.
• Pakistan. Beatings; burning with cigarettes; sexual assault; administration of electric shocks; being hung upside down; forced spreading of the legs with bar fetters.
• Saudi Arabia. Beatings; whippings; suspension from bards by handcuffs; drugging.
• Syria. Administration of electric shocks; pulling out fingernails; forcing objects into the rectum; beatings; bending detainees into the frame of a wheel and whipping exposed body parts

  The country reports cite the stripping and blindfolding of prisoners among the principal methods of torture used by Egyptian authorities. Female prisoners and family members of detainees have also been forced to strip.

Source: Human Rights Watch.

• Uzbekistan. Torture techniques include systematic beatings, hanging, electric shocks, suffocation, rape, cauterization – the use of hot irons – and pain inflicted through dentistry. The Human Rights Society has documented cases of prisoners who died as a result of torture and other people who have disappeared without a trace.

From Juan Cole, the observations of former Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray.

Murray began receiving photographs and other evidence from victims' families that the Uzbek government was engaging in brutal torture techniques as part of its interrogation of dissidents. One corpse had been beaten around the neck and jaw, and boiled alive. There was a line across his chest, under which it was scalded. Boiled like a lobster.

Yet the UK and the US were giving large amounts of foreign aid to Uzbekistan and winking at the political repression and torture. (Murray may not have known at that time that the US had a detention facility at its Karshi-Khanabad airbase in Uzbekistan, at which it was also torturing suspects.) The US was hoping that its corporations would be given contracts for the development and export of Uzbekistan natural gas. (In late 2004, the Uzbeks made their contract with the Russian Gazprom firm instead, and almost immediately Karimov began planning to ask the US to leave the base.)

Murray as UK ambassador began seeing CIA reports naming known al-Qaeda operatives who were prominent in Uzbekistan. But these turned out to be just run of the mill Uzbek politicians who were on the outs with Karimov. Where did the CIA get this information about high-level terrorists in Uzbekistan? From Karimov's secret police. And where did they get their phony "intelligence"? From torturing dissidents and making them admit to being al-Qaeda and implicating others as al-Qaeda. From torture. From the twilight of conciousness before the boiling killed them. From lobsters.

Lives forever shattered, these errors need to be accounted for and addressed to the full extent of the law.  They were committed in our names and with our tax money.

"They picked up the wrong people, who had no information. In many, many cases there was only some vague association" with terrorism, one CIA officer said.

Thousands.  How many others feel the same way Mr. El Masri does -- and who could ever blame him, or them?

Masri can find few words to explain his ordeal. "I have very bad feelings" about the United States, he said. "I think it's just like in the Arab countries: arresting people, treating them inhumanly and less than that, and with no rights and no laws."

Also posted at Unbossed and Never In Our Names.