Fighting Terrorism with Torture
by Aisha Gawad
As Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice embarked on her recent five day tour of the Middle East, the media found a renewed, if brief, interest in U.S. relations with its Middle Eastern allies in the War on Terror. Securing and maintaining these allies have been vital to the U.S. effort to democratize the region. A contradiction arises, however, which makes the relationship between the United States and these nations a very delicate one. While waging a war for democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. relies on nations with long records of human rights atrocities and that are, on the whole, far from democratic. In some cases, the lack of human rights regulations in these nations has even benefited the U.S. war effort. The U.S. has generally tried to avoid this contradiction by offering criticism mild enough not to antagonize the friendly nation. While the media focused on this issue with investigative reporting in early 2005, it has been reduced to brief sound bites in 2006, despite its continued relevance.
At the center of the controversy is the program called “extraordinary rendition,” which was adopted by the Bush administration after the September 11th attacks. The program is operated secretly by the CIA, aiming to transfer terrorist suspects to foreign nations for interrogation. Human rights organizations object to the program because the suspects are often sent to nations that employ illegal interrogation tactics, such as torture. Rendition is not a new practice, but was expanded in 2001 to allow the CIA to conduct the transfers without having to obtain approval from the White House or the Justice Department. Without outside approval, there is no one to monitor the CIA’s control over the program but the CIA itself. There is also no requirement to officially charge the suspects, some of whom are interrogated for months without ever being charged.
Within the CIA, the Counterterrorist Center operates a special Rendition Group, which “disappears” suspects from public streets, buses, airports, and any number of other locations. According to Dana Priest of the Washington Post, the Rendition Group members dress “head to toe in black, including masks, they blindfold and cut the clothes off their new captives, then administer an enema and sleeping drugs. They outfit detainees in a diaper and jumpsuit for what can be a day-long trip.” The suspects are either delivered to what are known as “black sites,” undisclosed CIA prisons often in Eastern Europe, or they are delivered to foreign detention centers in Egypt, Syria, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia, among many other locations.
Egypt, in particular, is a close United States ally that is often associated with extraordinary rendition. Egypt is considered by many human rights organizations to extensively practice torture methods. Secretary of State Rice began her recent tour in Egypt, and although she did criticize the country’s government for its decision to delay upcoming local elections, she made no mention of its extensive human rights violations.
In some cases, suspects are bounced around from one location to the other. Many prisoners were picked up and held in the Middle East before being transferred to the U.S. detention facility in Guantánamo Bay. Former prisoners complain of being subjected to beatings, electric shocks, and various forms of humiliation. In the case of Khalid Masri, a German citizen, he was picked up by the CIA in Macedonia and was transferred to a prison in Afghanistan. Masri was mistakenly held for a total of five months, because he had a similar name to a wanted terrorist. When he was finally released, he was malnourished, and was reunited with his family, who had no idea what had happened to him for those five months.
While many officials claim that rendition is a helpful tool in combating terrorism, the fact remains that rendition is inextricably tied to inhumane interrogation tactics and captivity conditions. Human Rights Watch asserts in its 2006 World Report that the Bush administration is increasingly using torture as part of its counterterrorism strategy. It also criticizes Canada and the United Kingdom for sending suspects to foreign nations after receiving promises from those nations not to mistreat the suspects. Human Rights Watch and other organizations argue that such assurances are meaningless coming from nations with rampant torture in their legal systems.
As the United States takes the lead in conducting this War on Terror, it is sending conflicting messages to its allies and also to the Muslim world, which it is desperately trying to reach.
“What message does it send? It sends two messages to me and I think to our allies and all over the world and to the human rights community. One is that we're not only refusing to investigate and go up the chain of command in torture, but we are actually elevating the positions of the very torturers, and those involved in torture themselves,” said Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights in an interview with Between the Lines.
The U.S. rendition policy represents more than just a controversial method of holding and interrogating suspected terrorists; it represents a wide divide between our nation’s words and its actions. As the United States wages a war on the basis of promoting liberty among the formerly oppressed, it loses credibility as it relies on foreign nations that routinely torture suspects of interest to America. A program run and funded by the American government is responsible for essentially “disappearing” people, and then transferring them to foreign nations that have no qualms about using abuse and humiliation to get answers, all in the name of fighting terrorism. Rendition poses an ethical human rights quandary for the United States that seems counterproductive to its aims of promoting democracy in the Middle East. This practice, as well as other practices that undermine human rights laws in the effort to capture terrorists, deserves to be reexamined. While the media’s investigation of the practice has largely stopped, the use of torture through rendition has not.
Works Cited
Harris, S. (2005, February 22). U.S.-Held Prisoners Transferred Abroad Subjected to Torture. Z Magazine on the web. Retrieved from http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=7292
Priest, D. (2005, December 4). Wrongful Imprisonment: Anatomy of a CIA Mistake. The Washington Post on the web. Retrieved from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/03/AR2005120301476_pf.html
