In a
NewYorker article posted yesterday a Syrian man from Canada recounts being abducted after being stopped and questioned at JFK airport on September 26th, 2002. The man goes on to tell how he was flown on an "executive jet" to Syria where he was tortured for days on end. Finally being released in October 2003 after Canadian officials took up his cause.
The article reads:
A year later, in October, 2003, Arar was released without charges, after the Canadian government took up his cause. Imad Moustapha, the Syrian Ambassador in Washington, announced that his country had found no links between Arar and terrorism. Arar, it turned out, had been sent to Syria on orders from the U.S. government, under a secretive program known as "extraordinary rendition." This program had been devised as a means of extraditing terrorism suspects from one foreign state to another for interrogation and prosecution. Critics contend that the unstated purpose of such renditions is to subject the suspects to aggressive methods of persuasion that are illegal in America--including torture.
Arar is suing the U.S. government for his mistreatment. "They are outsourcing torture because they know it's illegal," he said. "Why, if they have suspicions, don't they question people within the boundary of the law?"
Rendition was originally carried out on a limited basis, but after September 11th, when President Bush declared a global war on terrorism, the program expanded beyond recognition--becoming, according to a former C.I.A. official, "an abomination." What began as a program aimed at a small, discrete set of suspects--people against whom there were outstanding foreign arrest warrants--came to include a wide and ill-defined population that the Administration terms "illegal enemy combatants." Many of them have never been publicly charged with any crime. Scott Horton, an expert on international law who helped prepare a report on renditions issued by N.Y.U. Law School and the New York City Bar Association, estimates that a hundred and fifty people have been rendered since 2001. Representative Ed Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts and a member of the Select Committee on Homeland Security, said that a more precise number was impossible to obtain. "I've asked people at the C.I.A. for numbers," he said. "They refuse to answer. All they will say is that they're in compliance with the law."
This detailed article is a great follow up to previous pieces done.
See:
Mystery man takes to the skies
Secrecy shrouds jet used to move U.S. detainees
Jet linked to torture claims is sold
A swedish news site broke the story in May 2004, read english transcripts
HERE