So you manage a consulting firm working on a project for a client, and your average run of the mill researcher in the US charges $45 an hour, but his counterpart in India will charge a third of that. So what do you do? Well, seeing that we live in a globalized, virtually borderless world of instant communication, you outsource the job to India and save your firm a whole heap of money.
In like manner, an intelligence agent investigating terrorists who will not “cooperate,” and the law in your country does not sanction the use of torture to extract information, will outsource the job to a friendly country that does.
Makes sense, right? Well, not quite.
In late December 2003, Khaled Masri, 41, who had been having marital problems, got into a heated argument with his wife in their hometown of Ulm, Germany, and decided that to cool off he should get away for a few days.
That’s when he bought a bus ticket for Skopje, Macedonia. At the border, immigration officials took one look at his passport and detained him as a member of Al-Qaeda. Though he protested his innocence, he was kept under guard for three weeks and then put on a plane by US secret agents that took him to Afghanistan. There, he was beaten, stripped, shackled, deprived of water and aggressively questioned.
After five months, he was released when it turned out that the Arab immigrant’s abduction had been a mistake after all: Khaled Masri’s name was similar to that of an Al-Qaeda suspect, Kalid Masri.
Flight logs supported Masri’s claim that he was flown out of Macedonia by US secret agents. Aviation records show a US-registered Boeing jet arriving in Skopje at 9 a.m. on Jan. 23, 2004 and departed about six hours later. Masri had provided German investigators with the same time and date.
Prosecutors in Germany, after scrutinizing his account, have confirmed key parts of his story and are investigating it as a kidnapping.
In Feb. 2003, a radical Egyptian cleric in Milan, Italy, known as Abu Omar, was walking to his mosque for noon prayers when he was grabbed on the sidewalk by two men, sprayed in the face with mace and stuffed into a van. He hasn’t been seen since. Milan investigators, however, now appear close to identifying his kidnappers: The Egyptian was the target of a CIA-sponsored operation, involving 15 agents, many of them CIA operatives.
In Sweden, a parliamentary probe has found that CIA agents wearing hoods orchestrated the forced removal in December 2001 of two Egyptian nationals on a US-registered plane to Cairo, where the men were tortured severely. One was later exonerated by Ehyptian police when they discovered that his was a case of mistaken identity — but not before he was dehumanized by the treatment meted out to him.
This practice, of forcibly sending suspects to countries that have no qualms about abusing suspects to extract information, is known euphemistically as rendition.
A suspect refuses to cooperate, and we’re enjoined by the law of the land against torturing him, well then, by Jove, send the jerk to a land where investigators can shock him into doing so — electrically.
Earlier this year, President Bush, in an interview with Time magazine, assured the nation, and the rest of the world, that “torture is never acceptable, nor do we hand over people to countries that do torture.”
Well, then, George, you ought to do lunch with your CIA director who will tell you about that most notorious of rendition cases — whose brazenness merited wide attention in the national media — that of Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen of Syrian extract who, on Sept. 26, 2002, was apprehended at JFK Airport, where he had a two-hour layover, on his way back home with his family from a vacation in Tunisia.
Arar, a thirty-five-year-old graduate of McGill University, whose parents had emigrated to Canada when he was in his teens, was flown to Syria by American agents and rendered there as a terrorist. Locked up there in a cell “the size of a coffin,” he endured months of brutal interrogation, including torture — the kind of torture, as he described it to Jane Mayer of the New Yorker, invoking Arab idiom, that “makes you forget the milk that you have been fed from your mother’s breast.”
Arar, another case of mistaken identity, was apprehended because his name had been placed on the US Watch List of Terrorists, and released in October, 2003, only after the Canadian government took up his cause.
A call I placed to the press attache’s office at the Syrian Embassy in Washington last week resulted in an official impatiently saying that his country “does not practice torture at all.” Asked to identify himself for the purpose of this column, he said gruffly, “I don’t have time for that,” and hung up.
After Sept. 11, rendition of suspects to countries with little regard for legal niceties, has expanded from a limited practice aimed at suspects with outstanding international warrants to a wide range of people that the administration, in its declared global war on terrorism, considers “illegal enemy combatants.”
According to a report on renditions issued by N.Y.U. Law School and the New York City Bar Association, approximately a hundred and fifty people have been rendered since 2001.
Obviously, outsourcing torture is in clear violation of US law, not to mention international law. In 1998, Congress passed legislation that declared it “the policy of the United States not to expel, extradite, or otherwise effect the involuntary return of any person to a country in which there are substantial grounds for believing the person would be in danger of being subjected to torture.”
Yet rendition to countries that practice torture — countries where, in the words of Michael Scheur, a former CIA counterterrorism expert and a critic of the practice, American agents give the local interrogators questions “they want put to a detainee in the morning and get answers by the evening” — goes on, justified in intellectual terms by the administration’s elite, including Alberto Gonzales, a former White House counsel and now the attorney general, in the belief that American law and the UN Convention Against Torture banning “cruel, degrading and inhuman treatment” do not apply to American interrogations overseas.
A democratic country does not condone, practice or outsource torture. As simple as that.
Thus, when Washington hectors our part of the world, in a paternalistic, often threatening manner, about democratization, you suspect that there is something fishy about this whole enterprise advanced by a country that, over the last half century or more, has not only underwritten the survival of two-bit dictators around the world, all the way from Nicaragua to Vietnam, but actually engineered the overthrow — not encouraged the emergence — of democratic regimes all the way from Iran (1953) to Chile (1973).
And now the egregeous practice of rendion.
I bring up the issue of American efforts to “introduce” Arabs to democracy, in a column on torture, on the grounds that readers are entitled to all the laughs they can get in these depressing times.
