Extraordinary Rendition
From American Gulag
Reporting from the Dark Side
Contents |
[edit] The First Clues
It was 2:40 a.m. on October 23, 2001 at a small, rarely used terminal of the Karachi airport in Pakistan. Masood Anwar, a Pakistani journalist and expert in aviation, received report from a source who worked at the airport. The source stood close enough to a departing plane that night to note the aircraft’s tail number, N379P. He told Anwar that Pakistani intelligence officers had handed over a suspect to U.S. authorities. The source added that the operation was extremely secretive, noting that the people involved wore masks, including the U.S. troops. The plane had arrived from Amman, Jordan at 1:00 am and inside it was Jamil Qasim Saeed Mohammed, a Yemeni microbiologist. Saeed Mohammed was being handed over to American forces because he was wanted for his alleged involvement in the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole. Anwar's article headlined "Mystery Man Handed Over to U.S. Troops in Karachi,"(1) was published by The News International, a newspaper in Karachi. His mention of the tail number N379P, would become one of the first clues into the CIA’s secret program of extraordinary rendition and imprisonments around the world after 9/11.
After Anwar’s article was published on October 26, a conservative forum website FreeRepublic.com posted it soon after. Thirteen minutes later, one of the bloggers provided the name of the aircraft’s owner. The tail number linked the plane back to a Massachusetts-based airline called Premier Executive Transport Services Inc. The name was so generic and simple it made another reader wonder if it was anything like Air America, which was secretly owned and operated by the CIA during the Vietnam War. Dana Priest, a long time reporter on war and intelligence for The Washington Post, noticed the discussion. Priest believed the FreeRepublic.com's blogger was right about the possibility of a CIA operated airline. She visited a records office in Boston to confirm her suspicion and, sure enough, all the alleged officers of Premier Executive Transport Services Inc. existed only on paper. Anwar's piece had captured one of the first moments of extraordinary rendition and the use of black sites-- important new elements of the war on terror for years to come.
[edit] Rendition and Black Sites
Extraordinary renditions are not a new tactic of the CIA.
In 1995, the Clinton administration approved extraordinary renditions to combat terrorism efforts. Between 1995 and 1998, the CIA sent suspects, especially Islamic freedom fighters in the Balkans, to Egypt to be interrogated and dealt with by Egyptian authorities. Evidence suggests many of these detainees were killed after reaching Egyptian hands. Regarding the treatment of rendition victims, Michael Scheuer, the author of Clinton’s rendition program, stated at a Congressional hearing on rendition that “This is a matter of no concern as the Rendition Program’s goal was to protect America, and the rendered fighters delivered to Middle Eastern governments are now either dead or in places from which they cannot harm America. Mission accomplished, as the saying goes.” (2)
For more information on Extraordinary renditions in the United States click here.
But things changed after 9/11. Renditions now involved a new set of rules and dynamics. As the director of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center, Cofer Black, stated in 2007, “After 9/11, the gloves came off.” He later added, “The hunt is on.” (3)
Vice President Dick Cheney’s remarks on the NBC show Meet the Press with Tim Russert less than a week after the attacks were a clue into what was to come with the U.S. declared "Global War on terror." “We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will” he said, “We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we're going to be successful” (4)
It is the dark side of intelligence work post 9/11 that would take journalists years to unravel. The confidentiality and anonymity immediately after the CIA secret prisons network was established were elements that kept early reporting on these prisons, called black sites, away from the spotlight. There were hundreds or even thousands of suspects who were being held around the world because of possible connections to terrorist organizations, and who were ultimately subject to torture and humiliation. In many cases, the prisoners were completely innocent and free of any terrorist affiliation; in all cases undeserving of torture and anonymous injustice.
With the new rules, the intelligence units of other countries no longer interrogated prisoners. Instead, the U.S. set up secret interrogation units, or black sites. These sites, located in several countries, provided a place where the CIA had full control of the operation and where all questioning and torturing would be conducted by CIA agents as opposed to local officials.
Dana Priest said in an interview with PBS’s Frontline “The whole reason for having the detention sites was so that the CIA could interrogate the people in them. And nobody else, not the host nation, nobody --Not the Pentagon, not the FBI. Nobody. Just the CIA. Their little prison system.” (5) It was a secret system waiting to be discovered.
[edit] Finding the bait
It was soon after 9/11 that Stephen Grey, a British journalist researching for the [Sunday_Times Sunday Times] first heard of the United States sending suspects to secret, CIA-run prisons. He, like Priest and other reporters, began to pay particular attention to Anwar's CIA plane hint, and started to track the flight logs of several suspect aircraft tail numbers. Some of the pioneer journalists included Priest and Barton Gellman from the Washington Post with “U.S. Decries Abuse but Defends Interrogations”(6) late in 2002. The article described some early knowledge of black sites:
"Deep inside the forbidden zone at the US-occupied Bagram air base in Afghanistan, around the corner from the detention center and beyond the segregated clandestine military units, sits a cluster of metal shipping containers protected by a triple layer of concertina wire. The containers hold the most valuable prizes in the war on terrorism—captured al Qaeda operatives and Taliban commanders...."
These pioneering reporters were for the most part relying on families of people who had been taken, flight records, local people who witnessed Americans coming to their towns to take men who had yet to return home. A similar article was on the front page of The New York Times in March 2003 titled "Interrogations: Questioning Terror Suspects in a Dark and Surreal World." (7) This time around, the language was more indicative of torture at these sites; Van Natta wrote, "Intelligence officials also acknowledged that some suspects had been turned over to security services in countries known to employ torture." With little to work with, Priest and Gellman used “interviews with several former intelligence officials and 10 current U.S. national security officials -- including several people who witnessed the handling of prisoners.” Their article confirms “U.S. officials have said little publicly about the captives' names, numbers or whereabouts, and virtually nothing about interrogation methods.” Journalists would have to work from the outside; using anything they got to find their way in.
During the Frontline interview Dana explained that The Post had “unearthed, basically, most of their [CIA’s] system of proprietary front companies in our own public database work. We even showed it to them [the CIA] before we wrote the story. We did flow charts of who's who and mailbox numbers and all these hundreds of names that didn't exist, and we gave it all to them and said, "OK, what would you like to say about this, because we're going to say X." During a lecture at the University of California at Santa Cruz, Priest said that after talking to the CIA about this mysterious set of flight records and employees, the agency essentially responded with a simple “no comment.” She added, “You would think that at that point they [CIA] would realize ... that it's hard to maintain certain secrets in this day and age.”
The Abu Ghraib scandal, which confirmed the abuse of the prisoners of the Baghdad facility, broke in April 2004 by the Television news-magazine 60 Minutes. Though not a secret prison, the Abu Ghraib story exploded, as did the reporting on the war on terror. In May 2004, an article for the British political magazine New Statesman headlined "America's Gulag" by Stephen Grey described renditions and how the CIA had used a fleet of luxury aircraft to move prisoners around the world to secret locations since 9/11. The article only mentioned a few countries, none of them in Europe. "Some of the prisoners have gone to Guantanamo, the US interrogation centre at its naval base in Cuba," "Hundreds more have been transferred from one Middle Eastern or Asian country to another - countries where the prisoners can be more easily interrogated." (8)
Also in May, Stockholm's TV4 Kalla Fakta (Colf Facts) aired a detailed account of the CIA's transfer from Bromma Airport, Stockholm to Cairo of Ahmed Agiza and Muhammed al-Zery, both Egyptian refugees in Sweden. The transfer took place on December 18, 2001. The CIA used Gulfstream N379P, the same aircraft Anwar had identified in October 2001, and one journalists and plane spotters alike had been tracking for almost 3 years. Kalla Facta had interviewed several people involved in the rendition. These people included Sven Linder, a former Swedish ambassador to Egypt, Arne Anderson, a chief officer of the Swedish Security Police, Mary McGuiness, the spokesperson for Premier Executive Transport Services, Hans Dahgren, the Swedish vice foreign minister, and Paul Forell, a police inspector who had been on duty at the Bromma Airport the day of the transfer.
TV4's report of the Swedish case was extremely important because it revealed just how deeply involved Swedish authorities were with the CIA operations. The fact that European countries were cooperating in the network of black sites where prisoners were likely to be tortured was not unnoticed. In fact, journalists soon identified more than one thousand CIA flights to European countries, which made it almost safe to conclude that these governments were aware of renditions and black sites, some of which were taking place in their backyard.
A transcript of the Kalla Fakta report can be found here.
[edit] A New Wave
Eventually, the black sites story unraveled. In 2005, a new wave of articles appeared. Journalists now had stories with names. Take for example Maher Arar who was a Canadian-Syrian captured by the CIA while en route to the U.S. and taken to Jordan and then to Syria where he was "brutally physically tortured," according to his lawyer. We heard about Khaled el-Masri’s story, a German citizen of Lebanese origin. Masri was taken through rendition in Macedonia to a secret prison in Afghanistan where he says he was repeatedly abused. Or Mohammed Haydar Zammar’s accounts of being taken from Morocco to spend four years at a secret prison in Syria.
Jane Mayer wrote a piece for The New Yorker on February 2005 titled “Outsourcing Torture” referencing black sites.(9) Dana Priest ran a series of articles about rendition, secret prisons and the mistakes made by the CIA. On March 17, 2005 The Post ran Priest's article about Mamdouh Habib’s maltreatment while he was detained at a black site in Egypt. Priests most controversial article came on November 2, 2005 “CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons.”(10) Here, Priest described the secret prisons program in greater detail than ever before, and most importantly mentioned the existence of these prisons in Eastern Europe.
In an interview in 2009, Len Downie, who was executive editor of the Washington Post when Priest’s article was published, recalls that Priest had contacted him “pretty early on”, “as soon as she knew this [black sites sotry] could be something big.” He said Dana only had “bits and pieces, and did not really know what she was looking at.” In an article on December 4, 2005, Priest reported the mistaken detention of Khaled al-Masri, taken from Macedonia to Afghanistan, and who was then wrongfully imprisoned for five months.(11)
[edit] To name or not to name
Well before the November 2 story was published, “senior officials of the government” contacted both Priest and Downie raising concern about of the material in Priest’s articles, and especially the details of the secret prisons system. According to Downie, “Dana attended a high level meeting at the CIA.” Officials there explained which “details they thought would be a problem.” The officials knew about her reporting because she had contacted them to get a response. Shortly after the CIA meeting, the White House asked Downie to meet with President Bush. Downie went, determined to make it “clear that there would be no harm.” The president insisted that these types of stories were potentially damaging to national security and that publishing certain details would undermine intelligence operations and the safety of men and women involved in them. Still, Downie approved publication, agreeing to only withhold the location of the black sites located in “Eastern European democracies.”Isabel Hilton of The Guardian wrote in “The 800lb Gorilla in American Foreign Policy” in 2004 wrote:
"The delusion that officeholders know better than the law is an occupational hazard of the powerful and one to which those of an imperial cast of mind are especially prone … When disappearance became state practice across Latin America in the '70s it aroused revulsion in democratic countries, where it is a fundamental tenet of legitimate government that no state actor may detain - or kill - another human being without having to answer to the law."(11)
As if taking a similar stance, several journalists and newspaper editors decided to print articles despite the supposed threat to national security they posed. Their determination was criticized by those who believed in the legitimacy of keeping CIA intelligence programs secret.
[edit] Responses
“CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons” came with a great deal of backlash. In the article Dana exposes the worldwide system of “black sites” run by the CIA in several countries, including emerging Eastern European democracies, which meant that the operations taking place in those countries were illegal under their respective national laws. Dana won a Pulitzer Prize for her extended reporting on this subject, which was both a source of praise and critique. In some cases the criticism was almost in the form of attack, such as Bill Bennett’s comment suggesting Dana’s work was “worthy of jail.” Europeans also feared their countries would now become targets of terrorist attacks due to their cooperation with the United States.
The articles following Dana’s November piece were increasingly about the European response to black sites. The New York Times published “Rice Is Challenged in Europe Over Secret Prisons” on Dec. 7, 2005 in reference to then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Also in Europe, journalists and governments responded by conducting criminal investigations in countries like Spain, Italy, and Germany. These investigations confirmed the intricate involvement of European courtiers in getting terrorist suspects out of their countries and into secret black sites where they faced torture. Quite embarrassed, Europe's antiterrorism chief Gijs de Vries publicly denied involvement, but reporters had uncovered enough to prove the denials were useless.
Since 2005, journalists have continued to confirm the existence of secret prisons, and have told several more rendition stories. As more information has become available from U.S. government officials and lawyers of detainees, the focus has shifted away from flight records and locations and to the interrogation techniques and reports of abuse within the detention sites. On August 13, 2007 Jane Meyer in The New Yorker's "The Black Sites" (12) reported that extreme psychological interrogation techniques were used on secret prison detainees, including sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, forcing prisoners to be naked for extended periods of time, and often photographing them in humiliating positions.
Recent reporting includes journalist Mark Danner's pieces on torture within black sites. Danner recently got hold of a highly classified International Committee of the Red Cross report, which documented the interrogation techniques, health, and testimonies of “14 high-value detainees” who were transferred to Guantanamo Bay from black sites around the world. In a story for The New York Review of Books in April 2009 titled “US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites,” Danner cited direct accounts from the prisoners:
“I woke up, naked, strapped to a bed, in a very white room. The room measured approximately 4m x 4m [13 feet by 13 feet]. The room had three solid walls, with the fourth wall consisting of metal bars separating it from a larger room. I am not sure how long I remained in the bed....”
Bush, in his State of the Union address in February 2003, said: "More than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries. Many others have met a different fate. Put it this way, they're no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies." The “suspected terrorists” and the men who wake up naked, disappeared and strapped to a bed are one in the same. The “different fate” Bush refers to is exactly what journalists and human rights organizations around the world have attempted to reveal since 9/11.
EXTRAORDINARY RENDITION: KEEPING AMERICA SAFE?
Four years after storming Iraq and finding no weapons of mass destruction, four years after the revelation that intelligence reports on Iraq’s nuclear ambitions were based upon falsified documents, and three years after CIA director George Tenet resigned under fire, the United States government is heavily embroiled in a legal and ethical dilemma – with questions arising that we’ll likely be dealing with for years to come.
The CIA Rendition Program
The CIA Rendition Program is one of the most controversial aspects of the apocalyptic Global War on Terror. After the devastating attacks of September 11, both houses of Congress signed into law the Authorization for Use of Military Force. The measure gave President Bush sweeping powers to “use all necessary and appropriate force” against any organization, person or nation that planned or committed acts of terrorism against the United States. It also laid the groundwork for Bush’s expansion of the CIA program.
According to former CIA analyst Michael Scheurer, the policy of extraordinary rendition began in the summer of 1995 during the Clinton Administration. Initially, Clinton directed the CIA to render suspected terrorists to countries where they were already wanted for a crime. Prisoners were to face criminal charges, which ensured that proper legal channels were met. But CIA operatives complained that these procedures were cumbersome. They warned that because of this policy, terrorists could easily elude capture.
In the days following the World Trade Center attacks, the Bush administration modified the Rendition program by giving CIA officials exclusive control of a network of secret prisons in parts of Eastern Europe, Asia and the Middle East. No longer must prisoners be taken to a specific country for questioning and arraignment. Instead, prisoners could now be snatched off the streets, taken to an undisclosed location, and held indefinitely without explanation. Al-Qaeda fighters and other suspected terrorists in these so-called “black site” prisons faced complete isolation from the rest of the world.
Proponents of the rendition program like Scheurer contend that this procedure, known as extraordinary rendition, has made the U.S. safer. The CIA’s controversial methods, they argue, are justified by the Rendition program’s success in capturing several al-Qaeda leaders. Since September 2006, many notorious al-Qaeda leaders have been captured, including Khalid Shaykh Muhammed, Abu Zubaydah and Khalid bin Attash. In a letter to The Washington Post, Scheurer wrote that the Rendition program has been “the single most effective counterterrorism operation ever conducted by the United States government… Americans are safer today because of the program.”
But although Scheurer and many Bush Administration officials argue that the Rendition program is both necessary and effective in fighting an underground terrorist organization, many assert that the policy of extraordinary rendition amounts to an abuse of Executive power. Legal and ethical questions, along with allegations of human rights’ violations, have dogged the CIA Rendition program since its inception.
Prisoner abuse
For one thing, suspected terrorists are taken to secret prisons where they have no right to contest their capture. With no judicial oversight, prisoners are subject to humiliating and often brutal interrogation methods. Government officials have maintained that these methods – which have included beating, sleep deprivation, food deprivation, sensory and light bombardment, slapping, isolation and simulated drowning – do not amount to torture. But stories leaked to the press prove otherwise.
In December 2005, Washington Post reporter Dana Priest drew national attention to a detainee who was wrongfully imprisoned for months. As reported by Priest, German citizen Khaled el-Masri was kidnapped from Macedonia and taken to a secret facility in Afghanistan where, el-Masri says, he was deprived of food and beaten repeatedly before being released without apology. Although the Bush Administration maintains that suspected enemy combatants do not have the legal right to contest their imprisonment, the ACLU filed a case on el-Masri’s behalf, charging former CIA director George Tenet with violating national and international human rights laws.
Last May, however, El-Masri v. Tenet was dismissed by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. The Court maintained that holding proceedings would expose state secrets.
Court proceedings or no, unsavory details on abusive interrogation methods and other controversies have been vigorously reported by the press. An independent review by the Council of Europe found that 14 European countries, including Poland, Romania, and Spain, were involved in the Rendition program. The revelations have sparked an international furor.
Additionally, watchdog groups like the ACLU and Amnesty international have repeatedly attacked the Rendition Program for its alleged and documented abuses – especially in the wake of the prison abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib. While Bush has described the interrogation methods as “safe, and lawful, and necessary,” some prisoners in U.S. custody have died. This dilemma has raised even more questions. Who is ultimately responsible for the deaths of prisoners? Can family members of the falsely accused seek compensation from the U.S. government and members of the intelligence community?
John Yoo and the Question of Legality
There is also the question of legality. Last September, President Bush moved to block former detainees from taking legal action against government officials when he asked Congress to pass new legislation protecting U.S. personnel from being prosecuted for Geneva Convention violations. The Military Commissions Act of 2006, backed by John Yoo, former Justice Department deputy assistant, eliminated the writ of habeas corpus—the prisoner’s right to contest his imprisonment in a court of law—as applied to enemy combatants.
Yoo has proven a formidable ally of the Bush Administration, arguing in a PBS Frontline interview that habeas corpus can’t apply to suspected terrorists because “We are facing a very aggressive, determined enemy in which the normal rules don’t apply.” Yoo argued further that since terrorist networks are non-state organizations, upholding Geneva Conventions standards are irrelevant.
“If you're a prisoner of war under the Geneva Conventions, you can only be asked questions and you cannot be treated any differently based on whether you answer them or not.” So-called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” Yoo added, are necessary to obtain crucial information in a timely manner. Simply put, these techniques foil terrorist plots, Yoo has argued.
But without due process of law, kidnappings, detainment and interrogation are arguably illegal and should not be permitted by a society that calls itself a champion of individual rights. Although the Rendition Program has led to the successful capture of dangerous terrorists, it has also become another ugly smear on America’s human rights’ record—a frightening reminder that Executive power, left unchecked, can lead to a world where secret operatives can kidnap and terrorize people without justification to the either the prisoners themselves or to the American people. Moreover, the policy has further damaged America’s reputation around the world as embarrassing details on prisoner abuse have circulated throughout the national and international media.
Government officials’ seeming lack of concern over prisoner abuse has also damaged America’s reputation. John Yoo dismissed the concerns. “[B]ecause we had abuses in Abu Ghraib, does that mean the next time we capture, say, the number two person of Al Qaeda, that means we have to ask them the right questions with a lawyer present?”
Scheurer further added, “The Rendition Program’s goal was to protect America and the rendered fighters… are now either dead or in places from which they cannot harm America. Mission accomplished, as the saying goes.”
Atmosphere of secrecy; Journalistic challenges
The secrecy surrounding the program has only heightened its controversy. Many journalists have complained that when covering controversial issues like the CIA Rendition program, they are often butting heads with government officials. These officials, journalists say, are all too eager to accuse them of writing stories that compromise national security.
Sensitive stories often require the use of confidential sources, or those who for professional or political reasons cannot be named in a news story. Washington Post reporter Dana Priest described her reservations in using confidential sources in an interview with Quill Magazine. “As a paper we want to tell readers as much as possible about our sources,” Priest said. Providing information about sources adds to a story’s credibility. But it’s a delicate balancing act. “I also want to protect people… so that they don’t feel they are putting themselves in jeopardy by talking to you,” Priest said.
In a telephone interview, Christine Tatum, Society of Professional Journalists President, called the Bush Administration openly hostile to news media. “If anything this Administration has over classified so many documents it's not even funny. And of course it's hiding behind the guise of national security to try and rankle journalists," said Tatum.
Many reporters allege that the Administration’s skill in controlling information has lead to an unprecedented level of combativeness between media and government officials. “Without question the Administration has had its little war on the media. It's been a question of fighting them for everything,” said Tatum.
Reporters like Priest have won Pulitzer awards, journalism’s top honor, for their top-notch reporting. But ironically, the same reporters have also been accused of committing felonies. Last May, Alberto Gonzalez appeared on the ABC News show ‘The Week,’ hinting that the Administration was considering using the Espionage Act to prosecute journalists for leaks. But making good on this threat would challenge the indispensable role of journalists as independent watchdogs – indispensable even in this time of war and confusion.
[edit] Background
Since the attacks on 9/11, President Bush authorized the US Intelligence community to use a wide range of methods (including lethal methods) to find and capture members of al Qaeda and other suspected terrorists. "Extraordinary rendition" is the practice of transferring a prisoner or suspect to another country outside the US for interrogation. The US maintains secret prisons in at least eight countries in the Middle East, Central Asia and Eastern Europe. President Bush claims that the covert prison program is necessary to act on tips quickly and collect information from suspects that could prevent another terrorist attack.
[edit] Criticisms
Human rights groups and other activists have decried the secret prison program, which has been referred to the "outsourcing of torture." They claim the US has violated many foreign nationals' basic civil and judicial rights. Suspected terrorists are taken to CIA "black sites" where they have no legal representation, can be held without being charged, and do not have contact with their home country.
Some members of the CIA are skittish about the program. If the interrogation methods violate national and international law, then they can presumably be held accountable for their actions.
In 2004 the Supreme Court ruled (Rasul v. Bush) that detainees of Guantanamo Bay that were never formally charged could challenge their imprisonment in US courts. (*More recent decisions?)
[edit] Issues
Torture? When detainees are hurt or killed while interrogated, can American interrogators be held legally responsible?
The "Hollywood"-ization of the CIA
Dana Priest: "Members of the Rendition Group follow a simple but standard procedure: Dressed head to toe in black, including masks, they blindfold and cut the clothes off their new captives, then administer an enema and sleeping drugs. They outfit detainees in a diaper and jumpsuit for what can be a day-long trip. Their destinations: either a detention facility operated by cooperative countries in the Middle East and Central Asia, including Afghanistan, or one of the CIA's own covert prisons -- referred to in classified documents as "black sites," which at various times have been operated in eight countries, including several in Eastern Europe."
[edit] Questions
[edit] Relevant Films
The Strange Case of Salman abd al Haqq: A Film by Tim Gregory and Jeff Orlowski
[edit] Relevant Readings
Annals of Justice: Outsourcing Torture By Jane Mayer (February 2005); The New Yorker
CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons By Dana Priest (November 2, 2005)
Officials Relieved Secret is Shared By Dana Priest (September 7, 2006) President Bush reveals what everyone already knows: The existence of secret prisons. The intelligence community breathes a sigh of relief. ("'Finally the burden of this program will not rest only on the shoulders of the CIA,' said James Pavitt, who headed CIA covert operations when the program was put in place, with White House approval, after Sept. 11, 2001.") President Bush calls for new legislation which aims to prevent former prisoners from suiing US Government officials based on the terms of the Geneva Code. At the same time, Bush denies that the interrogation methods -- beating, sleep deprivation, food deprivation, sensory and light bombardment, slapping, isolation and simulated drownings -- amount to torture.
The outsourcing of evil By Salman Rushdie The Age (January 10, 2006)
Wrongful Imprisonment: Anatomy of a CIA Mistake By Dana Priest (December 4, 2005) In January 2005 the CIA kidnapped German citizen Khaled al-Masri, drugged him and flew him from Macedonia to a prison in Afghanistan where, he says, he was beaten repeatedly, deprived of food and isolated. "No one knows you are here," he was told. By March, the CIA realized it had the wrong man. When he was released in May, an agent told him he had been imprisoned because of he had a bad name.
The Wronged Man: Unjustly Imprisoned and Mistreated, Khaled al-Masri Wants Answers the U.S. Government Doesn't Want to Give By Dana Priest (November 29, 2006) Khaled al-Masri is taking the US Government to court over his mistreatment.
Extraordinary Rendition and Secret Prisons - June 6, 2008
Christina Yoon
On April 17, 2007, Michael Scheuer, the former chief of the Bin Ladin Unit of the CIA testified at a congressional hearing about the CIA’s use of extraordinary rendition and secret prisons to gain information about suspected terrorists. Scheuer, who ran the program from its creation in 1995 until 1999, described rendition as “the single most effective counterterrorism operation ever conducted by the United States government.” His testimony, however, was intended to do more than just sing the praises of this controversial program. He also emphatically denounced politicians including Senator John McCain, who criticized the program as well as journalists who published articles about the use of rendition.
Drifting away steadily from the initial political politeness he maintained at the beginning of his testimony, Scheuer pointed an accusing finger at Washington Post reporter Dana Priest. He criticized her for revealing information that endangered US security, a reference to Priest’s November 2005 piece in the Post that revealed that the United States maintained secret prisons in Eastern Europe. Scheuer called Priest one of a group of “venal and prize-hungry reporters” who “have behaved disgracefully and ought to publicly apologize to the CIA’s men and women who have executed the rendition program.”
Priest received scathing criticism by government officials for covering stories about the U.S.’s use of rendition. But these attacks did not come immediately, which showed the government’s reluctance to discuss information about their secret programs. After all, the program was created more than a decade before Scheuer’s testimony, and was covered in the press five years earlier in reference to the Bush administration. Scheuer’s personal incrimination of journalists covering rendition was both overblown and delayed. Both of these aspects are critical in examining the press’s role in addressing rendition and secret prisons.
The understood use of the term “rendition” has evolved greatly in the past several decades. It was originally primarily a legal term referring to the act of transporting people or property from one jurisdiction to another. Most commonly, this referred to interstate rendition, where one US state is required to hand over a criminal suspect to another state for trial.
In 1995, the Clinton administration adapted this concept as a part of its decisions to capture terror suspects in the Middle East. In Presidential Decision Directive 39, President Clinton stated the U.S. would “work closely with friendly governments in carrying out our counterterrorism policy.” This was known as “extraordinary rendition,” as the suspects were often never on U.S. soil and they were often kept in custody without any involvement from the host country.
In his congressional testimony, Scheuer explained that under the Clinton administration, the goal of rendition under the Clinton administration was to capture only suspects who had outstanding warrants for arrest in other countries and take them to those countries to be tried. Suspects who were rendered were not to be interrogated because the interrogation would be performed by a foreign country with no CIA control and there was a good chance that these suspects would be tortured.
These restrictions were abandoned after the attacks on September 11, 2001. The CIA was now given permission by the Bush administration to capture those it designated as “illegal enemy combatants.” Whereas previously rendered suspects were kept in prisons run by the host country, they were now often held in U.S.-run prisons in those countries. Finally, the suspects were interrogated. Critics claimed rendition was simply a way to torture suspected terrorists in secret locations off U.S. soil. Cofer Black, the director of the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center seemed to tacitly confirm this at a House and Senate Intelligence Committee hearing: “All you need to know is that there was a before 9/11 and there was an after 9/11. After 9/11, the gloves came off.” Although the press covered instances of extraordinary rendition just a few months after September 11, the initial coverage of rendition did not reveal the Bush administration’s reinterpretation of the program and its corresponding violations of international treaties and U.S. laws. Because the program was secret, the press relied on the families and lawyers of those who had been rendered in early reports.
The Washington Post’s Peter Finn was one of the first to write about selected instances of rendered terror suspects. On January 29, 2002, he reported on the deportation of two Egyptian citizens from Sweden to Cairo. Finn defined the process of rendition as a “new willingness to expel Islamic terror suspects with little attention to legal proceedings.” But there was no mention in the piece about U.S. involvement in the process. Instead, the article pointed the finger at participating foreign countries: “Even as European governments criticize the United States for its treatment of Taliban and al Queda prisoners at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, they are showing new willingness to expel terror suspects to countries that were previously shunned because of records of torture and execution.” Finn also reported that rendition was not limited to the European Union. He also named Pakistan, Azerbaijan and Bosnia, saying that “a growing number of suspects have been whisked abroad in recent months.”
It was not until July 25, 2004, that the Sweden incident was linked to the United States government. “Playing a central role in the operation: the U.S. government, which provided the plane, some agents and other logistical support,” reported Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post. Whitlock had gotten a hold of classified documents released by the Swedish government.
Whitlock also focused on evidence that the two terror suspects, Ahmed Agiza and Muhammad Zery, had “regularly subjected to electric shocks and other kinds of torture.” He cited sources who that the suspects were not given full trials after being charged, or were held in custody without any charge at all.
“By the summer of 2004 we were aware that the CIA was relying on an overseas prison network to hold terrorism suspects,” said Whitlock in an interview. “What was unclear was where, exactly, these suspects were being held.”
The reports of torture, lack of legal representation, and indefinite imprisonments with no corresponding legal charges would become the basis of many more rendition stories.
The details about the process and extent of the rendition program came at a slow pace. This was due in large part, of course, to the fact that extraordinary rendition was a secret program. Journalists were limited by the slow release of documents by European countries as well as research compiled by human rights groups.
“At first, the CIA would not even respond when I asked them for comment in advance of publication,” says Whitlock. “After the first couple of stories, however, they backed down and at least agreed to review my questions ahead of time. They never did comment on the record, and my interpretation is that they simply wanted to know what I was up to.”
Whitlock reported on the Swedish rendition case again in May 2005, detailing exactly what happened to the prisoners once CIA operatives captured them. His piece cited “newly released documents from the parliamentary probe that provide elaborate details about an operation that normally unfolds entirely out of public view and about the government deliberations that preceded it.” A Swedish parliamentary investigator spent 10 months to create the report that provided Whitlock with the detailed information he was able to give in 2005.
Later in 2005, Dana Priest wrote a series of stories about rendition and secret prisons for the Washington Post. The series brought significant attention both to the issue and to Priest personally. She and fellow staff writer Barton Gellman had previously reported on “an off-limits patch of ground” at the Bagram air base in Afghanistan in 2002. Like Finn, Priest and Gellman were limited in the information they were able to uncover. They relied on unnamed sources including “former intelligence officials and 10 current U.S. national security officials.” The story focused on possible human rights abuses at Bagram, especially the death of two inmates held there. Priest and Gellman named favorite countries of the U.S. for renditions, such as Morocco, Jordan and Syria. However, they were restricted by their lack of actual cases and the story was more or less a back-and-forth of unnamed sources who claimed that torture had occurred and on-the-record officials who said that it hadn’t.
Priest’s 2005 pieces differed in several ways. First, Priest was able to use former rendered prisoners as sources. The detailed stories of those who were abducted and held without charge had a unique effect on capturing the human element that many of the earlier stories did not have. On March 17, 2005, Priest reported on Mamdouh Habib, an Austrailan citizen who was allegedly hung from hooks, shocked, nearly drowned and beaten while held in Egypt.
Priest also reported on unsuccessful instances of rendition. On December 4, 2005, she recounted the case of Khaled Masri, a German citizen who was held mistakenly for five months because his name was allegedly similar to that of a terror suspect. Priest interviewed Masri for the story and got the full details of his ordeal. Masri’s voice recounting what happened to him before the CIA realized its mistake and released him with no explanation or compensation struck a chord that more impersonal stories about rendition had failed to.
Priest’s piece for the Post on November 2, 2005 caused the most dramatic reaction, at least among her critics. In “CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons,” she examined the “black sites” run by the United States in secret international locations. Priest’s editors made the decision not to disclose the names of Eastern European countries that held U.S.-run secret prisons “at the request of senior U.S. officials. They argued that the disclosure might disrupt counterterrorism efforts in those countries and elsewhere and could make them targets of possible terrorist retaliation.”
“I’d say that the reason the issue (of rendition) seemed to arise in the public consciousness in 2005 was primarily due to Dana Priest’s revelations about the secret prison network in Eastern Europe,” says Whitlock. “It was one thing to read about rendition cases in faraway Third World nations such as Egypt and Afghanistan, but another in the European Union.”
The story was criticized by those who felt that the Post had buckled to government pressure. It triggered even more criticism from members of the CIA and supporters of the Bush administration who claimed it had endangered U.S. counterterrorism missions. Conservative pundit Bill Bennett chastised Priest on his morning radio show when he expressed disbelief at the praise she had received. What she did, said Bennett, was “worthy of jail.”
In an interview with The Quill, Priest responded to Bennett’s remarks. “It’s one thing to criticize,” she said, “but he decided to call me a traitor. He doesn’t know my motives or me, and he continued to say things that were incorrect about the law.” She went on to clarify that it was not a crime to publish classified information, not including a few specific exceptions.
Priest explained that the use of unnamed sources in these cases involved a delicate balancing act. “As a paper we want to tell readers as much as possible about our sources,” Priest said, “but then if we go too far, will that point to a pool of people?” “In hindsight, I think critics protested too much and were off base in their claims that revelations about black sites and the rendition program would harm national security,” says Whitlock. “To my knowledge, none of these critics has been able to document any evidence of this.”
After Priest’s story appeared, the CIA polygraphed Mary McCarthy, a CIA officer in the inspector general’s office, to investigate whether she had leaked classified information about U.S. black sites. Although both McCarthy and the Washington Post denied that she provided the information, the CIA fired her, never explicitly stating that she was let go because of her alleged involvement in Priest’s story.
It was not until late 2005 that the issue of the United States’ use of extraordinary rendition and secret prisons came to the attention of the larger American public. Many prisoners of the program had been in custody for several years at that point, with little questioning of the process that brought them there or their treatment once in the facilities. However, the government’s handling of the issue and with the press that attempted to cover it is not unique. Issues such as abuse in Guantanamo and the use of waterboarding, among others, stood as warning signs for the Bush administration’s human rights abuses and careless policies.
As is seen in the long and difficult struggle to bring the issue of rendition into the public attention, much of the job in reporting these topics effectively is waiting for the correct timing. When rendition was first covered in early 2002, perhaps there were more forces working against the journalists attempting to uncover the stories and more working toward supporting the “new paradigm” touted by the Bush Administration. For journalists like Finn, Whitlock and Priest, much of the impact of their reporting and writing came years after they first realized that the government might be involved in questionable decisions. The slowest and most frustrating part of reporting on rendition, it appears, has been waiting for the reaction to arrive
Relevant Reading and Resources
Interviews: Craig Whitlock, the Washington Post
Articles: Hoke, Wendy A. “Ten: Quill Poses 10 Questions to People With Some of the Coolest Jobs in Journalism.” The Quill, October 10, 2006.
Chandrasekaran, Rajiv and Finn, Peter. “U.S. Behind Secret Transfer of Terror Suspects.” The Washington Post, March 11, 2002.
Whitlock, Craig. “New Swedish Documents Illuminate CIA Action; Probe Finds ‘Rendition’ Of Terror Suspects Illegal.” The Washington Post, May 21, 2005.
Mayer, Jane. “Outsourcing Torture.” The New Yorker, February 14 and 21, 2005.
Whitlock, Craig. “A Secret Deportation of Terror Suspects; 2 Men Reportedly Tortured in Egypt.” The Washington Post, July 25, 2004.
Priest, Dana. “CIA’s Assurances on Transferred Suspects Doubted.” The Washington Post, March 17, 2005.
Whitlock, Craig. “Europeans Investigate CIA Role in Abductions; Suspects Possibly Taken To Nations That Torture.” The Washington Post, March 13, 2005
Priest, Dana. “CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons.” The Washington Post, November 2, 2005.
Finn, Peter. “Europeans Tossing Terror Suspects Out the Door.” The Washington Post, January 29, 2002.
Priest, Dana. “Wrongful Imprisonment: Anatomy of a CIA Mistake.” The Washington Post, December 4, 2005.
Priest, Dana and Gellman, Barton. “U.S. Decries Abuse but Defends Interrogations; ‘Stress and Duress’ Tactics Used on Terrorism Suspects Held in Secret Overseas Facilities.” The Washington Post, December 26, 2002.
Other Sources: Congressional Testimony: Impact of Extraordinary Rendition on Transatlantic Relations. April 17, 2007
Presidential Decision Directive 39: http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/pdd39.htm
Media Matters for America: http://mediamatters.org/items/200604180009
Use of European Countries by the CIA For the transport and Illegal detention of Prisoners http://www.statewatch.org/cia/documents.htm
