NOVANEWS
“It Wasn’t The CIA Just Doing It By Themselves
By Tom Finn
On Tuesday Mozzam Begg, a British Pakistani citizen and former Guantanamo bay detainee, was asked by a journalist from Sky News for his reaction to revelations about CIA torture documented in a new US Senate report.
“Do you feel any sense of vindication by what’s been revealed in this report?” asked the journalist.
“No,” said Begg, looking straight at the camera.“It’s something we’ve been talking about for the past thirteen years. When I was held [at Bagram detention center] guns were put to my head, I was kicked and punched on the floor, my clothes were sliced off with a knife by US soldiers… The US has admitted wrongdoing but what doesn’t happen is accountability,” said Begg.
Then he changed tack: “What about the outsourcing of torture? Syria, Egypt, Libya under Qaddafi, these are places where Britain and the United States of America were sending people to be tortured. It wasn’t just the CIA doing it by themselves, they couldn’t have done it by themselves, there had to be lots of accomplices.”
In addition to its own interrogation program, run out of “black sites” – secret detention centres outside the US – the Senate report has raised questions about the ways in which the CIA used a vast network of other countries – many in the Middle East – to help capture, detain, transport and torture detainees.
That network is shown in the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program – officially ended by president Obama in 2008 – under which the CIA could detain and interrogate foreign suspects without bringing them to the US or charging them with any crimes.
54 foreign governments supported the CIA’s program of extraordinary rendition, according to a 2013 report by the Open Society Foundation (OSF).
Of those 54, eleven were Middle Eastern states (Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen).
Infographic: CIA torture in the Middle East #HumanRights pic.twitter.com/zNRpxndb6d
— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) December 10, 2014
The degree to which those governments were involved in actual torturing of suspects varied, according to Sam Raphael, a lecturer in international relations at Kingston University. He is also co-founder of the Rendition project, which investigates US-led rendition and detention since 2001.
Some Arab states, such as Egypt, captured suspects on the CIA’s behalf and handed detainees over to the agency as well as permitting use of airports and airspace for flights associated with extraordinary rendition operations.
Others, like Jordan, which received several Pakistani citizens between 2001 and 2005, violently interrogated detainees on the CIA’s behalf, said Raphael.
“This is what hasn’t been written into the Senate’s report: an account of how detainees were treated by foreign security forces… In many cases they were treated far more brutally than they were inside the CIA program,” said Raphael.
‘Coffin-sized cells’
The most common destinations for rendered suspects, according to the OSF report, were Egypt, Morocco, and Jordan, all of which have been cited for human-rights violations by the State Department, and are known to torture suspects.
The Syrian government was also one of the “most common destinations for rendered suspects”. In a prison known as “The Grave”, due to its coffin-sized cells, some U.S.-provided detainees were subjected to “torture involving a chair frame used to stretch the spine (the ‘German chair’) and beatings.”
Iran, typically considered an American foe, also participated in the CIA’s programme by handing over 15 individuals to Kabul shortly after the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, in the full knowledge that they would fall under US control.
#CIA threatened to send me to Mubarak’s #Egypt or Asad’s #Syria for failing to cooperate with them in Bagram prison 2003. #TortureReport
— Moazzam Begg (@Moazzam_Begg) December 9, 2014