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Jeffrey St. Clair exposes Bush's covert policy of "renditions" Torture Air, Inc. May 13, 2005 | Page 5
JEFFREY ST. CLAIR is coeditor of the muckraking magazine and Web Site CounterPunch, author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature; and co-author with Alexander Cockburn of A Dime's Worth of Difference. His new book is Grand Theft Pentagon, to be published this summer. This article, which was first published on the CounterPunch Web site, is excerpted from the forthcoming book. With permission, we reprint it here.
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It has also frequently landed at Dulles International, outside Washington, D.C., and enjoys clearance to land at U.S. military air bases in Scotland, Cyprus and Frankfurt, Germany. Observers around the world have noticed men in hoods and chains being taken on and off the jet.
The plane is owned by a company called Bayard Marketing, based in Portland, Ore. According to FAA records, Bayard's lone corporate officer is a man called Leonard T. Bayard. There is no contact information available for Bayard. Indeed, there's no public record of Bayard at all. No residential address. No telephone numbers. Nothing.
In fact, Bayard Marketing is a dummy corporation, and Leonard Bayard is a false identity. They were both created by the CIA to conceal an operation launched after the attacks of September 11, 2001 to kidnap suspected terrorists and transport them to foreign governments where they could be interrogated using methods outlawed in the United States--that is, tortured and sometimes killed.
Bayard Marketing is one of five or six different front companies the CIA has used to hide its role in the clandestine "rendition" (the term of art for this process) of suspected terrorists. In this case, the CIA's desire to keep the program a secret doesn't spring from a need to protect it from al-Qaeda or other hostile forces, but from public exposure. The rendition of captives for the purpose of torture violates international and U.S. law.
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A notorious example: On September 26, 2002, Maher Arar, a Canadian engineer born in Syria was arrested by U.S. intelligence officials at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York as he was changing planes. Arar and his family were returning home to Canada from a vacation in Tunisia. Arar was held in a federal cell for 13 days while he was interrogated about a man U.S. intelligence believed was linked to al-Qaeda. Arar told his captors that he had never met the man in question, although he had worked with his brother on a construction project.
Then one night, two plainclothes officers came for Arar, placed a hood over his head, secured his hands with plastic cuffs and shackled his feet in leg irons. He was taken from the federal jail to the airport, where he was placed on the Gulfstream V jet. The plane flew to Washington, D.C., then to Portland, Maine. It stopped once in Rome, then landed in Amman, Jordan. During the flight, Arar recalls that he heard the pilots and crew referring to themselves as members of the "Special Removal Unit."
Arar was held in a cell in Amman for 10 hours. He pleaded with his captors to release him or allow him to talk with a lawyer. They refused. He was placed in a van and driven across the border into Syria, where he was handed over to a secret police unit. He was taken to a dark underground cell, and immediately, his interrogators began to beat him with battery cables. The beatings went on, day after day.
A year later, Arar was released by the Syrians at the behest of the Canadian government. He was never charged with a crime. His detention, interrogation and torture had been ordered by the CIA. He has received no apology. Arar is one of at least 150 people the CIA has captured and taken to other countries in a covert program known as "extraordinary rendition."
While Arar ended up in Syria, other detainees have stayed in Jordan, where the CIA runs a "ghost prison" for the detention, interrogation and torture of some of the most senior members of al-Qaeda captured by U.S. forces over the last three years. According to an article in the Israeli daily Ha'aretz, 11 top al-Qaeda operatives have been sent to the al-Jafr prison in Jordan's southern desert, where they have been interrogated and tortured. Among those being held in Jordan are Abu Zubaydah, Riduan Isamuddin and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
Khalid Sheik Mohammed, a suspected planner of the 9/11 attacks, was captured in Pakistan in March 2003. Mohammed was reportedly taken to a U.S. base in Afghanistan for his initial interrogation and then was sent to the prison in Jordan, where he was subjected to a range of tortures--including the infamous "water-boarding" technique, where the victim is bound tightly with ropes to a piece of plywood and then dunked in ice cold water until he nearly drowns.
The water-boarding method was one of several varieties of torture approved by President Bush in an executive order issued in February 2002. Bush's order, which exempted the CIA from compliance with the rules of the Geneva Conventions, was extended seven months later by an August 2002 memorandum signed by Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee.
The Bybee Memo (largely written by his deputy John Yoo) called for the continuation of CIA interrogation methods, including rendition, and blessed as legal methods of physical and psychological coercion that inflicted discomfort "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death."
The prison in Jordan is only one of 24 secret detention and interrogation centers worldwide operated by the CIA. According to a report by Human Rights Watch, "at least half of these operate in total secrecy."
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The post offices are located in Arlington, Va.; Oakton and Chevy Chase, Md.; and the District of Columbia. Over the past few years, those very same post office boxes have been registered to 325 other fictitious names, as well as a company called Executive Support OFC, another CIA front.
The Bush administration hasn't tried very hard to keep its torture-by-proxy program a secret. That's because the administration's torture lawyers, such as John Yoo, former deputy to Alberto Gonzales and now a law professor at Berkeley, argue that the administration is free to breach international and domestic laws in its pursuit of suspected terrorists.
While working for the Bush administration, Yoo drafted a legal memo, which set the framework for the rendition program. He argued that the U.S. was not bound by the Geneva Accords (or U.S. prohibitions on torture) in its pursuit of al-Qaeda members or Taliban soldiers because Afghanistan was "a failed state," and therefore not subject to the protections of the anti-torture laws. The detainees were slotted into a newly created category called "illegal enemy combatants," a legal rubric which treated them as sub-humans lacking all basic human rights.
"Why is it so hard for people to understand that there is a category of behavior not covered by the legal system?" Yoo proclaimed. "Historically, there were people so bad that they were not given protection of the laws. There were no specific provisions for their trial, or imprisonment. If you were an illegal combatant, you didn't deserve the protection of the laws of war."
Of course, in the absence of a trial, who is to determine if the people detained as "illegal combatants" are either "illegal" or even "combatants"?
Even more brazenly, Yoo contends that the Bush administration is free to ignore U.S. laws against torture. "Congress doesn't have the power to tie the hands of the President in regard to torture as an interrogation technique," said Yoo. "It's the core of the Commander-in-Chief function. Congress can't prevent the president from ordering torture."
Yoo claims that if Congress has a problem with Bush flouting its laws, the solution is simple: impeachment. He also argued that the U.S. public had its shot at repudiating Bush's detention and torture program and instead endorsed it. "The issue is dying out," Yoo told the New Yorker magazine. It "has had its referendum."
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"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," Cheney said. "That's the world these folks operate in. And so it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective. We may have to work through, sort of, the dark side."
Welcome to the dark ages.
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