More Than 50 Countries Helped the CIA Outsource Torture + Renditions continue under Obama

[Mutatis Mutandis]

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2013/02/54-countries-rendition/

In the years after 9/11, the CIA ran a worldwide program to hold and interrogate suspected members of al-Qaida, sometimes brutally. It wasn’t alone: The agency had literally dozens of partners that helped in ways large and small. Only it’s never been clear just how many nations enabled CIA capture and torture; cooperated with it; or carried it out on behalf of the U.S. — until now. A new report from the Open Society Foundation details the CIA’s effort to outsource torture since 9/11 in excruciating detail. Known as “extraordinary rendition,” the practice concerns taking detainees to and from U.S. custody without a legal process — think of it like an off-the-books extradition — and often entailed handing detainees over to countries that practiced torture. The Open Society Foundation found that 136 people went through the post-9/11 extraordinary rendition, and 54 countries were complicit in it.

Some were official U.S. adversaries, like Iran and Syria, brought together with the CIA by the shared interest of combating terrorism. “By engaging in torture and other abuses associated with secret detention and extraordinary rendition,” writes chief Open Society Foundation investigator Amrit Singh in a report released early Tuesday, “the U.S. government violated domestic and international law, thereby diminishing its moral standing and eroding support for its counterterrorism efforts worldwide as these abuses came to light.”

Iran didn’t do any torturing on behalf of the CIA. Instead, it quietly transferred at least 15 of its own detainees to Afghan custody in March 2002. Six of those found their way into the CIA’s secret prisons. “Because the hand-over happened soon after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan,” Singh writes, “Iran was aware that the United States would have effective control over any detainees handed over to Afghan authorities.” At least one of those detainees, Tawfik al-Bihani, ended up at Guantanamo Bay, where his official file makes no mention of his time with the CIA.

Iran’s proxy Syria did torture on behalf of the United States. The most famous case involves Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen snatched in 2002 by the U.S. at John F. Kennedy International Airport before the CIA sent him to Syria under the mistaken impression he was a terrorist. In Syrian custody, Arar was “imprisoned for more than ten months in a tiny grave-like cell, beaten with cables, and threatened with electric shocks by the Syrian government,” Singh writes.

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Renditions continue under Obama, despite due-process concerns

http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-01-01/world/36323571_1_obama-administration-interrogation-drone-strikes

The three European men with Somali roots were arrested on a murky pretext in August as they passed through the small African country of Djibouti. But the reason soon became clear when they were visited in their jail cells by a succession of American interrogators.

U.S. agents accused the men — two of them Swedes, the other a longtime resident of Britain — of supporting al-Shabab, an Islamist militia in Somalia that Washington considers a terrorist group. Two months after their arrest, the prisoners were secretly indicted by a federal grand jury in New York, then clandestinely taken into custody by the FBI and flown to the United States to face trial.

The secret arrests and detentions came to light Dec. 21 when the suspects made a brief appearance in a Brooklyn courtroom.

The men are the latest example of how the Obama administration has embraced rendition — the practice of holding and interrogating terrorism suspects in other countries without due process — despite widespread condemnation of the tactic in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

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[ProSense]

1. The report or the article you linked to doesn't say anything about Obama continuing this policy.

Singh and the Open Society Foundation don’t presume that the CIA is out of the extraordinary renditions game under Obama. Danger Room pal Jeremy Scahill recently toured a prison in Somalia that the CIA uses. While Obama issued an executive order in 2009 to get the CIA out of the detentions business, the order “did not apply to facilities used for short term, transitory detention.” The Obama administration says it won’t transfer detainees to countries without a pledge from a host government not to torture them — but Syria’s Assad made exactly that pledge to the U.S. before torturing Maher Arar.

Much of this is likely to be contained in the Senate intelligence committee’s recent report into CIA torture. It’s unclear when, if ever, that report will be declassified. But the Open Society Foundation’s study into renditions comes right as Obama aide John Brennan — already under pressure to clarify his role, if any, in post-9/11 torture — is about to testify to the panel ahead of becoming CIA director. It remains to be seen if the Senate committee will ask Brennan to clarify if the CIA still practices extraordinary rendition, along with its old friends.

The title of the OP is a gross misrepresentation of the findings. It's a report about the extent of the program under Bush.

Torture: America's Export

By Zachary Katznelson, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU National Security Project at 12:07pm
Yesterday, the Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI) issued a comprehensive report laying out the scope of the CIA's extraordinary rendition, secret prison and torture program. The report, following up on the ACLU's 2012 Torture Report, traces the evolution of the program, through which the CIA kidnapped terrorism suspects from around the world, flew them secretly to "black sites" – where they were held incommunicado without charge or trial – and tortured them. The OSJI report reveals that 54 nations, more than a quarter of the world, directly participated in the torture program, including through housing CIA prisoners on their soil, where they were often tortured; helping kidnap terrorism suspects and ship them overseas without any legal process; and allowing CIA planes to use their airspace and airports for those kidnapping missions. (Check out the report to learn which countries participated, and what types of assistance they offered). And it compiles the largest, most detailed list yet of the men and women thrown into these horrific black holes, naming 136 victims, many of whose whereabouts remain unknown today.

But even the impressive OSJI report is not the full story; the CIA continues to cloak the entire truth in shameful secrecy, including suppressing the statements of torture victims who remain in United States custody (with the acquiescence of a military commissions judge). We are urging the Senate Intelligence Committee to release a 6,000-page classified report it has adopted that details the CIA torture program, to ensure that Americans know all the facts about what was done in our names (click here to add your voice).

While President Obama outlawed the torture techniques used by the CIA, he has to date refused to hold anyone accountable for these egregious violations of domestic and international law, stating, "We need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards." That decision has sent the dangerous message has not only prevented accountability, but set a terrible example for the world, eroded America's reputation and undercut our claims to uphold the rule of law.

http://www.aclu.org/blog/human-rights-national-security/torture-americas-export

[Mutatis Mutandis]

3. the 2 titles are straight from Wired and the Washington Post, and Obama IS continuing renditions

Rendition gets ongoing embrace from Obama administration

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/rendition-gets-ongoing-embrace-from-obama-administration-8434963.html

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Obama Administration Interrogating Terror Suspects Locked Up Abroad (Again)

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/01/remix-rendition-proxy-detention

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Barack Obama to allow anti-terror rendition to continue 2009

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/4425135/Barack-Obama-to-allow-anti-terror-rendition-to-continue.html

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Obama and Rendition 2011

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/06/24/obama-and-rendition/

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Obama preserves renditions as counter-terrorism tool 2009


http://articles.latimes.com/2009/feb/01/nation/na-rendition1

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Under Obama Administration, Renditions—and Secrecy Around Them—Continue

http://www.propublica.org/blog/item/as-rendition-controversy-reemerges-obama-admin-policies-murky

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[ProSense]

4. What exactly is that?

You're posting a series of articles bouncing between 2009 on that do not support the continutuation of extraordinary rendition, the Bush policy.

Some of the articles are pure speculation based on not knowing. There is no evidence, none, to support your claim. The fact that the OP report does not should be a clue.

[Fight2Win]

2. We need a full Financial and Constitutional audit of all policies of the pentagon/homeland security

Is it any wonder why they don't want to bother auditing the pentagon, who takes 60% of federal spending, or Big Government Homeland Security which now cost as much as education, which Republicans like to complain about incessantly.

We need to demand audits of the Pentagon and Homeland Security, and a judicial review by the international criminal court.

[woo me with science]

5. K&R