Int Hearld Tribune: No exceptions to the ban on torture

No exceptions to the ban on torture

Louise Arbour International Herald Tribune

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2005

GENEVA - The absolute ban on torture, a cornerstone of the international human rights edifice, is under attack. The principle we once believed to be unassailable - the inherent right to physical integrity and dignity of the person - is becoming a casualty of the so-called war on terror.

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Furthermore, prolonged incommunicado detention or detention in secret places facilitates the perpetration of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. Whatever the value of the information obtained in secret facilities - and there is reason to doubt the reliability of intelligence gained through prolonged incommunicado or secret detention - some standards on the treatment of prisoners cannot be set aside. Recourse to torture and degrading treatment exposes those who commit it to civil and criminal responsibility and, arguably, renders them vulnerable to retaliation.



Link:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/12/06/opinion/edarbour.php

(Louise Arbour is the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.)

We have all been reading over the last several days how Condi was going on the offensive to browbeat our allies over their newfound concern for our terror prisons in their backyards and the use of their airspace for our rendition flights. In typical Bush macho fashion, the White House decided the best way to deal with allies who were going wobbly on the issue of rendition flights in their airspace was to embarrass them in front of their home constituencies by reminding them that they have been willing supporters of this policy since 9/11, and that they need the CIA to continue these illegal activities to keep they themselves safe. Of course, it strains credulity for any other country to think that the CIA protects them from anything or has any kind of trustworthiness; just ask the Italians.

So here we have Condi, getting ready to display her latest “See how big my balls are” routine Tuesday when she will challenge our allies and humiliate them, giving no quarter and using the weasel Wilkinson to spread her image building at the expense of our allies. But in typical Bush fashion, in her efforts to show the Europeans who is the boss, she is about to let a genie out of the bottle that the White House cannot control. First, in the UK, her efforts are about to embarrass and undermine the Blair government, which is now being forced to admit publicly their knowledge and level of support for the renditions and the use of British airspace, a revelation that will seriously harm not only Tony Blair but will also cut off further use of British airspace for these flights.

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Yep, Condi will get her moment to display her spike-heel boots tomorrow and kick a little European ass around, to satisfy her need for attention and constant approval as one of the boys. And in the process, the Bush Administration may find that it will lose several more allies and its rendition program all at the same time, when a little quieter approach to the criticism would have been the smart play.

Link:
http://www.theleftcoaster.com/archives/006201.php

And, some excellent comments at:
http://www.theleftcoaster.com/cgi-bin/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=6201

U.S. Allies Oppose Torture, Polls Show

Tuesday December 6, 2005 5:01 PM

By WILL LESTER

Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - Most people in eight countries that are American allies don't want the United States conducting secret interrogations of terror suspects on their soil, an AP-Ipsos poll found.

Anxiety about recent reports of secret prisons run by the CIA in eastern Europe has been heightened by the ongoing debate on the use of torture. The poll found a majority in the United States, France, Britain and South Korea refused to rule out torture in some cases.

Anxiety about recent reports of secret prisons run by the CIA in eastern Europe has been heightened by the ongoing debate on the use of torture. The poll found Americans and residents of many of the allied countries divided on the question of torture, with about as many saying it's OK in some cases as those saying it never should be used.

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Bloche said it will be difficult for the United States to reverse policy changes on aggressive interrogation because that might require an admission of wrongdoing. ``Once you're in the game,'' Bloche said, ``it's hard to get out.''

Link:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-5460873,00.html

CIA Ruse Is Said to Have Damaged Probe in Milan: Italy Allegedly Misled on Cleric's Abduction

By Craig Whitlock
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, December 6, 2005; A01

MILAN -- In March 2003, the Italian national anti-terrorism police received an urgent message from the CIA about a radical Islamic cleric who had mysteriously vanished from Milan a few weeks before. The CIA reported that it had reliable information that the cleric, the target of an Italian criminal investigation, had fled to an unknown location in the Balkans.

In fact, according to Italian court documents and interviews with investigators, 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, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, an Egyptian refugee known as Abu Omar.

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More at the link:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/04/AR2005120400885_pf.html

ACLU Files Landmark Lawsuit Challenging CIA’s “Extraordinary Rendition” of Innocent Man

Media release:

http://www.aclu.org/natsec/emergpowers/22207prs20051206.html

ACLU Rendition information site:

http://www.aclu.org/safefree/extraordinaryrendition/index.html

Link to suit document:

http://www.aclu.org/images/extraordinaryrendition/asset_upload_file829_22211.pdf

German Sues Over Abduction Said to Be at Hands of C.I.A.

By SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON, Dec. 6 - A German citizen who says he was abducted, beaten and taken to Afghanistan by American agents in an apparent case of mistaken identity in 2003 filed suit in federal court today against George J. Tenet, the former C.I.A. director, and three companies said to have been involved in secret flight operations.

The suit came three days after Khaled el-Masri, a 42-year-old Lebanese-born former car salesman, was refused entrance to the United States after arriving Saturday in Atlanta on a flight from Germany with the intention of appearing at a news conference today in Washington. He spoke instead by video satellite link, describing somberly how he was beaten, photographed nude and injected with drugs during five months in detention in Macedonia and Afghanistan.

"I want to know why they did this to me," Mr. Masri said, speaking in German. He said that he had been reunited with his wife and children and was seeking work in Germany but that he had not fully recovered from the trauma of his experience.

"I don't think I'm the human being I used to be," he told reporters through an interpreter.

More at the link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/06/international/europe/06cnd-detain.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

Photo credit: Shawn Thew -- European Pressphoto Agency

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The Attorney General's demurral opens up a loophole large enough for Torquemada to ride through on a wagonload of Iron Maidens, breaking wheels and thumbscrews.

President Bush has promised to veto the Defense Authorization Bill if it contains language submitted by Senator John McCain prohibiting "cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of persons in the detention of the U.S. government." This language would apparently unacceptably narrow the category of behavior that the administration considers permissible under its secret definition of torture.

Gonzales added that the president and Vice President Cheney, who has been leading the charge against the McCain Amendment, are in "100 percent" agreement on their objectives.

In sum, the White House's policy which we can expect Condi to elaborate "comprehensively" is "we don't torture because we choose not to call it torture and we will fight all efforts to define torture according to its ordinary meaning."

More at the link:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr/the-white-houses-torture_b_11743.html

I was only half listening a minute ago as NBC's Jim Meceda in Bagdad was describing how a woman was stripped and tortured and then taken to Abu Ghraib and terribly abused. I turned quickly to see who this latest person was who had come forward to accuse the US of inhumane treatment --- only to find that it was a witness testifying at Saddam's trial. Wow.

Until the past two years I never would have made that assumption, never, even though I'm quite aware of all the nasty things we've done around the world over the years, including My Lai. But when you read things like this, it's natural to assume that any news of torture, Abu Ghraib etc. are reports of US behavior. These days, sadly, it usually is:

More at the link ...

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2005_12_04_digbysblog_archive.html#113389424002923663

Rice’s European troubleshooting fails threefold

Daniel Dombey in Brussels

Published: December 6 2005 20:10 | Last updated: December 6 2005 20:10

The continuing controversy over US “secret prisons” and abductions in Europe - coupled with Condoleezza Rice’s failure to clear the air - has made life difficult for European governments, but created even more perils for the US’s attempt to put transatlantic relations on an even keel.

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In the wake of the CIA allegations, Mr Bush will probably have to start again from scratch. Who knows, he could even reconsider the benefits of international law.


More at the link:

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/f66c23a2-668a-11da-884a-0000779e2340,dwp_uuid=d4f2ab60-c98e-11d7-81c6-0820abe49a01.html

Rendition: Tales of torture

The US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, has defended the US against allegations that it ran a network of "ghost flights" and secret prisons around the world where terror suspects could be interrogated with little concern for international law.
The BBC News website profiles some of the detainees who say they were victims of the US' secret "extraordinary rendition" policy.

Link:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4502986.stm

Romania, Poland scrutinized over prisons

WILLIAM J. KOLE

Associated Press

BUCHAREST, Romania - Romania and Poland, stalwart allies in the U.S.-led global war on terror, came under increasing fire Tuesday amid widening reports that they hosted secret CIA prisons where top al-Qaida suspects were interrogated.

Top leaders in both countries denied it, but lawmakers in Romania called for a parliamentary investigation. The stakes are high: Although they have curried favor with the U.S., any proof of complicity could leave the former communist nations isolated and scorned in a Europe demanding a full accounting from Washington, and threaten Romania's drive to join the European Union in 2007.

More at the link:

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/world/13341132.htm

US Defence of Tactic Makes No Sense Says Legal Expert

By Suzanne Goldenberg
The Guardian UK

Tuesday 06 December 2005

The robust defence of rendition offered yesterday by the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, marks the export to a European audience of a position on torture that is becoming increasingly uncomfortable for the Bush administration.

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However, her assurances that spiriting terror suspects away to clandestine prisons is a legitimate tactic did not carry much weight with human rights organisations or legal scholars yesterday.

They argued that the sole use of extraordinary rendition was to transport a suspect to a locale that was beyond the reach of the law - and so at risk of torture.

"The argument makes no sense unless there is an assumption that the purpose of rendition is to send people to a place where things could be done to them that could not be done in the United States," said David Luban, a law professor at Georgetown University who is presently a visiting professor at Stanford University.

More at the link:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1659153,00.html

Not everybody here is of that view, to say the least. Indeed, 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. There have been too many reports in the news media about renditions - including one involving an Lebanese-born German citizen, Khaled el- Masri, kidnapped in Macedonia in December 2003 and imprisoned in Afghanistan for several months on the mistaken assumption that he was an associate of the Sept. 11 hijackers - for blanket disclaimers of torture to be widely believed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/07/international/europe/07react.html?ei=5094&en=b050a23c444c2311&hp=&ex=1134018000&adxnnl=1&partner=homepage&adxnnlx=1133933016-DP+KwjWi82jfiAui5oYifQ&pagewanted=all

It was a sad enough measure of how badly the Bush administration has damaged its moral standing that the secretary of state had to deny that the president condones torture before she could visit some of the most reliable American allies in Europe. It was even worse that she had a hard time sounding credible when she did it.

Of course, it would have helped if Condoleezza Rice was actually in a position to convince the world that the United States has not, does not and will not torture prisoners. But there's just too much evidence that this has happened at the hands of American interrogators or their proxies in other countries. Vice President Dick Cheney is still lobbying to legalize torture at the C.I.A.'s secret prisons, and to block a law that would reimpose on military prisons the decades-old standard of decent treatment that Mr. Bush scrapped after 9/11.

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Ms. Rice said Monday that rendition had been used to lock up some really dangerous bad guys, like Carlos the Jackal and Ramzi Yousef, who masterminded the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. But both men were charged in courts, put on trial, convicted and sentenced. That's what most American think when they hear talk about "bringing the terrorists to justice" - not predawn abductions, blindfolded prisoners on plane rides and years of torture in distant lands without any public reckoning.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/07/opinion/07wed1.html?hp=&pagewanted=print