According to a former CIA agent, he told reporters:
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.
Rendition is not the same as deportation. Under US immigration laws a person may be deported for a variety of reasons, including charges of terrorism. Rendition, however, is a covert operation in which an innocent person can be forcibly removed to another country or state where he has committed no crime. Under rendition, the person handing over the suspect is knowingly passing his ‘package’ to a country who is far less scrupulous about human rights than the country from which they are being transferred. As the practice has grown, the CIA is finding it harder and harder to keep it under cover, and criticism of the rendition system has grown. Under the current law, rendition is strictly prohibited if the rendered person is subjected to any kind of torture, and human rights groups are working on legal challenges to try and stop the practice from continuing.
Rendition was developed by the CIA back in the 1990s for the purpose of tracking down and disrupting the militant Islamic organizations in the Middle East, in particular al-Qaeda. For fear of jeopardizing their own intelligence methods, the CIA wanted to avoid the normal procedure of trying suspects under US law and came up with the alternative of transferring them to Egypt. In Egypt they would be handed over to the Mukhabarat (Arabic for ‘intelligence’), which was well known for its brutality. This arrangement suited both countries as the Egyptians had been trying to track down Islamic extremists, some of whom were Egyptian, and for the USA, because torture is illegal under US and international law.
The first person to be the subject of rendition was Talaat Fouad Qassem, one of Egypt’s most wanted terrorists. He was arrested in Zagreb by the CIA in September 1995, with the cooperation of the Croatian police. He was taken on board a US ship somewhere on the Adriatic Sea, interrogated by US agents and then returned to Egypt. He has never been heard of or seen since and is believed to have been executed without having been given a trial.
Another operation that has come to light took place in Albania in the summer of 1998. Five Egyptians were known to be in contact with Osama bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri and, over the course of several months, four militants along with Shawki Salama Attiya were captured by Albanian security forces, who collaborated with the CIA. The five men were flown to Cairo – where they were interrogated using harsh torture methods. On his release Attiya said that he had electric shocks applied to his genitals, that he was kept in a cell that was filled with dirty water and that he had been hung up by his limbs for hours on end.
Despite the fact that they are being constantly questioned about the practice of rendition, the CIA and the White House strongly resist any in-depth investigation. They refuse to release any information about the suspects that have been detained in other parts of the world.
Another variation, which has become known as ‘reverse rendition’, is when US agents abduct suspects on foreign soil, or assumed custody of detainees from other countries, in transfers that completely bypass any legal process or human rights protections. Some of the victims of reverse rendition have later turned up in Guantanamo, but the most sinister and least well-documented cases are those of the detainees who have simply ‘disappeared’ after being detained by the USA or turned over to US custody.
One example of this practice was the case of a Yemeni businessman Abd al-Salam Ali al-Hila, who was handed over to the US authorities and then disappeared for a year and a half before turning up at Guatanamo Bay detention centre. Although there have been many reports in the media regarding the renditions of suspects to third countries, this case was different – in fact, it was the ‘reverse’. Foreign authorities picked up the suspect in a non-combat situation and handed him over to the USA without the basic protection afforded to criminal suspects.
Al-Hila was literally kidnapped from the streets of Cairo and disappeared when under US custody. When al-Hila was picked up on 19 September, 2002, during a business trip to Cairo, he was taken to Baku in Azerbaijan and later to the Bagram air base in Afghanistan. After his disappearance, his family did not hear from him until April 2004, when they received a letter, which was smuggled out of Afghanistan. Al-Hila has sent subsequent letters to his family to let them know he is still alive via the International Committee of the Red Cross and, most recently, from Guatanamo.
Unfortunately, the al-Hila case is not unique. It appears that the Bush administration feels it is within its legal rights if the detainees come under the label of ‘terror suspects’.
The term ‘black sites’ is a military term that literally means ‘secret jails in foreign countries’, which are operated by the CIA. Recently the term has gained notoriety when the Washington Post published a controversial article claiming the existence of black sites, which was vehemently denied by many European countries. The secret facilities for detaining and interrogating suspected terrorists are believed to be in Thailand, Afghanistan and several other democracies in Eastern Europe, on top of the already notorious Guatanamo Bay prison in Cuba. This hidden network of internment is all part of the illicit war on terrorism at present being carried out by the CIA. It relies on the assistance of other foreign intelligence agencies, and the concealment of any details is paramount to the success of their operations. Due to what the CIA and the White House consider the clandestine nature of these black sites, virtually nothing is known about who is kept where and the exact locations. This information is only available to a handful of people to protect national security and because of the fear that the information could be leaked out. Although the CIA has issued reports and testimonies regarding the alleged abuse carried out at Guatanamo Bay, it strongly denies the existence of any black sites.
In 2003, three Yemeni nationals all disappeared. When their whereabouts was eventually disclosed it appeared they had been kept in a series of secret locations run by US agents. The reason for the clandestine operation was so that it put the victims beyond the protection of the law, while at the same time concealing any violations from external scrutiny. The three men were Salah Nasser Salim ’Ali, Muhammad al-Assad and Muhammad Faraj Ahmed Bashmilah.
The nightmare started on the night of 26 December, 2003, in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, where Muhammed al-Assad had lived since 1985. Al-Assad had just sat down to dinner with his Tanzanian wife, Zahra Salloum, and her brother and uncle, when he heard a knock at the front door. The three men at the door were an immigration officer and two state security officials, who ordered al-Assad to surrender his passport and mobile phone. As al-Assad walked away from the men to get his passport from his study, he was grabbed from behind; his hands were handcuffed behind his back and his head was covered with a hood. He was forcibly pushed into the back of a car, which sped away from the house, leaving al-Assad in a state of shock.
He was frightened and kept asking his captors what was happening to him and where were they taking him, but they gave him no reply. He was taken back to a flat and questioned for several hours, before being taken to a waiting plane. All the time al-Assad was wearing a hood, so he had no idea where he was. However, he was aware of the roaring of the plane engines. Again he asked his captors where he was being taken, and this time they responded, ‘We don’t know, we are just following orders, there are high-ranking ones who are responsible.’