I always knew the Americans would bring electricity back to Baghdad. I just never thought they’d be shooting it up my ass.
—Young Iraqi translator, Baghdad, November 20031
Maher Arar was on his way to Canada from a family vacation, changing planes at JFK Airport in New York. His wife and his kids would soon follow.
He would not make it home to Ottawa for over a year.
At JFK, he was pulled over and detained by the FBI and New York City police. After two weeks in a New York immigration facility, he was shackled and put aboard a Gulfstream jet in New Jersey despite his pleas and protests that he would be tortured in Syria. He wept during the entire flight. His family didn’t even know where he was being taken. In Syria he was put in a cell the size of a grave. And he was tortured, repeatedly and brutally.
Three hundred seventy-four days after he landed at JFK, Maher Arar was released from the Syrian prison. Charges were never filed against him.
Days after Arar’s release, President Bush gave a speech in Washington criticizing Syria. “Dictators in Iraq and Syria [have left] a legacy of torture, oppression, misery, and ruin,” he declared.2
Thanks to the United States, Arar knew this misery firsthand. He had been kidnapped and tortured at the behest of the most powerful nation in the world.
And he was not alone.
The United States is an outlaw nation.
The laws that used to govern the behavior of American leaders evolved from basic codes of conduct for civilized nations. In 1215, the Magna Carta asserted that no one, not even a king, was above the rule of law, and it established the concept of habeas corpus—a prisoner’s right to challenge his or her detention in a public court of law. Kidnapping, murder, and rape, all nations agree, are crimes. The four Geneva Conventions, the first of which was adopted in 1864, established that even in wars, civilians and combatants have rights. The conventions prohibit murder, torture, hostage-taking, and extrajudicial sentencing and executions.
These have long been the publicly proclaimed ideals of Western nations. In private, they have been routinely violated. From the Native American conquest, to slavery, to Vietnam, where torture and extrajudicial killing were staples of the CIA’s Phoenix program, to Latin America, where U.S.-backed death squads rained terror on civilians throughout the 1970s and ’80s, to the U.S. Army School of the Americas, which counts among its graduates a who’s who of Latin American dictators and human rights abusers, the United States has been secretly involved in the torture business for years.
Yet even by these sordid standards, the United States is now probing new lows.
For this, we must credit President George W. Bush. A failed oilman, he lost the 2000 election but was selected as president of the United States by the Supreme Court. Having lost the popular vote nationally that year—including, as recounts proved, losing in Florida—Bush proceeded to declare after the attacks of 9/11 that he had a God-given mandate not just to rule America, but to wage war across the globe. He reportedly told Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, “God told me to strike at al Qaeda and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam.”3 Bush decreed that neither international law nor U.S. law applied to him or his administration.
Bush was not able to achieve all this on his own. A compliant Congress, lubricated by contributions from self-dealing lobbyists and multinational corporations, together with a deferential American media have been essential parts of his arsenal.
In the Outlaw Nation that has risen up where the United States once stood, holding humans in offshore cages and denying them fair trials is fine. Kidnapping has become an essential tool of foreign policy. The vice president personally lobbies the Senate to legalize torture, while the secretary of defense decides which medieval torments are acceptable (drowning and freezing are in; disemboweling is out). The secretary of state trots around the globe to forcefully and unequivocally reassure squeamish allies— on whose soil the kidnappings and torture occur—that what they know is happening (and secretly assisted) is not really happening. The U.S. media speaks politely about possible “abuse” and refers delicately to things like “stress positions.”
Torturing its enemies in secret is not new for the United States. But the open—even proud—embrace of it is unprecedented.
Let us take a look into the dark alleys, behind the iron bars, and into the dungeons to shed some light on the secret actions of the Outlaw Nation.
Tortured
It was around noon on September 26, 2002, and Maher Arar was wearily waiting his turn in the immigration line at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. He was en route from Tunisia, where his family was vacationing, to his home in Ottawa, Canada. The 33-year-old computer engineer was familiar with the routines of world travel, working as he did for a high-tech company called MathWorks in Massachusetts. Arar was born in Syria, but left the country with his family when he was 17 years old. He went on to graduate from prestigious McGill University in Montreal.
The immigration officer typed Arar’s name into a computer, then paused. He suddenly looked up and motioned for Arar to step aside and wait for further instructions. Two hours later, uniformed officers took him to be fingerprinted and photographed. He was told this was regular procedure, and his bag and wallet were searched. Officials from the New York Police Department and the FBI arrived to question him, and they assured him he would be able to catch his flight to Montreal. When Arar asked for a lawyer, he was told he had no right to an attorney because he was not an American citizen.
As he was about to learn, in this Outlaw Nation he had no rights at all.
At 4 P.M., an FBI agent came to interrogate Arar. According to Arar’s affidavit, the agent wanted to know about his connection to Abdullah Almalki, another Syrian-born Canadian, whom Arar said he knew only casually. The agent constantly yelled at Arar, calling him a “fucking smart guy” with a “fucking selective memory.” When Arar took more than a few seconds to respond to a question, the agent became angry.
After this five-hour interrogation, Arar was questioned for another three hours, this time by an immigration officer. The new interviewer asked Arar about his membership in various terrorist groups. The Canadian computer engineer strenuously denied any such affiliation. Arar was then chained, shackled, put in a vehicle, and driven to another building at JFK Airport, where he was placed in solitary confinement with no bed. He did not sleep.
The next morning, two FBI agents interrogated Arar for another five hours, asking him about Osama bin Laden, Iraq, and Palestine, among other things. Arar again denied any connection to terrorists or terrorist activity. He repeatedly asked to see a lawyer and to make a telephone call; the officials ignored him. It had been nearly two days, and he had still not eaten.
Early that evening, an immigration officer came to Arar’s holding cell. He asked Arar to “volunteer” to be sent to Syria. Arar refused, insisting that he be sent to Canada or Switzerland. At around 8 P.M., Arar was shackled and driven to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. For thirteen days, Arar remained imprisoned. After days of insisting, he was finally allowed to call his mother-in-law in Ottawa, who promptly got him a lawyer. The Canadian consul visited, and Arar told her that he was afraid the U.S. authorities were going to deport him to Syria against his will. She reassured him that would not happen.
But she was thinking of another America, a civilized nation of laws. Maher Arar was discovering that that America no longer exists.
At 3 A.M. on October 8, 2002, Arar was awoken in his cell and informed that he was leaving. A woman read to him from a document that said that based on classified information that she could not reveal to him, and because he knew a number of men, including Abdullah Almalki, the director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service had decided to deport him to Syria.
Arar recounted on Democracy Now! in November 2003: “I explained to them very clearly that if they send me back to Syria, I will be tortured. They accused me of being a member of a terrorist organization. I told them repeatedly that I am not a member of this group. They were just not believing me. I said if you send me back to Syria, the Syrians will try to extract information, and the only way to do that is just to torture me.”
The officials ignored his pleas. Instead, they chained him, took him to a waiting car, and drove him to an airport in New Jersey where an unmarked white Gulfstream V corporate jet was waiting. As investigators later learned, this was one of the CIA’s fleet of torture taxis that take suspects to foreign countries—typically Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, or Syria—for brutal interrogations. Arar’s flight stopped in Washington, then continued to Portland, Maine, and on to Rome and Amman, Jordan.
Flying at thirty thousand feet while CIA agents watched action movies, Arar sat in the luxury jet, terrified. “I just couldn’t believe it. I felt at first it was a dream. I was crying all the time. I was disoriented. I wished I had something in my hand to kill myself because I knew I was going to be tortured and this was my preoccupation. That’s all I was thinking about when I was on the plane.”
Arar was taken off the plane in Amman at 3 A.M. He was chained, blindfolded, and put in a van, where he was beaten by guards. They then drove him to the Syrian border, where he was handed over to Syrian authorities, who drove him to Damascus. He was taken to a building known as the Palestine Branch of Syrian military intelligence. Once inside, his worst fears came true. A group of men sat in a bare room. Arar recounted:
“One of them started questioning me and the others were taking notes. The first day it was mainly routine questions between eight and twelve of us. The second day is when the beatings started. The first day they did not find anything strange about what I told them. Later, they started to beat me with a cable.”
The cable beatings were especially harrowing, as Arar has recounted to journalists: “The interrogator said: ‘Do you know what this is?’ I said, ‘Yes, it’s a cable.’ And he told me, ‘Open your right hand.’ I opened my right hand and he hit me like crazy. And the pain was so painful, and of course I started crying. And then he told me to open my left hand, and I opened it and he missed, then hit my wrist. And then he asked me questions. If he does not think you are telling the truth, then he hits again. An hour or two later he put me in this room where sometimes I could hear people being tortured.”4
“In my view, they just wanted to please the Americans,” Arar told Democracy Now! just after his release. “They had to find something on me because I was accused of being an al Qaeda member, which is nowadays synonymous with Afghanistan. They told me, ‘You’ve been to a training camp in Afghanistan.’ I said no. And they started beating me. I had no choice. I just wanted the beating to stop. I said, ‘Of course, I’ve been to Afghanistan.’ I was ready to confess to anything just to stop the torture.”5
Arar’s false confession helped decrease the severity of his daily beatings. But his torture took on a new dimension when he was put in what amounted to an underground grave.
“The worst of all of this is the cell that they put me in. It was an underground cell. It was dark—there was no light in there. It was three feet wide, six feet deep, and seven feet high, with an opening in the ceiling. That’s where a little bit of light came in. There was no heating in the winter. There was only two blankets on the hard floor.” He paused, sighing as he recounted the horror. “It’s a disgusting place to be. There were rats. Cats above the cell peed from time to time in that opening. There was no hot water, especially no toilets. . . . It was a torture chamber. And I stayed in that place for ten months and ten days.”
Arar was allowed periodic brief visits with the Canadian consul, but only in the presence of his Syrian torturers, so he did not dare discuss what was happening to him. Meanwhile, back in Canada, his wife, Monia, mounted a tireless human rights campaign on his behalf. Finally, the Canadian government took up his case at the highest levels, demanding that Arar be released. On October 5, 2003, Maher Arar was taken from his cell, told to wash his face, and driven to a courtroom in Damascus, where he was turned over to officials from the Canadian Embassy. There were no charges against him.
Now reunited with his family in Canada, Arar’s ordeal continues. He told us in early 2006, “The main thing that is driving me crazy is that when they accuse someone of being a terrorist, directly or indirectly, this brand is gonna stay for life. You are not gonna be able to find a job. Even though people have sympathy for you, always in their head they have, ‘What if ? What if ?’ ”
Years after his ordeal, Arar is still haunted. His work as an engineer used to involve travel, and these days he is invited to speak all over Canada. But he can’t accept. “I don’t dare to take a plane. I am so scared to fly,” he says. He says that he still has nightmares and flashbacks. “People don’t realize what goes through the head of someone who’s been tortured,” he explains. “The other day I was picking up my daughter from school. So I went to the gym and I said, ‘Bring your things with you and come with me.’ And suddenly I had some fear in my heart. Minutes later, I realized that I just used the same expression that the guards in Syria used when they asked people to leave the cell.” Two days earlier, he had “a terrible nightmare. Sometimes I see myself being beaten; I fall on the ground and they make me stand up again and they beat me.” His distress is obvious. “It’s like it’s not going away. I just wanna forget about it. But I’m not able to. I’ve lost confidence in myself.
“I never thought that human beings could treat other human beings like that. For me it was a huge cultural shock. I go from a world where human dignity is respected, where there are values such as people being treated justly and fairly and in a humane way, and I go to another world, in a matter of hours, where human beings are treated worse than animals—there is no respect, there is torture.
“I think the healing process is going to be long and, frankly, my life and future have been destroyed even though I’m working right now to clear my name. But it is just the accusation to label someone as a terrorist—it’s not going to be easy to make people believe that I was not a terrorist. I’m just very worried if I’m going to be able to get back to my normal life. One thing is for sure, I don’t think I’ll go back to the same career. . . . There’s so much injustice out there in the world. I don’t know, I’ll probably become a human rights activist.”
He reflects, “I just still can’t believe what happened to me. A country like the United States, which is supposed to be a country that praises democracy and respects human rights, to do this kind of thing to me.”
Global Roundup
Maher Arar was the victim of what the U.S. government calls “extraordinary rendition”—sending suspects to foreign countries to be harshly interrogated. The program began in 1995, under the Clinton administration, when the CIA undertook a series of kidnappings of suspected terrorists in Europe. Suspects were shipped to Egypt, where some were tortured and others were killed. One of the more spectacular operations took place in the spring of 1998 in Albania. According to the Wall Street Journal, Albanian secret police, with their CIA advisors observing from a waiting car, kidnapped an Islamic militant named Shawki Salama Attiya. Over the next few months, four other suspected Islamic militants were abducted in Albania, and another suspect was killed in a gun battle. The men were bound, blindfolded, and taken to an abandoned air base, from where they were flown to Cairo on a CIA plane and handed over to Egyptian security officials for interrogation. Attiya charged later that he was hung from his limbs, was given electrical shocks to his genitals, was dragged on his face, and was imprisoned in a cell with knee-deep fetid water. Two other suspects captured that day were executed by hanging.6
A CIA official involved in the rendition program boasted of the closeness between Egyptian security and the United States. The Americans could send Egyptian interrogators the questions they wanted detainees to answer in the morning, and they would have answers by the evening.7
The rendition program has been “extraordinary” not only for the brazenness with which it flouts international law, but for how many lives—primarily American—have been lost as a result of it. On August 5, 1998, an Arab-language newspaper in London published a letter from the International Islamic Front for Jihad. The letter promised revenge for the Albanian operation, vowing to retaliate against the United States in a “language they will understand.” Two days later, the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were blown up, killing 224 people.8
Since September 11, 2001, the extraordinary rendition program has morphed into a global roundup. Suspects are being abducted around the world and dumped in places like Guantánamo Bay and Bagram, Afghanistan. By mid-2006, these two offshore American prisons held about one thousand people. Almost all of these prisoners have never been charged, and they languish out of view and outside protection of the law.
In the case of Maher Arar, the Bush administration insisted that it had information linking him to al Qaeda. The administration claimed that Syria promised he would be treated humanely. Syria has denied Arar was tortured. U.S. officials have said that sending Arar to Syria was “in the best interest of the security of the United States.”9
Human rights groups estimate that over one hundred people have been rendered to countries well known for torturing prisoners. In the case of Syria, the Bush administration could be confident that Arar and the other prisoners it sent there would be savaged. According to the U.S. State Department 2001 Human Rights Report, published seven months before Arar was sent to Syria:
Former prisoners and detainees [in Syria] report that torture methods include administering electrical shocks; pulling out fingernails; forcing objects into the rectum; beating, sometimes while the victim is suspended from the ceiling; hyper-extending the spine; and using a chair that bends backwards to asphyxiate the victim or fracture the victim’s spine. In September Amnesty International published a report claiming that authorities at Tadmur Prison regularly torture prisoners, or force prisoners to torture one another. Although torture occurs in prisons, torture is most likely to occur while detainees are being held at one of the many detention centers run by the various security services throughout the country, and particularly while the authorities are attempting to extract a confession or information regarding an alleged crime or alleged accomplices.10
In fact, President Bush has cited Syria’s abysmal human rights record as a reason to isolate and possibly attack the country. But as Maher Arar learned, when it comes to torture, Syria and the Bush administration think alike.
Rather than suffer in silence, Maher Arar is pursuing justice. In January 2004, the Center for Constitutional Rights filed suit on Arar’s behalf against former attorney general John Ashcroft, former Homeland Security secretary Tom Ridge, FBI director Robert Mueller, former Canadian prime minister Jean Chrétien, and others, charging them with knowingly sending Arar to Syria to be tortured in violation of U.S. and international law. Arar’s demand for justice has also resulted in a Canadian government inquiry into the role of Canadian officials in his arrest and detention. In hearings held in Canada in 2005, it was revealed that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police provided unverified (and inaccurate) information about Arar and several other Canadians—who were also tortured in Syria—at the request of U.S. attorney general John Ashcroft. In August 2005, the U.S. Justice Department tried to block Arar’s lawsuit, claiming that all information about him was covered by a rarely used “states secrets privilege.”
In February 2006, U.S. district judge David Trager dismissed Arar’s lawsuit. Judge Trager wrote in his opinion that “Arar’s claim that he faced a likelihood of torture in Syria is supported by U.S. State Department reports on Syria’s human rights practices.” But, the judge added, when “national security” is involved, decisions, even if they lead to torture, “are most appropriately reserved to the Executive and Legislative branches of government.” Judge Trager explained that in dismissing the lawsuit on grounds of national security, “The need for much secrecy can hardly be doubted. . . . Governments that do not wish to acknowledge publicly that they are assisting us would certainly hesitate to do so if our judicial discovery process could compromise them.”
Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, responded on Democracy Now!, “You know, this was one of the most remarkable and infamous and worst decisions I’ve ever read by a federal judge. What it really is saying is it gives a green light to the U.S. to take people like Maher Arar and send them overseas for torture.
“What’s happened here is the idea that torture is somehow a legitimate means in the so-called war on terror is now seeping into not just the administration and the executive, [but] into the judiciary, into the pundits, and everything else,” Ratner added. “This is [former Chilean dictator Augusto] Pinochet saying ‘I can torture in the name of national security.’ ”11
Maher Arar was astonished by the court’s acceptance that “torture happens.” “If the courts will not stop this evil act, who is going to stop this administration?” he told the Toronto Star. “Where do we go? The United Nations? We—me and others who have been subjected to this—are normal citizens who have done no wrong. They have destroyed my life. They have destroyed other lives. But the court system does not listen to us.
“When a court will not act because of ‘national security,’ there is no longer any difference between the West and the Third World,” he said.12
Arar’s case hits at the heart of all that is wrong with the rendition program. That’s why both the Canadian and American governments are trying desperately to hide everything associated with it. On January 21, 2004, Ottawa Citizen reporter Juliet O’Neill had her apartment raided by some twenty agents of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. She had written about Arar’s case several months earlier. Her articles quoted from leaked documents and revealed the contents of Arar’s tortured confessions; the implication was that the RCMP had received these confessions either from the Syrians or the United States. The RCMP claims it raided O’Neill’s apartment while investigating a national security leak. O’Neill and the Citizen have sued the RCMP, and it has become a major press freedom case in Canada.
In January 2006, the Center for Constitutional Rights filed suit against President Bush and the head of the National Security Agency (NSA). The suit claimed that the NSA warrantless electronic eavesdropping program violated attorney-client privilege, since it presumably spies on phone calls between its lawyers, including those representing Maher Arar, and other foreign clients.
In the United States—the cause of his pain—Arar is hardly known, but his relentless quest for justice earned him “Newsmaker of the Year” in 2004 from the Canadian edition of Time magazine. For him, to fight is to survive. “The main thing that gives me relief is that people are now listening,” he told us. “People have woken up. The media, too.”
He reflects, “This campaign started to stop people from terrorizing other people. But what is happening now, this so-called campaign is ending up destroying people’s lives in a different way, under the disguise of protecting other people’s lives. You can’t protect people’s lives by destroying other people’s lives.”
Kidnapped
As people strolled down Via Guerzoni in Milan just after noon on February 17, 2003, a man with a long beard and a flowing djellaba stood out among the fashionably dressed Italians. He was on his way to daily prayers at a nearby mosque. Suddenly, two Westerners clutching cell phones approached and stopped the man. They asked him, in Italian, for his documents, as if they were police.
A witness described what happened next: “At the junction with Via Croce Viola there was a pale-colored van on the pavement. Then, all I heard was a loud noise like a thud. The van suddenly shot backwards and then set off again, away from the mosque, passing me at high speed. And the three people I’d seen, they weren’t there any longer.”13
The man was an Islamic cleric named Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, an Egyptian refugee also known as Abu Omar. When the Italian police investigated his disappearance, the trail led to a surprising source: the CIA.
By tracing cell phone records and piecing together eyewitness accounts, the Italian authorities learned that the CIA had sent a “special removal unit” to Italy consisting of about nineteen agents. For months before the abduction, the American agents lived like royalty.
Staying for up to six weeks in $450-a-night hotels, drinking $10 Cokes, running up $500-a-day dining tabs, and jetting off to seaside resorts, these government agents, some of whom appear to have been romantically involved with one another, were living out a James Bond fantasy. Operating under the cover of President George W. Bush’s “war on terror,” the agents worked in a world beyond laws.14
After capturing their prey, the CIA agents whisked the cleric to Aviano Air Base, a joint U.S.-Italian military facility. A few hours later, he was secreted onto a Learjet and taken to Ramstein Air Base, a U.S. military base in Germany. Then he was transferred to another plane and taken to Cairo. A Milan-based CIA agent turned up in Cairo five days later, around the same time as Abu Omar.15
As for the other CIA agents, they were not yet done partying. Four of them stayed on in luxury hotels in Venice, while two others relaxed for a few days in the Italian Alps.
While the Americans partied, Italian authorities were busy chasing shadows in the war on terror. That’s because in March 2003, the CIA sent an urgent message to the Italians that Abu Omar had fled to the Balkans. The Italian police frantically chased down the lead into dead ends. It turns out “the CIA’s tip was a deliberate lie, part of a ruse designed to stymie efforts by the Italian anti-terrorism police to track down the cleric,” according to Italian investigators interviewed by the Washington Post.16 The Americans didn’t want word leaking to squeamish European governments that Abu Omar’s real destination was Egypt, where he was brutally interrogated and allegedly tortured. His treatment included electric shocks and being subjected to freezing temperatures.17
Which is just the treatment the Bush administration would have expected—and presumably wanted. The U.S. State Department 2002 Human Rights Report, published a month after Abu Omar was kidnapped by American agents, said this about Egypt:
There were numerous, credible reports that security forces tortured and mistreated citizens. . . . Principal methods of torture reportedly employed by the police included: Being stripped and blindfolded; suspended from a ceiling or door-frame with feet just touching the floor; beaten with fists, whips, metal rods, or other objects; subjected to electrical shocks; and doused with cold water. Victims frequently reported being subjected to threats and forced to sign blank papers to be used against the victim or the victim’s family in the future should the victim complain of abuse. Some victims, including male and female detainees, reported that they were sexually assaulted or threatened with the rape of themselves or family members.18
Notwithstanding President Bush’s absurd claim in 2005 that “we do not render to countries that torture,”19 he and his administration have found Egypt’s abysmal human rights record to be irresistible. Egyptian Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif told the Chicago Tribune that the CIA had handed over to Egypt between sixty and seventy terrorism suspects captured from around the world. Indeed, Egypt has become a destination of choice for governments wishing to outsource torture: Human Rights Watch estimated that between 2001 and 2005, Egypt worked with other countries to arrest more than sixty Islamic militants living abroad and return them to Egypt.20
Former CIA agent Robert Baer explained the cold logic behind where the United States chooses to outsource torture: “If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear—never to see them again—you send them to Egypt.”21
As for Italy, it has learned that being a U.S. ally offers no protection from being burned. “The kidnapping of Abu Omar was not only a serious crime against Italian sovereignty and human rights, but it also seriously damaged counterterrorism efforts in Italy and Europe,” said Armando Spataro, the lead prosecutor in Milan. “In fact, if Abu Omar had not been kidnapped, he would now be in prison, subject to a regular trial, and we would have probably identified his other accomplices.”22
But that would have been so . . . legal. In the war on terror, laws and human rights are nuisances to be ignored.
Unfortunately for the CIA, laws still apply in the real world, and kidnappers are considered common criminals. In July 2005, Italian authorities issued arrest warrants for twenty-two alleged CIA operatives, including the head of the CIA Milan substation. The agents, who were named, were charged with kidnapping and other crimes. The Italians say that the kidnapping was overseen by the CIA’s Rome station chief at the time, Robert Seldon Lady, and directed by U.S. Embassy officials there. Lady’s Italian homes have been raided, and he, like the other defendants, has been unable to return to Italy for fear of being arrested. The CIA and the U.S. Embassy in Rome have refused comment about the charges.
This case is the first in which a foreign government has attempted to bring U.S. intelligence operatives to justice.23 Whether or not the prosecution succeeds, it signals that even if the United States has decided that international law is irrelevant, other countries still cling to the old-fashioned notion that no one is above the law. It is a sign that rogue Bush administration officials may yet be held accountable for their actions.
The torture-happy Bush administration is now itself feeling some pain. First it must contend with the problem of what to do with all the people it has tortured around the world. If these detainees go to trial, their accounts of abuse will spill forth, and their cases may well be thrown out.
“It’s a big problem,” explained Jamie Gorelick, a former deputy attorney general and a member of the 9/11 Commission, in The New Yorker. “In criminal justice, you either prosecute the suspects or let them go. But if you’ve treated them in ways that won’t allow you to prosecute them, you’re in this no man’s land. What do you do with these people?”24
Then there’s the problem of how false confessions “blow back” to the United States. It turns out that Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the detainee whose bogus claims on links between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were championed by President Bush to justify the invasion of Iraq, fabricated his claims after being tortured while in the custody of—guess who?—Egypt. Al-Libi was handed over to Egypt by U.S. agents in January 2002. The disclosure of his fabrications in 2005 was the first public evidence that bad intelligence on Iraq may have resulted from the administration’s reliance on third countries to interrogate and torture detainees.25
The problem—that tortured detainees will say or make up anything to stop their abuse—was recognized early by key intelligence officials. In a February 2002 report that was widely circulated within the Pentagon and White House, the Defense Intelligence Agency said it was probable that al-Libi, who was the highest ranking al Qaeda member in U.S. custody when he was captured in December 2001, “was intentionally misleading the debriefers” when he claimed there was Iraqi support for al Qaeda’s work with illicit weapons.26
Unfortunately, this intelligence assessment conflicted with President Bush’s goal of attacking Iraq. Bush resolved this conflict eight months later by simply lying, declaring in a major speech in Cincinnati in October 2002 that “we’ve learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and gases.” Colin Powell repeated the lie in his infamous prewar speech to the UN in February 2003, when he described “the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these weapons to al Qaeda.”
It’s a simple story, really: how torture led to lies, which were the pretext for the Bush administration’s Big Lies, that led to war, that led to the deaths of thousands of Iraqi citizens and U.S. soldiers.
An Innocent Man
Khaled El-Masri needed a break. It was New Year’s Eve 2003, and the 42-year-old unemployed car salesman from Germany and father of five had just had a spat with his wife. He decided to get on a bus to Macedonia to cool off for a few days. Little did he know that his innocent getaway would end up as a five-month odyssey of torture, starvation, and prison—courtesy of the Bush administration.
At the Macedonian border, Masri was ordered off the bus. It turns out that his name, which means “Khaled the Egyptian,” was similar to the name of an associate of one of the 9/11 hijackers.27
El-Masri was born in Kuwait in 1963 to Lebanese parents. He moved to Germany in 1985 to escape the Lebanese war, became a German citizen in 1995, and married in 1996. But the Macedonian border guards suspected that his German passport was a fake. They drove El-Masri to Skopje, the Macedonian capital, for further questioning.
Unbeknownst to the unwitting German citizen, the Macedonian police contacted the CIA station in Skopje. The station chief was away for the holidays, so the deputy CIA station chief handled the case. She was excited about her chance to be a player in the global war on terror. “The Skopje station really wanted a scalp because everyone wanted a part of the game,” a CIA officer told the Washington Post.28 Since a number of mid-level CIA officials were away for the holidays, the junior officer in Skopje got to deal directly with the head of the al Qaeda unit at the CIA Counterterrorist Center (CTC) in Virginia. This was a big score for her.
The CTC was “the Camelot of counterterrorism,” said a former official. It was a place teeming with aggressive agents eager to make their mark, a shadowy underworld where laws could be ignored or flouted. “We didn’t have to mess with others—and it was fun,” said the official.29
El-Masri was about to be sucked up in a global dragnet. There was no evidence that El-Masri was not who he insisted he was: a German citizen of Lebanese descent. But the CTC al Qaeda unit chief “didn’t really know—she just had a hunch” that El-Masri was probably a terrorist, according to another CIA official.30 She ordered that he be sent to a CIA prison in Afghanistan and interrogated immediately.
An extraordinary rendition was set in motion. The Macedonian police handed El-Masri over to a CIA rendition group. They followed their standard procedure, according to the Post:
Dressed 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. Their destinations: either a detention facility operated by cooperative countries in the Middle East and Central Asia, including Afghanistan, or one of the CIA’s own covert prisons— referred to in classified documents as “black sites.”31
Khaled El-Masri recounted what happened to him after he was detained at the Macedonian border: “Eventually, I was transferred to a hotel in Macedonia where I was held for twenty-three days. I was guarded at all times, the curtains were always drawn, I was never permitted to leave the room, I was threatened with guns, and I was not allowed to contact anyone. At the hotel, I was repeatedly questioned about my activities in Ulm [Germany], my associates, my mosque, meetings with people that had never occurred, or associations with people I had never met. I answered all of their questions truthfully, emphatically denying their accusations. After thirteen days I went on a hunger strike to protest my confinement.”32
On January 23, 2004, El-Masri recounts that he was beaten, thrown in a car, and taken to a waiting airplane in Macedonia. There, his clothing was cut off, and he was forcibly given an enema and drugged. He woke up surrounded by American soldiers—in Afghanistan. The innocent man’s ordeal was just beginning. He recounted to ACLU lawyers:
Once off the plane, I was shoved into the back of a vehicle. After a short drive, I was dragged out of the car, pushed roughly into a building, thrown to the floor, and kicked and beaten on the head, the soles of my feet, and the small of my back. I was left in a small, dirty, cold concrete cell. There was no bed and one dirty, military-style blanket and some old, torn clothes bundled into a thin pillow. I was extremely thirsty, but there was only a bottle of putrid water in the cell. I was refused fresh water.
That first night I was interrogated by six or eight men dressed in the same black clothing and ski masks, as well as a masked American doctor and a translator. They stripped me of my clothes, photographed me, and took blood and urine samples. I was returned to my cell, where I would remain in solitary confinement, with no reading or writing materials, and without once being permitted outside to breathe fresh air, for more than four months.
In March, I, along with several other inmates, commenced a hunger strike to protest our confinement without charges. ... On day 37 of my hunger strike I was dragged into an interrogation room, tied to a chair, and a feeding tube was forced through my nose to my stomach. After the force-feeding, I became extremely ill and suffered the worst pain of my life.
Near the beginning of May, I was brought into the interrogation room to meet an American who identified himself as a psychologist. He told me he had traveled from Washington, D.C., to check on me, and promised I would soon be released. Soon thereafter, I was interrogated again by a native German speaker named “Sam,” the American prison director, and an American translator. I was warned at one point that as a condition of my release, I was never to mention what had happened to me, because the Americans were determined to keep the affair a secret.33
On May 28, 2004, Khaled El-Masri was led out of his cell in Afghanistan, blindfolded and handcuffed, and put on a plane to Europe. He was told that he would not be flown directly to Germany, because the Americans wanted to keep secret their involvement in his ordeal. When his plane landed, he was driven blindfolded for several hours up winding mountain roads. Finally, his captors handed him his passport, removed his blindfold, sliced off his handcuffs, and dumped him on the side of a deserted road. They told him not to look back. After all he’d been through, El-Masri assumed this was the final moment, that he would now be shot. But the car sped away, and the German citizen was soon confronted by local police, who informed him he was in Albania. When he finally flew home to Germany, he discovered that his wife and family were gone. El-Masri eventually located his wife—in Lebanon. For five months, she thought her husband had abandoned her. So she uprooted her five children from Germany and moved to be closer to family.
The CIA confirmed in March 2004—three months after Khaled El-Masri was illegally detained—that his German passport was authentic; they had gotten the wrong man. But it took over two more months of jail and torture for him to be dumped, a free man, in Albania.
El-Masri’s story is far from unique. The CIA has captured an estimated three thousand people in its roundup of alleged terrorist leaders.34 It is impossible to know how many of these people are innocent. The CIA acts as judge, jury, and executioner: Its agents decide on their own who to arrest, and the CIA decides if and when a mistake has been made. If the CIA isn’t getting the information it wants from a suspect—or if officials want to cover up an embarrassing mistake—the agency can simply “disappear” someone by transferring that prisoner to Guantánamo Bay or Bagram, Afghanistan. Out of sight and beyond the reach of the media, it can take years for a suspect’s case to be reviewed by the military. One senior official describes Guantánamo Bay as “a dumping ground” for CIA mistakes.35 Indeed, nearly 300 prisoners have been released without charges from Guantánamo, having been illegally detained and after suffering years of isolation and abuse.
As a German citizen, Khaled El-Masri could not be so easily silenced—but the United States would try its best. In May 2004, U.S. ambassador to Germany Daniel R. Coats met with the German interior minister to inform him that the CIA was about to release a German citizen who had been wrongfully imprisoned for five months. Coats asked the Germans not to disclose what it knew about El-Masri’s ordeal—even if El-Masri went public. The United States feared exposure of its shadowy rendition program, and was afraid of possible legal action by El-Masri and others.
The CIA was right about one thing in the El-Masri case: the backlash. In December 2005, the ACLU filed suit on behalf of ElMasri against former CIA director George Tenet. The unprecedented lawsuit charged that Tenet and other CIA officials broke U.S. and international human rights laws when they kidnapped ElMasri, and that his unlawful abduction and treatment were the direct result of the illegal CIA policy of extraordinary rendition. A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit five months later, declaring that El-Masri’s rights must yield to “the national interest in preserving state secrets.”36
With its cover blown for its illegal global roundup, the Bush administration has been reduced to barnstorming through skeptical foreign capitals and lying about what it’s done before furious audiences. An irritated Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declared in Europe in December 2005, “The United States does not transport and has not transported detainees from one country to another for the purpose of interrogations using torture.”37 But just four months later, investigators for the European Parliament revealed that the CIA had flown one thousand secret flights over Europe since 2001, sometimes ferrying terrorism suspects to countries that torture.
The United States has a product to sell, but no one is buying. “It’s clear that the text of [Rice’s] speech was drafted by lawyers with the intention of misleading an audience,” said Andrew Tyrie, a Conservative member of the British parliament. Reporting on Rice’s calamitous “we never torture” European tour in December 2005, a New York Times correspondent observed dryly, “It would be hard to imagine a more sudden and thorough tarnishing of the Bush administration’s credibility than the one taking place here right now.”38
It turns out that Germany may have been a silent partner to the United States in El-Masri’s abduction. El-Masri has insisted that during his detention in Afghanistan, a fluent German-speaker participated in his interrogations. In February 2006, El-Masri picked a senior German police official out of a lineup of ten people and identified him as the man who interrogated him. The New York Times reported the story but astonishingly declined to identify the German official “at the request of Germany’s intelligence services because he often does undercover intelligence work.”39
The innocent victims of the war on terror, such as Khaled ElMasri, are piling up too high to be ignored. “I don’t think I’m the human being I used to be,” he said in announcing his lawsuit.40 He is vowing to continue his fight.
He said, “I’m filing this lawsuit because I believe in the American system of justice. What happened to me was outside the bounds of any legal framework, and should never be allowed to happen to anyone else.”41
Hiding the Hidden Prisons
“The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement,” began a startling Pultizer Prize–winning exposé by Washington Post reporter Dana Priest on November 2, 2005. “The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.”
The article continued, “Virtually nothing is known about who is kept in the facilities, what interrogation methods are employed with them, or how decisions are made about whether they should be detained or for how long. While the Defense Department has produced volumes of public reports and testimony about its detention practices and rules after the abuse scandals at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison and at Guantánamo Bay, the CIA has not even acknowledged the existence of its black sites. To do so, say officials familiar with the program, could open the U.S. government to legal challenges, particularly in foreign courts, and increase the risk of political condemnation at home and abroad.”
Yes, the free flow of information in a democracy carries certain political risks. But the obligation of America’s press is to inform its readers without concern for “political condemnation.” Right? Well, not quite. The article adds a bombshell: “The Washington Post is not publishing the names of the Eastern European countries involved in the covert program, at the request of senior U.S. officials. They argued that the disclosure might disrupt counterterrorism efforts in those countries and elsewhere and could make them targets of possible terrorist retaliation.”
The single most important piece of information—where the CIA is illegally warehousing prisoners—is being withheld, because the Bush administration, so trustworthy when it comes to the treatment of detainees, wants it that way.
Human Rights Watch quickly stepped in to say that the prisons were likely in Poland or Romania. The group based this on records it obtained of military flights from Afghanistan. Officials from both Poland and Romania denied the allegations. Maintaining secret prisons would violate European human rights treaties.
Post executive editor Len Downie responded to the furor about the withheld information. Speaking on CNN, he said, “In this case, we agreed to keep the names of those particular countries out, because we were told, and it seems reasonable to us, that there could be terrorist retaliation against those countries, or more importantly, disruption of other very important intelligence activities, antiterrorist activities.”
Commenting on the Post’s excuses, the media watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting said, “The possibility that illegal, unpopular government actions might be disrupted is not a consequence to be feared.”42 Indeed, isn’t exposing abuse exactly what a free press is for?
In an environment where journalists acknowledge that widespread abuse is taking place, lives hang in the balance when the media withholds information. As Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive, told Democracy Now!, “I think that the Post bears a responsibility for the continuation of these abuses that we know have taken place in the past and probably are taking place in the present.”43
To say that revealing the locations of probable torture centers somehow endangers American security is to tacitly endorse the legitimacy of the terror inflicted in these dungeons. As Kornbluh argued, “What is at stake is these secret detention centers. And the Romanians, the Poles, and other Eastern European citizens have been building a civil society focused on the abuses of the past— museums, monuments, efforts to say ‘Never again!’ And here the poetic irony is that the CIA appears to be using actual Soviet gulags that were in place in these countries when the Soviet Union was running them.”
Yet when Amnesty International secretary general Irene Khan described Guantánamo Bay in May 2005 as “the gulag of our times,” there was a furious backlash.
“Absurd,” hit back President Bush.
“Offensive,” declared Vice President Dick Cheney.
“Reprehensible,” fumed Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. “To try to equate the military’s record on detainee treatment to some of the worst atrocities of the past century is a disservice to those who have sacrificed so much to bring freedom to others.”44
“Dramatic, overwrought and, yes, outrageous,” chimed in liberal pundit E. J. Dionne Jr.45
Khan shot back that her critics “overlooked U.S. operation of a worldwide network of prisons beyond Guantánamo Bay— extending from Afghanistan to Diego Garcia, from Pakistan to Iraq to Jordan—even to U.S. ships. . . . To the more than 70,000 prisoners—none yet tried, many tortured or ill-treated, enduring years of detention and interrogation—the prisons are far from ‘ad hoc.’ The United States should recommit to respecting the rule of law and human rights, actions that could begin to repair damaged U.S. credibility.”46
British journalist Stephen Grey was among the first to report on the secret prisons and clandestine CIA flights that transported people to be tortured, in his article “America’s Gulag,” which appeared in May 2004 in The New Statesman. He explained on Democracy Now!, “The phrase ‘gulag’ is relevant, not because of the numbers involved. Clearly there were tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of prisoners in the Soviet gulag. But the interesting parallel is to look at how Solzhenitsyn described the Soviet gulag [in his 1973 classic, The Gulag Archipelago], which was a chain of islands of secret detention centers that existed hidden beneath normal society.
“And what you have here are these flights moving around from very normal airports, but inside are prisoners in the war on terror. Likewise, these jails are scattered around the world and no one sees them. They’re connected by these flights. And the numbers are probably a few dozen in the CIA’s own prisons, but thousands more in the jails of allied countries, such as Egypt and Morocco and Jordan.”47
The Washington Post, instead of revealing the key detail that could throw open the doors of the gulags to international view, instead helped cover it up. Months after the Post broke the story about the prisons in Eastern Europe, human rights investigators were still unable to confirm their exact whereabouts because of government stonewalling. “The entire continent is involved,” said Swiss senator Dick Marty, who was investigating the secret prisons for the Council of Europe’s parliamentary assembly, a body comprising several hundred national lawmakers. “It is highly unlikely that European governments, or at least their intelligence services, were unaware.”48
When the major media and the government collude to cover up a politically embarrassing story, democracy is undermined. Press freedom is mocked. And lives are lost.
Deception and Death
Consider what happened in the run-up to the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion. In early 1961, The New Republic was about to publish an article about the CIA’s covert effort to recruit Cuban refugees in Florida to attack Cuba and overthrow Fidel Castro. In a last-minute panic, New Republic publisher Gilbert Harrison sent the galley proofs of the story to Arthur Schlesinger Jr., then an assistant to President John F. Kennedy. Schlesinger has written that the article was a “careful, accurate and devastating account of CIA activities among the [Cuban] refugees [in Florida].”49 Schlesinger showed the article to JFK, and at the president’s request, the New Republic killed the story.
New York Times reporter Tad Szulc also filed a story with his newspaper on the imminent invasion of Cuba. It was slated to run on the front page under a four-column headline. At the eleventh hour, Times publisher Orvil Dryfoos told managing editor Turner Catledge that he was “troubled” by the security implications of exposing the secret invasion. Washington editor James Reston was consulted, and the story was gutted, stripped of references to an imminent invasion, and pushed down to a smaller below-the-fold placement. The news editor and assistant managing editor protested, but to no avail.
On April 17, 1961, a ragtag group of fifteen hundred Cuban exiles attacked Cuba at the Bay of Pigs with CIA backing. It was a disaster for the Kennedy administration: One hundred fourteen of the invaders died, and nearly twelve hundred were taken prisoner.
Ten days later, JFK met with Times managing editor Turner Catledge. “If you had printed more about the operation,” scolded the president, “you would have saved us from a colossal mistake.”
A year later, JFK sounded the same theme to Orvil Dryfoos: “I wish you had run everything on Cuba. I am just sorry you didn’t tell it at the time.”50
Reston, who acquiesced in the cover-up, later wrote, “If the press had used its freedom during this period to protest, it might have been influential even in the White House, where instead it was being encouraged to put out false information and was actually putting it out.”
A month after the failed invasion—and the Times role in it—the newspaper ran a stinging editorial titled “The Right Not to Be Lied To”: “A democracy—our democracy—cannot be lied to. . . . The basic principle involved is that of confidence. A dictatorship can get along without an informed public opinion. A democracy cannot.”51
The problem is not just that governments lie. It’s that the media, then as now, actively participates in the deception. A half century after the Bay of Pigs, the corporate media is still covering for power, with similar disastrous results for democracy.