This is a short, well made documentary about Benyam Mohammed al Habashi, who, as of 2006, was still imprisoned in Guantamo Bay. He is a British citizen.

Originally posted
by Human Rights Watch.

Extraordinary Rendition, Extraterritorial Detention, and Treatment of Detainees: Restoring Our Moral Credibility and Strengthening Our Diplomatic Standing

Testimony by Tom Malinowski, Human Rights Watch Washington advocacy director

US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations

July 26, 2007

Mr. Chairman, thank you for holding this hearing and for inviting me to testify.

When I joined the staff of Human Rights watch six years ago, I assumed I would be spending most of my time dealing with outrages committed by governments in countries like Sudan and China and Burma, and urging the United States to be a force for good in such places. I never imagined that I would see my own government engaging in the kinds of activities it has long condemned around the world: disappearing prisoners in secret facilities for years without any legal process, sending them to be interrogated in countries where torture is standard practice, and subjecting them to interrogation methods that I first learned about while reading accounts by Soviet dissidents of what they endured in KGB prisons.

These policies have undermined standards that defenders of human rights everywhere rely upon to fight for their cause. They have diminished America’s moral standing and influence in the world. They have hindered, not aided, the fight against terrorism, handing America’s enemies a victory they could never have achieved on their own.

For the last six years, a growing number of voices have been pushing back: members of Congress, the Supreme Court, active and retired members of the U.S. military and intelligence community, not to mention organizations dedicated to promoting civil liberties and human rights. We have made considerable progress in righting the wrongs of the last few years and encouraging a counter-terrorism strategy that will be more effective as well as lawful. But much more needs to be done. And I am very glad, Mr. Chairman, to see you taking the lead in addressing some of the most complex and important aspects of the problem, including extraordinary rendition and secret detention.

What I’d like to do is discuss what we know about the CIA’s detention, interrogation, and rendition program, as well as its consequences and the importance of fundamentally changing it. I will then offer a few comments on the legislation you have introduced.

The Program

The administration has acknowledged that around 100 prisoners have been held in the CIA program, in facilities operated by the Agency in undisclosed locations around the world. The International Committee for the Red Cross has repeatedly asked for access to these facilities and been denied. These prisoners were effectively disappeared. In international law, an enforced disappearance is considered to be “the arrest, detention, abduction or any other form of deprivation of liberty committed by agents of the State . . . followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or by concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person, which place such a person outside the protection of the law.” That is precisely what happened to the CIA prisoners…

Read the full article here.

This is Canadian Maher Arar’s story of extraordinary rendition, as it happened to him. He is seeking an appeal for his case against the US Government, which was previously denied due to a claim of National Security.

originally posted counterpunch.org

A Personal Account
The Horrors of Extraordinary Rendition

By MAHER ARAR

Canadian citizen Maher Arar, who is barred from entering the United States, delivered his acceptance speech for the Letelier-Moffitt International Human Rights Award in a pre-recorded videotape. This is a transcript of his speech, which was viewed at the award ceremony hosted by the Institute for Policy Studies on Oct. 18, 2006 in Washington, DC.

Hello my name is Maher Arar. Sorry I could not join you for today’s ceremony.

All Center for Constitutional Rights Staff and I are humbled to have been chosen this year’s recipient for the Letelier-Moffitt International Human Rights Award. This award means a tremendous amount to us. It means that there are still Americans out there who value our struggle for justice.

It means that there are Americans out there who are truly concerned about the future of America. We now know that my story is not a unique one. Over the past two years we have heard from many other people who were, who have been kidnapped, unlawfully detained, tortured and eventually released without being charged with any crime in any country.

JFK Stopover

My nightmare began on September 26, 2002. I was transiting through New York airport, JFK Airport, when they asked me to wait in a waiting area. I found that to be strange. Shortly after, some FBI officials came to see me and they asked me whether, I was willing to be interviewed.

My first immediate reaction was to ask for a lawyer and I was surprised when they told me that I had no right to a lawyer because I was not an American citizen…

Read the full article here

Once again, a state of the European Union is attempting to extradite CIA operatives for a trial, this time for the alleged kidnapping and rendition of Khalid El-Masri.

Monday, June 25, 2007
originally posted on Jurist

German prosecutors seek extradition of CIA agents in El-Masri rendition
Gabriel Haboubi at 3:59 PM ET

German prosecutors said Monday they will seek the extradition of 13 US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agents they believe to be responsible for the alleged 2003 kidnapping and extraordinary rendition of German national Khalid El-Masri. US State Department Deputy Spokesman Tom Casey said that he hadn’t formally heard about the German request, but told reporters that the US response would be “about the same” as prior extradition requests for CIA agents. In February, the State Department said that the US would not extradite CIA agents to Italy for a rendition-related trial. The German government can block the prosecutor’s demand if it decides it harms the public interest.

El-Masri alleges that CIA agents kidnapped him while on vacation in Macedonia in 2003 and transferred him to Afghanistan, where he was held in a secret prison for five months and subjected to inhumane conditions and coercive interrogation. He was released in Albania in 2004 without apology or funds to return to Germany. El-Masri sued various CIA officials in 2005, arguing that they violated international human rights law in his rendition to Afghanistan. A US federal appeals court upheld the dismissal of that lawsuit in March 2007, ruling that the case could not be heard in a US court because of the state secrets privilege. Reuters has more.

Extraordinary Rendition Exposed Again
by Adel Safty
August 31, 2007
originally posted on zmag.org

Extraordinary rendition-the CIA program of sending suspects in US custody to other countries for torture- has claimed a new victim: the government of Canada. Earlier this month it was revealed that it had knowingly collaborated with the CIA to sacrifice one of its own citizens to imprisonment and torture in another country.
A federal judge ordered the Canadian government to make public some of the blacked out sections of the Arar Commission report on the extraordinary rendition of the Syrian-born Canadian citizen Maher Arar, who had been arrested while transiting in New York in 2002, en route home to Canada. Arar was flown to Syria by the CIA where he was imprisoned for a year and reportedly tortured. He was released without ever being charged with a crime.

Mr. Arar commenced legal actions both in Canada and the USA. A Canadian Commission of Inquiry-headed by Mr. Justice Dennis O’Connor- cleared him. The Canadian government formally apologized and offered Mr. Arar monetary compensation.

The words censored in the name of national security and finally revealed by court order on August 9, show that the Canadian security agency knew that in passing on unverified information- obtained by torture and later recanted- about Arar, it was collaborating with the CIA in the arrest, imprisonment and torture of one of its own citizens, in clear violation of international law and of Canada’s own human rights law.

Canadian security officials knew as early as October 2002 that the CIA and the FBI had been rendering suspects to countries willing to act as agents of torture. They also knew that they were feeding the CIA highly suspect information about Arar obtained under torture from another Syrian-Canadian-Ahmad Abou El Maati-imprisoned in Syria.

The information revealed earlier this month show that on October 10, 2002 , Mr. Hooper, a senior Canadian security official, stated in a memorandum: “I think the U.S. would like to get Arar to Jordan where they can have their way with him.” Mr. Arar’s whereabouts at the time were unknown; he was in fact flown from the US to Jordan and from there taken to Syria where he was imprisoned.

The Canadian Conservative government fought and lost a long legal battle to keep secret its knowledge about and deliberate involvement in the CIA sponsored extraordinary rendition program.

Extraordinary rendition has now been extensively documented. A Human Rights Watch Report prepared in October 2004, documented cases of persons who “disappeared” while in US custody after being apprehended in places like Pakistan , Indonesia, Thailand , and Morocco.

In Outsourcing Torture, Jane Mayer (New Yorker, Feb 14,05) described cases in which “Terrorism suspects in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East have often been abducted by hooded or masked American agents,” then forced into a plane and transported to foreign locations where “rendered suspects often vanish.”

Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark, quoting US and UK military sources, and reporting from Afghanistan write that the number of “ghost detainees” is in excess of 10,000. They document harrowing cases of people abducted and rendered to third countries where they allegedly endured torture. “In scores more cases,” they wrote, “people have simply disappeared.” (Guardian, Mar 19,05)

The arbitrariness of extraordinary rendition was described by Stephen Grey, author of Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program, who told Democracy Now that the program was used “to take people off the streets that were considered a threat and were sent to countries where they had no connection at all. I mean, Maher Arar… was a Canadian citizen, was sent to Syria. We’ve got an Egyptian citizen sent to Libya. We’ve got Ethiopian citizens sent to Morocco …” (Oct 19, 2006)

American military investigations have confirmed that the CIA had routinely brought to various military prisons in Iraq persons without accounting for their identity or the reason for their detention; these detainees came to be known as “ghost detainees”.

Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba stated in his report about the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison: ” On at least one occasion, the 320th MP Battalion at Abu Ghraib held a handful of “ghost detainees” [for The CIA] that they moved around within the facility to hide them from a visiting International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) survey team. This maneuver was deceptive, contrary to Army Doctrine, and in violation of international law.”

The extraordinary rendition program also violates national US legislation passed by Congress in 1998 forbidding 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..” Furthermore, under US law, a “grave breach” of The Geneva Convention ban on torture is a federal crime.

Under fire and in the face of growing public condemnation of the extraordinary rendition program, Bush administration officials confirmed to the New York Times (March 6,05) the existence of the rendition program and the mistreatment. “This,” observed the editors of the NYT, “confirmed that the Bush administration has been outsourcing torture and intends to keep doing it.” Even former CIA inspector Frederick Hitz condemned the practice for its illegality and its immorality. (Democracy Now, Feb 2, 2007 )

The State Department’s own lawyer, William Taft IV, expressed alarm at the criminality of the practice of torture and the Bush administration’s attempt to justify it.. In a lengthy legal opinion, which he sent to the Justice Department on January 11, 2002, and copied to the then White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales,. he reportedly warned the Justice Department and the White House lawyers that disregarding the Geneva Conventions was “untenable.” He urged them to warm President Bush that he would “be seen as a war criminal by the rest of the world.” (New Yorker, Feb 14, 2005)

Prof. Adel Safty’s latest book is Leadership and Democracy, New York.