Kamna Arora
Khaled al-Masri was unlawfully held for around 23 days in the Macedonian capital, Skopje, and was beaten, handcuffed, blindfolded and flown to a US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) detention centre in Afghanistan via Iraq. After torturing him for around five months, the CIA concluded that they had held a wrong person, and dumped the Lebanese-born German citizen somewhere in the Balkans. He was then driven to the Albanian border by unknown men, and later the Albanian authorities arranged for his flight back to Germany.
Amazing, isn’t it! Khaled was held in Macedonia, flown to Iraq and Afghanistan, and then eventually released in Albania.
The case of the 46-year-old Khaled does not only highlight the use of torture as an instrument in the ‘War on Terror’, but also underlines that borders carry no weight in running ‘clandestine’ torture camps. In other words, the ghost prison network stretches around the globe.
Khaled’s case is not an isolated one; there are many like him who have faced the dark art of interrogation in “black sites” located in Romania, Poland, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Thailand, Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, Uzbekistan and other Muslim nations. According to the Centre for Research on Globalisation, the CIA under the Bush administration held tens of thousands of detainees in a number of countries across the world. Established by the US in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, these secret jails across the world house “high-level” detainees.
According to the Council on Foreign Relations, the process of rendition used to be a low-profile counter-terrorism tool, but became an essential part of US intelligence-gathering efforts since 9/11. A number of media reports suggest that the US secretly sends suspects to other countries where there is no law on human rights. Albeit no official information on the subject is available, yet human rights activists pour scorn on the extrajudicial nature of rendition citing various reports.
Some unconfirmed reports also suggest that after 9/11, CIA officers looked for virtually unvisited islands like Alcatraz Island or Lake Kariba to keep detainees. However, due to some reasons, they dropped the idea and started rendering detainees to Egypt and Jordan. But as the number of prisoners started increasing, the US agency looked around for more covert prisons. And then more and more countries were made partner to this inhumane programme.
In 2007, the Council of Europe released an investigative report verifying the presence of detention facilities in Eastern Europe. The report prepared by Dick Marty concluded that people were blindfolded and kidnapped by groups of masked CIA agents. The detainees were then rendered and tortured in prison camps. In fact, some of them were reportedly beaten and there were cases of a “foreign object being forcibly inserted into the man’s anus”, he added.
As per several former US government and intelligence officials, the black-site program was okayed by a small circle of White House and Justice Department lawyers and officials.
What is the legal authority of the US agencies to carry out such renditions? Being a signatory to the UN`s Geneva Convention against Torture, Washington is not allowed to treat prisoners in cruel, inhuman, and degrading manner.
Released recently, Binyam Mohamed spent around seven years in custody - four of those were at the infamous Guantanamo Bay camp. Ethiopian-born Mohammed is a British resident who first came to the UK in 1994 seeking asylum. He was detained in Pakistan in 2002 and was accused of participating in terrorist training camps. But he later revealed that he was rendered and tortured in Pakistan, Morocco and Afghanistan between 2002-04, and was eventually sent to Guantanamo Bay. He also alleged that interrogators repetitively used a scalpel to lacerate his chest and genitals.
Following his return to the UK, Mohamed stated that while he was in detention "the very worst moment came when I realised in Morocco that the people who were torturing me were receiving questions and materials from British intelligence".
Now when Mohamed’s nightmare is over, the US and the UK’s is just beginning. British Defence Secretary John Hutton had recently apologised for giving wrong information apropos of extraordinary rendition of terror suspects, hence putting a confirmation stamp for the first time that UK forces in Iraq handed over individuals to the US, which further rendered them to an Afghan prison.
Law played in the hands of leaders and protectors of democracy and eventually became the worst foe of basic freedom an individual is entitled to enjoy. Nothing could stop torture from being inflicted on hundreds of Binyam Mohameds – no law, no rule and not even border.
Will the winds of ‘change’ in the US put a full stop at this infamous rendition programme. Opponents of secret CIA transfers of terror suspects were disappointed when US President Barack Obama indicated at keeping rendition as an option in the war against terror despite announcing to close Gitmo.
The professed ardent supporters of democracy are breaching the basic tenets of the form of government. Whether it is Abu Ghraib, Bagaram or Guantanamo Bay, the dark art of interrogation employed to take out ‘wanted’ confessions has sent many innocent lives in shadows. And responsible are those governments that are allowing the use of their territory for such crimes just to assist their ally, the US. The need of the hour is concerted efforts by the international community to buckle and find the solution. The borders need to be closed to torture.
