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TechnoratiStopping the Torture Flights
In July 2002, an Ethiopian citizen named Binyam Mohamed, held by the CIA, was strapped to the seat of a nondescript plane, shackled, blindfolded, stripped and secretly flown to Morocco, where he was held for a year and a half. Moroccan security forces, not known for their sensitivity to human rights, interrogated and tortured Binyam for 18 months.
Then, in January 2004, he was moved to the "Dark Prison" in Kabul, Afghanistan, a secret "black site" facility run by the CIA, where he was again tortured. Finally, the American government transferred him to Guantanamo Bay, where he remains, held indefinitely without any effective way to challenge his detention. And Mr. Mohamed is not alone.
The ACLU filed a lawsuit on May 30th against a private aerospace company paid by the CIA to provide logistical services on the flights that secretly transported these detainees. Specifically we represent three men: Binyam, who is currently detained at Guantanamo Bay; Italian citizen Abou Elkassim Britel, who was tortured after being "rendered" to Morocco by the CIA, where he remains behind bars; and Egyptian citizen Ahmed Agiza, who was chained, shackled, drugged and flown to Egypt, where he was tortured and where he remains today.
We filed this lawsuit because the company, Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc. (a subsidiary of Boeing), abetted and profited from torture.
The New Yorker broke the story when a former Jeppesen employee quoted a senior executive on the record. "We do all of the extraordinary rendition flights -- you know, the torture flights," the source said. "Let's face it, some of these flights end up that way [and] it certainly pays well. [The CIA] spare[s] no expense. They have absolutely no worry about costs."
Mr. Mohamed and the two other plaintiffs in our lawsuit lack any meaningful way to challenge their detention or hold the government accountable for its violation of their basic human rights--and our fundamental American values. The ACLU, on the other hand, is giving them that voice, and we are fighting to stop these torture flights and our government's unlawful practice of extraordinary rendition -- the clandestine abduction of individuals who are transferred to secret prisons in countries where torture is routine.
The intelligence community has a long history of enlisting private corporations to conduct covert operations. The ultra-secret National Security Agency once had Western Union and other major telegraph companies provide a copy of every telegram to and from the United States. More recently, major phone companies caved to the Bush administration and opened up our telecommunications networks to wholesale warrantless wiretapping by the NSA.
To put it starkly, the Bush administration used our tax dollars-- with "absolutely no worry about costs"--to pay a company to facilitate the secret transfer of detainees to secret prisons for secret interrogations using methods that most Americans would find abhorrent. And if that's not troubling enough, The New York Times reported on Wednesday that intelligence experts have criticized those interrogation methods as "outmoded, amateurish and unreliable."
This disregard for basic human rights has become de rigueur in the Bush administration. We all want to protect America by preventing terrorism and punishing individuals who target civilians with violence. But at the same time, we want to protect our American values of fairness and respect for the rule of law.
Anthony D. Romero is the Executive Director of the American Civil Liberties Union, the nation's premier defender of liberty and individual freedom.
© 2007 The Huffington Post
6 Comments so far
Show AllUsually, the political pendulum would have begun swinging back before now. The computer age has brought new methods for stealing elections. These torture flights are the tip of the iceberg. The CIA should be tied in knots and rendered harmless. That's what Hunt claimed JFK was planning to do just before he was assassinated by them. It was a deathbed declaration.
disaster in the form of climate change and extinction is in the near future anyway, wars for resources to sustain the military empire just hasten the end.
Cindy Sheehan has had her revelations these past days and I've had mine. My horrible realization is that Nixon was right: the president is in fact above the law; he was just thirty years ahead of his time. Audacious power grabs coupled with an utterly somnolent American public has given the executive branch the power to do anything in their allotted time. And who knows how long 8 years will remain enough for them? We live in a dictatorship. Why aren't even movies being made about Extraordinary Rendition? People are scared. We are frightened by the authorities we've vested to protect us.
Unless the power of the executive branch is radically curbed disaster looms in our future.
"You cannot be a traitor to life, and then expect to live in a free and just society."
From How I See It
http://www.gpln.com/howiseeit.htm
I just wish to add my praise for those attorneys (ACLU and others) who take on these cases, for they are a litmus test of what America has and is becoming. It's been all but PROVEN that torture only ends in persons saying anything to stop the pain; but why this pain is being used on persons only suspected of crimes (that is, when not dragged in the way so many dolphin end up in tuna nets, so that this administration, skilled in mostly smoke and mirrors LOOKS like it's doing something to stop terror). I will never tire of saying that karma catches up with the likes of those who would treat their fellow man worse than a mosquito; but that does not preclude the need and obligation to seek justice in THIS here and now. (It is, however, the ultimate cosmic default mechanism; and it gives me a little more peace to accept that. When Buddhists from Vietnam were interviewed on 60 Minutes when the companies responsible for the Agent Orange likely giving rise to all kinds of cancers in the exposed Vietnamese population, the capacity on the part of these trespassed against to make peace with the atrocity was breathtaking. Their religion is based on the law of karma. They either presume they are paying for their own past offenses, or that it would do not good to seek vengeance, for that would only embroil them further in a cycle of never ending and potentially escalating violence. Would that the West grow some of this enlightenment from the tree of spiritual knowledge.)
"we want to protect our american values of fairness and respect for the rule of law."
"fairness," "respect," compared to what? these attributes are no longer synonymous with this nation. deceit, arrogance aggression, greed to name a few, have become so. it would be hysterically funny if it weren't so sad. it's hard to know just how much our vaunted principles have declined and or how much more aware of their selective and haphazzard application we have become. my sense is that "extraordinary rendition" is just a newfangled name for a policy which has been around, with innumerable variations, forever in our beloved "free" society. it seems clear that one of the most important functions of our government is to "catapult the propaganda" -
to keep the myth alive of our much venerated institutions. but that effort is all but unnecessary, for as with a herd of livestock on their way to slaughter, far too many americans are blindly clinging to their precious "exceptionalism," and are wholly unprepared for the inevitable blowback.