Extraordinary Rendition Exposed Again

A federal judge ordered the Canadian government to make public some of the blacked out sections of the Arar Commission report on the extraordinary rendition of the Syrian-born Canadian citizen Maher Arar, who had been arrested while transiting in New York in 2002, en route home to Canada. Arar was flown to Syria by the CIA where he was imprisoned for a year and reportedly tortured. He was released without ever being charged with a crime.

Mr. Arar commenced legal actions both in Canada and the USA. A Canadian Commission of Inquiry-headed by Mr. Justice Dennis O'Connor- cleared him. The Canadian government formally apologized and offered Mr. Arar monetary compensation.

The words censored in the name of national security and finally revealed by court order on August 9, show that the Canadian security agency knew that in passing on unverified information- obtained by torture and later recanted- about Arar, it was collaborating with the CIA in the arrest, imprisonment and torture of one of its own citizens, in clear violation of international law and of Canada's own human rights law.

Canadian security officials knew as early as October 2002 that the CIA and the FBI had been rendering suspects to countries willing to act as agents of torture. They also knew that they were feeding the CIA highly suspect information about Arar obtained under torture from another Syrian-Canadian-Ahmad Abou El Maati-imprisoned in Syria.

The information revealed earlier this month show that on October 10, 2002 , Mr. Hooper, a senior Canadian security official, stated in a memorandum: "I think the U.S. would like to get Arar to Jordan where they can have their way with him." Mr. Arar's whereabouts at the time were unknown; he was in fact flown from the US to Jordan and from there taken to Syria where he was imprisoned.

The Canadian Conservative government fought and lost a long legal battle to keep secret its knowledge about and deliberate involvement in the CIA sponsored extraordinary rendition program.

Extraordinary rendition has now been extensively documented. A Human Rights Watch Report prepared in October 2004, documented cases of persons who "disappeared" while in US custody after being apprehended in places like Pakistan , Indonesia, Thailand , and Morocco.

In Outsourcing Torture, Jane Mayer (New Yorker, Feb 14,05) described cases in which "Terrorism suspects in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East have often been abducted by hooded or masked American agents," then forced into a plane and transported to foreign locations where "rendered suspects often vanish."

Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark, quoting US and UK military sources, and reporting from Afghanistan write that the number of "ghost detainees" is in excess of 10,000. They document harrowing cases of people abducted and rendered to third countries where they allegedly endured torture. "In scores more cases," they wrote, "people have simply disappeared." (Guardian, Mar 19,05)

The arbitrariness of extraordinary rendition was described by Stephen Grey, author of Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program, who told Democracy Now that the program was used "to take people off the streets that were considered a threat and were sent to countries where they had no connection at all. I mean, Maher Arar... was a Canadian citizen, was sent to Syria. We've got an Egyptian citizen sent to Libya. We've got Ethiopian citizens sent to Morocco ..." (Oct 19, 2006)

American military investigations have confirmed that the CIA had routinely brought to various military prisons in Iraq persons without accounting for their identity or the reason for their detention; these detainees came to be known as "ghost detainees".

Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba stated in his report about the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison: " On at least one occasion, the 320th MP Battalion at Abu Ghraib held a handful of "ghost detainees" [for The CIA] that they moved around within the facility to hide them from a visiting International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) survey team. This maneuver was deceptive, contrary to Army Doctrine, and in violation of international law."

The extraordinary rendition program also violates national US legislation passed by Congress in 1998 forbidding the "involuntary return of any person to a country in which there are substantial grounds for believing the person would be in danger of being subjected to torture.." Furthermore, under US law, a "grave breach" of The Geneva Convention ban on torture is a federal crime.

Under fire and in the face of growing public condemnation of the extraordinary rendition program, Bush administration officials confirmed to the New York Times (March 6,05) the existence of the rendition program and the mistreatment. "This," observed the editors of the NYT, "confirmed that the Bush administration has been outsourcing torture and intends to keep doing it." Even former CIA inspector Frederick Hitz condemned the practice for its illegality and its immorality. (Democracy Now, Feb 2, 2007 )

The State Department's own lawyer, William Taft IV, expressed alarm at the criminality of the practice of torture and the Bush administration's attempt to justify it.. In a lengthy legal opinion, which he sent to the Justice Department on January 11, 2002, and copied to the then White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales,. he reportedly warned the Justice Department and the White House lawyers that disregarding the Geneva Conventions was "untenable." He urged them to warm President Bush that he would "be seen as a war criminal by the rest of the world." (New Yorker, Feb 14, 2005)

Prof. Adel Safty's  latest book is Leadership and Democracy, New York.