Group Says U.S. Sent Up To 150 to Possible Torture Sites

Group Says U.S. Sent Up to 150 to Possible Torture Sites
Human Rights Watch also criticizes the military's investigations of the way it treats foreign detainees.
By Richard A. Serrano
Times Staff Writer

April 24, 2005

WASHINGTON — A civil liberties group investigating allegations of prisoner abuse will report today that since the Sept. 11 attacks, U.S. agents have secretly transported up to 150 detainees to countries that may practice torture.

Such transporting, known as rendition, is more widespread than the government has reported, according to Human Rights Watch. In a report issued a year after the earliest revelations of the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, the group said the renditions, along with abuses of foreign detainees by U.S. forces, were possible violations of international law.

The group also said an Army investigation clearing top U.S. military commanders of wrongdoing in the scandal at Abu Ghraib in Baghdad established the need for an outside inquiry. "This just proves the military can't investigate itself," said Reed Brody, a lawyer for Human Rights Watch, which monitors civil rights issues around the world. "It seems like another in a long line of attempts at self-absolution."

Brody's organization and the American Civil Liberties Union are among the groups that have sought the appointment of a special counsel to investigate U.S. detention practices since a string of Pentagon inquiries found few cases of wrongdoing, especially in higher military ranks or among civilian officials.

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...If not longer, yet Congress hasn't touched them with a ten foot pole from what I can see (and can find nothing on google indicating they've done any investigating of it).

I want to ask Congresspeople from BOTH parties: Do you approve of extrajudicial kidnapping and then sending the victims to a country like Syria to be tortured?

What would we say if the Chinese kidnapped people (such as Taiwanese activists) in other countries and sent them to Myanmar or North Korea for torture?

I'm going to begin asking that very question you posed to Congress critters. Thanks.