Time Magazine has an article up that profiles a new book on the CIA extraordinary rendition program. I highly recommend reading the whole thing as it exposes new details about the program that have not been revealed anywhere else.
- The CIA has been directly collaborating with the Syrian government in the use of a jail known as the "Palestine Branch" which is well-known for its use of torture.
- The German government agreed to drop charges against Syrian agents who were spying on dissidents in exchange for German access to terror suspects in Syrian custody.
- The US requested that the EU tone down its criticism of Morocco's human rights record in exchange for its collaboration in the rendition program.
- Portor Goss in December 2001 told the author about the rendition program and describes as "a polite way to take people out of action and bring them to some type of justice."
- Every single rendition is done with the approval of the White House.
One of the key passages for me was this one:
Seven months later, the same jet flew into Islamabad near midnight, and extracted three terror suspects. One was Binyan Mohammed, an Ethiopian student living in London, whom Pakistani security officials had arrested in Karachi. The CIA plane then flew the three men to Rabat, touching down at 3:40 a.m., while most people in the Moroccan capital were asleep; Mohammed has since been declared an enemy combatant and moved to Guantanamo, where he remains in legal limbo. Poring over the flight logs, Grey concluded it was 28th time CIA jets had touched down in Morocco since the 9/11 attacks. Last year, Grey asked Morocco's Interior Ministry for confirmation, in written questions submitted through the Moroccan Embassy in London; the emailed reply said no CIA flight had ever visited the Kingdom.
Binyam Mohammed, that name brings back some
painful memories:They cut off my clothes with some kind of doctor's scalpel. I was naked. I tried to put on a brave face. But maybe I was going to be raped. Maybe they'd electrocute me. Maybe castrate me.
They took the scalpel to my right chest. It was only a small cut. Maybe an inch. At first I just screamed ... I was just shocked, I wasn't expecting ... Then they cut my left chest. This time I didn't want to scream because I knew it was coming.
One of them took my penis in his hand and began to make cuts. He did it once, and they stood still for maybe a minute, watching my reaction. I was in agony. They must have done this 20 to 30 times, in maybe two hours. There was blood all over. "I told you I was going to teach you who's the man," [one] eventually said.
They cut all over my private parts. One of them said it would be better just to cut it off, as I would only breed terrorists. I asked for a doctor.
Doctor No 1 carried a briefcase. "You're all right, aren't you? But I'm going to say a prayer for you." Doctor No 2 gave me an Alka-Seltzer for the pain. I told him about my penis. "I need to see it. How did this happen?" I told him. He looked like it was just another patient. "Put this cream on it two times a day. Morning and night." He gave me some kind of antibiotic.
I was in Morocco for 18 months. Once they began this, they would do it to me about once a month. One time I asked a guard: "What's the point of this? I've got nothing I can say to them. I've told them everything I possibly could."
"As far as I know, it's just to degrade you. So when you leave here, you'll have these scars and you'll never forget. So you'll always fear doing anything but what the US wants."
It's important to remember that Morocco seems to be an important stopping point in the CIA's renditon program.
The London Times reported earlier this year on a secret prison the US was helping build near Rabat. It was also suggested by Dick Marty, the European Investigator into the rendition program, that after the eastern European prisons were outed by Dana Priest, the detainees were moved to Morocco.
Anyway, just read the whole Time article and maybe buy the book. You'll come away more terrified of your own government than you ever hoped to be.