Torture American style
By David Brooks
From the Mexican newspaper La Jornada
NEW YORK, Feb. 5 – Following the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the government of the United States conspired with more than 50 other countries to create a program of detention, “rendition” and torture of suspected “terrorists” that, so far, enjoys total impunity, according to the most detailed independent investigation of human rights violations committed in that program.
“Globalizing Torture,” a report by the Open Society Justice Initiative released today, says that so far the United States and almost all the governments involved in the program have refused to acknowledge their participation in it or give details about it.
The program, managed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), violated “people’s most basic rights, facilitated atrocious forms of torture, sometimes captured the wrong people, and damaged the United States’ reputation on human rights on a worldwide level.”
The report says that at least 136 individuals were subjected to “extraordinary rendition,” the practice of delivering detainees – without legal process – to the authorities of a foreign government for the purpose of detention and interrogation, or detention by the CIA. At least 54 governments are said to have participated in that program.
According to the report, 25 countries in Europe, 14 in Asia and 13 in Africa, plus Canada and Australia, participated to various degrees in the CIA program, from allowing clandestine CIA detention centers, to arresting and interrogating and/or torturing suspects in their own national facilities, to facilitating the transfers and the Agency’s aerial operations.
Many of the European countries publicly claim to be defenders of human rights on an international level and take on the role of judges of other countries, such as Germany, Denmark, Ireland, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Finland and Spain.
Among the countries that collaborated the most with this program, particularly in the “interrogation” of CIA detainees, are Syria, Libya and Egypt.
The report stresses that with this program “the United States violated domestic and international laws” and, “by enlisting the participation of dozens of foreign governments in these violations, the United States undermined longstanding human rights protections enshrined in international law, including in particular the norm against torture.” But, it adds, the responsibility for all this is not exclusively the United States’ but of all the governments that participated in and facilitated the program.
The report summarizes the methods of torture – officially called “intensified interrogation techniques” – applied to the detainees: flinging against walls, the well-known waterboarding, forced positions of stress designed to create physical pain, “insult slaps,” confinement in boxes, forced nudity, sleep deprivation and diet manipulation.
It reiterates that torture is prohibited by international law and that every accusation must be investigated and carried to criminal courts. It recalls that, upon entering the White House, President Barack Obama signed an executive order in 2009 repudiating torture but not the CIA’s program of rendition.
Although Obama ordered an investigation into the practice of rendition, the official report remains secret. A 6,000-page report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which details the operations of detention and interrogation, was completed but also remains classified.
The Open Society Justice Initiative is a program of the Open Society Foundations, an organization for the investigation and promotion of transparent policies, human and civil rights, and philanthropy. It was founded by financier George Soros.
The 216-page report can be downloaded from
http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/reports/globalizing-torture-cia-secret-detention-and-extraordinary-rendition
