J
Joe S.
Guest
QUOTE
The Bush Era's Dark Legacy of Torture
By Liliana Segura, AlterNet
Posted on October 27, 2007, Printed on October 28, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/66270/
There's a scene in the political drama Rendition where Peter Sarsgaard --
playing a well-meaning but ultimately cowardly senior aid to a powerful
senator -- unsuccessfully approaches the icy head of the CIA's
counterterrorism unit (Meryl Streep) about the case of Anwar El-Ibrahimi, an
Egyptian immigrant with an American wife and child who has been kidnapped by
hooded CIA operatives at Chicago's O'Hare Airport on erroneous suspicions of
terrorist ties and sent to be tortured in an unidentified North African
country (presumably Egypt). Put off by her arrogance and frustrated by her
rebuff, Sarsgaard's character says in a stern up-close whisper, "Perhaps I
should have a copy of the Constitution delivered to your office."
Streep answers archly: "What are you taking issue with?" she hisses. "The
disappearance of a particular man? Or a national security policy?"
To anyone opposed to the government practice of snatching people off the
street, erasing any record of their whereabouts, flying them off to a black
hole in some human rights-violating netherworld, and subjecting them to
sadistic torture techniques in the name of a "war on terror," the answer is
painfully obvious. But in our enduringly surreal political era, the question
cuts to the heart of the actual debates that are currently playing out on
Capitol Hill.
The day before the national premier of Rendition, amid no fanfare, a joint
hearing was held by the House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs committees on
the case of Canadian citizen Maher Arar, the software engineer who was
famously detained at JFK Airport in 2002 and covertly flown to his native
Syria, where, for ten months, he was physically and mentally tortured -- in
a U.S. operation inside a nation the administration labels "terrorist."
Eventually, Arar was sent home to an apology and compensation from the
Canadian -- not U.S. -- government. Despite the fact that it was the United
States that sent him to face such a nightmare, four years later the Bush
administration has yet to apologize to Mr. Arar -- or even acknowledge his
ordeal. In fact, despite an independent Canadian investigation that last
fall cleared him of anything remotely resembling criminal activity (In 2004,
the same year President Bush was named "Person of the Year" by Time
magazine, Arar was named Time Canada's "newsmaker of the year"), Arar
remains on the United States terrorist watch list and was thus unable to
travel to Washington to testify at the hearing on his own case. Instead, he
delivered his words in front of a camera from Ottawa, his testimony
delivered to the Congress courtesy of satellite hookup.
It was not the first time the Congress has discussed extraordinary
rendition -- or Arar's case, for that matter. The case achieved notoriety
years ago, and YouTube contains multiple clips of a very angry Sen. Patrick
Leahy laying into former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales this past winter
about the torture of Maher Arar.
"We knew damn well if he went to Canada he wouldn't be tortured," the
Vermont senator boomed. "He'd be held and he'd be investigated. We also knew
damn well if he went to Syria he'd be tortured. And it's beneath the dignity
of this country ... to send somebody to another country to be tortured. You
know and I know that this has happened a number of times the past five years
by this country."
There was no such drama at this hearing; in part because there was no
administration official to grill. But there were plenty of theatrics, mostly
from the Republican side. Pausing only to offer their personal -- not
official -- apologies to Mr. Arar for the "tragic mistake" that led to his
kidnap and torture, defenders of extraordinary rendition did everything they
could to spin and promote the program as an indispensable tool in the War on
Terror.
Leading the charge was Dana Rohrabacher, the California Republican, who
opened with a smirk and a nod at what must be his imagined collusion between
Hollywood and Congress. "Let us note that this is an opportune moment to be
having a hearing on the issue of rendition," he said, "because it just
happens to be the subject of a movie that is about to come out. What a
coincidence!" Casting extraordinary rendition as a government program like
Medicare only less problematic -- "hundreds of thousands of people die
because of human error in the Medicare system" -- Rohrabacher repeatedly
invoked Sept. 11 to remind people that, in a time of war, "there's no such
thing as perfection." "This was one year after the most brutal and bloody
foreign attack on American soil in the history of our country," he said
about Arar's ordeal, which took began on Sept. 26, 2002." More importantly,
"rendition is used to fight our war against radicals who want to end our way
of life." (Rohrabacher is uniquely poised to make such accusations, having
traveled to Afghanistan in the 1980s to fight alongside the Mujahadeen
against the Soviets -- on the very same side as Bin Laden.)
Discussions of extraordinary rendition are too often sanitized -- and this
hearing was no exception. What actually happens to a prisoner was memorably
described by Jane Mayer's New Yorker piece, "Outsourcing Torture" in
February of 2005, in which she described the rendition of two Egyptian men
following Sept. 11:
"On December 18, 2001, at Stockholm's Bromma Airport, a half-dozen hooded
security officials ushered two Egyptian asylum seekers, Muhammad Zery and
Ahme Agiza, into an empty office. They cut off the Egyptians' clothes with
scissors, forcibly administered sedatives by suppository, swaddled them in
diapers, and dressed them in orange jumpsuits ... the suspects were
blindfolded, placed in handcuffs and leg irons according to a declassified
Swedish government report, the men were then flown to Cairo on a
U.S.-registered Gulfstream V jet."
The lawmakers on Capitol Hill may consider themselves in too genteel a
setting to talk so bluntly. But, while his testimony was not graphic, Maher
Arar's refusal to comply with the "bad apples" narrative -- one that would
render his ordeal an unfortunate exception to an otherwise legitimate
program -- his story is a powerful counter-narrative against the lies and
excesses of the "war on terror." "An error in a program does not mean that
that program in and of itself is a wrong program," Rohrabacher argued. Such
claims have become staples in defending the most repressive policies of the
administration's war, from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo to Blackwater. "The most
fundamental question that has not been answered yet is why did the U.S.
government decide to send me to Syria and not to Canada," he told the
legislators. "I would believe that this was an innocent mistake if it
weren't happening to others ... Inflicting people with torture under any
circumstances is wrong."
This is the message the Bush administration -- and much of Congress -- has
been continually unwilling to hear. It is too easy to label the Arar case a
"tragic mistake," as though only innocent people have the right not to be
tortured. While the hearing on Capitol Hill did something to address the
repugnance of an "extrajudicial" (read: illegal) program like extraordinary
rendition, there was little suggestion that the program is under threat, or
anything vaguely resembling an investigation. In fact, there was an air of
helplessness to the proceedings when it came to the question of how to
proceed. ("Now that we will have a new attorney general, maybe there's
hope.") "This is not the end of the examination into what happened to Maher
Arar," co-chairman Bill Delahunt concluded. But the Arar case is only the
tip of the iceberg.
Contrary to common perception, extraordinary rendition was not born under
Bush but under the Clinton administration in the 1990s, when it gave
approval to the CIA to send "terror" suspects to be interrogated in Egypt.
In the wake of Sept. 11, the program was dramatically escalated by the Bush
administration; in the words of former CIA counterterrorism chief J. Cofer
Black, who once oversaw the rendition program, "All you need to know: there
was a before 9/11 and there was an after 9/11. After 9/11 the gloves come
off." (Or as Rohrabacher said at the hearing, "When you are at war with
people who are willing to slaughter those numbers of people, that does
affect the way you do business.")
In February of this year, the European Parliament released a report that
documented some 1,245 secret CIA flights that passed through European
airspace between 2001 and 2005, many to countries with dismal human rights
records. How many of those planes carried prisoners is hard to know, but the
number of people who appear to have been tortured under the banner of the
American flag over the past six years is disturbingly high. There's the
explosive case of Egyptian cleric Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr ("Abu Omar") who
was kidnapped in Milan and sent to Egypt with the complicity of Italian
officials. (This past February, an Italian judge indicted 25 suspected CIA
operatives for their role in his abduction.) There's the case of Binyam
Mohamed, kidnapped in a Karachi airport and subjected to brutal torture in
Morocco. There is Khalid A-Masri, a Kuwaiti living in Germany who was
kidnapped in Macedonia and brutally interrogated for five months. The list
goes on.
One of the unnerving strengths of Rendition, the film, is what it captures
about the callousness and missionary zeal of leaders who believe their own
rhetoric. When Dana Rohrabacher suggested that, as a father of two, Arar
might be grateful for extraordinary rendition, given that it has prevented
terrorist attacks that might hurt them, he sounds a lot like Meryl Streep
when she says that 7,000 people in London are alive thanks to the program,
among them, her grandchildren. The difference: an actress of her caliber
delivers the line with a cold precision that gives it a slightly terrifying
credibility -- credibility that is utterly lacking when it flows from the
lips of elected representatives. Particularly the president. "You can't
expect me and people in the government to do what we need to do to protect
you and your family if we don't gave the tools that we think are necessary
to do so," a petulant George W. Bush told Matt Lauer when he confronted him
on the CIA's secret prisons last fall. Anyway, he said, "whatever we have
done is legal."
Many have lauded the making of Rendition as a generally positive
development -- dissent, Hollywood style -- but its happy ending, where a
noble CIA agent exposes the injustice of one judicial miscarriage in
isolation of a state-sanctioned program of kidnapping and torture, stands in
jarring contrast to the case of Maher Arar, whose attempts to clear his name
have been blocked at every turn by the Bush administration. For him, "the
abuse is ongoing." "They have not allowed me to pursue justice in courts,"
he says. "... I have not been able to establish trust in the system."
At one point in Rendition, Jake Gyllenhaal's character, the CIA operative
overseeing his first torture of a rendered prisoner, quotes Shakespeare's
Merchant of Venice to question the validity of torture as an interrogation
technique: "I fear you speak upon the rack, where men enforced do speak
anything." U.S. lawmakers do not labor in a foreign dungeon, nor is their
speech -- or silence -- coerced through simulated drowning. With every
torture taxi that takes off, the U.S. Constitution and the nation's
reputation are extraordinarily rendered along with the victims of a U.S.
program that should have been something out of Hollywood fiction and not
official policy.
Liliana Segura is a freelance writer living in New York.
The Bush Era's Dark Legacy of Torture
By Liliana Segura, AlterNet
Posted on October 27, 2007, Printed on October 28, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/66270/
There's a scene in the political drama Rendition where Peter Sarsgaard --
playing a well-meaning but ultimately cowardly senior aid to a powerful
senator -- unsuccessfully approaches the icy head of the CIA's
counterterrorism unit (Meryl Streep) about the case of Anwar El-Ibrahimi, an
Egyptian immigrant with an American wife and child who has been kidnapped by
hooded CIA operatives at Chicago's O'Hare Airport on erroneous suspicions of
terrorist ties and sent to be tortured in an unidentified North African
country (presumably Egypt). Put off by her arrogance and frustrated by her
rebuff, Sarsgaard's character says in a stern up-close whisper, "Perhaps I
should have a copy of the Constitution delivered to your office."
Streep answers archly: "What are you taking issue with?" she hisses. "The
disappearance of a particular man? Or a national security policy?"
To anyone opposed to the government practice of snatching people off the
street, erasing any record of their whereabouts, flying them off to a black
hole in some human rights-violating netherworld, and subjecting them to
sadistic torture techniques in the name of a "war on terror," the answer is
painfully obvious. But in our enduringly surreal political era, the question
cuts to the heart of the actual debates that are currently playing out on
Capitol Hill.
The day before the national premier of Rendition, amid no fanfare, a joint
hearing was held by the House Judiciary and Foreign Affairs committees on
the case of Canadian citizen Maher Arar, the software engineer who was
famously detained at JFK Airport in 2002 and covertly flown to his native
Syria, where, for ten months, he was physically and mentally tortured -- in
a U.S. operation inside a nation the administration labels "terrorist."
Eventually, Arar was sent home to an apology and compensation from the
Canadian -- not U.S. -- government. Despite the fact that it was the United
States that sent him to face such a nightmare, four years later the Bush
administration has yet to apologize to Mr. Arar -- or even acknowledge his
ordeal. In fact, despite an independent Canadian investigation that last
fall cleared him of anything remotely resembling criminal activity (In 2004,
the same year President Bush was named "Person of the Year" by Time
magazine, Arar was named Time Canada's "newsmaker of the year"), Arar
remains on the United States terrorist watch list and was thus unable to
travel to Washington to testify at the hearing on his own case. Instead, he
delivered his words in front of a camera from Ottawa, his testimony
delivered to the Congress courtesy of satellite hookup.
It was not the first time the Congress has discussed extraordinary
rendition -- or Arar's case, for that matter. The case achieved notoriety
years ago, and YouTube contains multiple clips of a very angry Sen. Patrick
Leahy laying into former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales this past winter
about the torture of Maher Arar.
"We knew damn well if he went to Canada he wouldn't be tortured," the
Vermont senator boomed. "He'd be held and he'd be investigated. We also knew
damn well if he went to Syria he'd be tortured. And it's beneath the dignity
of this country ... to send somebody to another country to be tortured. You
know and I know that this has happened a number of times the past five years
by this country."
There was no such drama at this hearing; in part because there was no
administration official to grill. But there were plenty of theatrics, mostly
from the Republican side. Pausing only to offer their personal -- not
official -- apologies to Mr. Arar for the "tragic mistake" that led to his
kidnap and torture, defenders of extraordinary rendition did everything they
could to spin and promote the program as an indispensable tool in the War on
Terror.
Leading the charge was Dana Rohrabacher, the California Republican, who
opened with a smirk and a nod at what must be his imagined collusion between
Hollywood and Congress. "Let us note that this is an opportune moment to be
having a hearing on the issue of rendition," he said, "because it just
happens to be the subject of a movie that is about to come out. What a
coincidence!" Casting extraordinary rendition as a government program like
Medicare only less problematic -- "hundreds of thousands of people die
because of human error in the Medicare system" -- Rohrabacher repeatedly
invoked Sept. 11 to remind people that, in a time of war, "there's no such
thing as perfection." "This was one year after the most brutal and bloody
foreign attack on American soil in the history of our country," he said
about Arar's ordeal, which took began on Sept. 26, 2002." More importantly,
"rendition is used to fight our war against radicals who want to end our way
of life." (Rohrabacher is uniquely poised to make such accusations, having
traveled to Afghanistan in the 1980s to fight alongside the Mujahadeen
against the Soviets -- on the very same side as Bin Laden.)
Discussions of extraordinary rendition are too often sanitized -- and this
hearing was no exception. What actually happens to a prisoner was memorably
described by Jane Mayer's New Yorker piece, "Outsourcing Torture" in
February of 2005, in which she described the rendition of two Egyptian men
following Sept. 11:
"On December 18, 2001, at Stockholm's Bromma Airport, a half-dozen hooded
security officials ushered two Egyptian asylum seekers, Muhammad Zery and
Ahme Agiza, into an empty office. They cut off the Egyptians' clothes with
scissors, forcibly administered sedatives by suppository, swaddled them in
diapers, and dressed them in orange jumpsuits ... the suspects were
blindfolded, placed in handcuffs and leg irons according to a declassified
Swedish government report, the men were then flown to Cairo on a
U.S.-registered Gulfstream V jet."
The lawmakers on Capitol Hill may consider themselves in too genteel a
setting to talk so bluntly. But, while his testimony was not graphic, Maher
Arar's refusal to comply with the "bad apples" narrative -- one that would
render his ordeal an unfortunate exception to an otherwise legitimate
program -- his story is a powerful counter-narrative against the lies and
excesses of the "war on terror." "An error in a program does not mean that
that program in and of itself is a wrong program," Rohrabacher argued. Such
claims have become staples in defending the most repressive policies of the
administration's war, from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo to Blackwater. "The most
fundamental question that has not been answered yet is why did the U.S.
government decide to send me to Syria and not to Canada," he told the
legislators. "I would believe that this was an innocent mistake if it
weren't happening to others ... Inflicting people with torture under any
circumstances is wrong."
This is the message the Bush administration -- and much of Congress -- has
been continually unwilling to hear. It is too easy to label the Arar case a
"tragic mistake," as though only innocent people have the right not to be
tortured. While the hearing on Capitol Hill did something to address the
repugnance of an "extrajudicial" (read: illegal) program like extraordinary
rendition, there was little suggestion that the program is under threat, or
anything vaguely resembling an investigation. In fact, there was an air of
helplessness to the proceedings when it came to the question of how to
proceed. ("Now that we will have a new attorney general, maybe there's
hope.") "This is not the end of the examination into what happened to Maher
Arar," co-chairman Bill Delahunt concluded. But the Arar case is only the
tip of the iceberg.
Contrary to common perception, extraordinary rendition was not born under
Bush but under the Clinton administration in the 1990s, when it gave
approval to the CIA to send "terror" suspects to be interrogated in Egypt.
In the wake of Sept. 11, the program was dramatically escalated by the Bush
administration; in the words of former CIA counterterrorism chief J. Cofer
Black, who once oversaw the rendition program, "All you need to know: there
was a before 9/11 and there was an after 9/11. After 9/11 the gloves come
off." (Or as Rohrabacher said at the hearing, "When you are at war with
people who are willing to slaughter those numbers of people, that does
affect the way you do business.")
In February of this year, the European Parliament released a report that
documented some 1,245 secret CIA flights that passed through European
airspace between 2001 and 2005, many to countries with dismal human rights
records. How many of those planes carried prisoners is hard to know, but the
number of people who appear to have been tortured under the banner of the
American flag over the past six years is disturbingly high. There's the
explosive case of Egyptian cleric Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr ("Abu Omar") who
was kidnapped in Milan and sent to Egypt with the complicity of Italian
officials. (This past February, an Italian judge indicted 25 suspected CIA
operatives for their role in his abduction.) There's the case of Binyam
Mohamed, kidnapped in a Karachi airport and subjected to brutal torture in
Morocco. There is Khalid A-Masri, a Kuwaiti living in Germany who was
kidnapped in Macedonia and brutally interrogated for five months. The list
goes on.
One of the unnerving strengths of Rendition, the film, is what it captures
about the callousness and missionary zeal of leaders who believe their own
rhetoric. When Dana Rohrabacher suggested that, as a father of two, Arar
might be grateful for extraordinary rendition, given that it has prevented
terrorist attacks that might hurt them, he sounds a lot like Meryl Streep
when she says that 7,000 people in London are alive thanks to the program,
among them, her grandchildren. The difference: an actress of her caliber
delivers the line with a cold precision that gives it a slightly terrifying
credibility -- credibility that is utterly lacking when it flows from the
lips of elected representatives. Particularly the president. "You can't
expect me and people in the government to do what we need to do to protect
you and your family if we don't gave the tools that we think are necessary
to do so," a petulant George W. Bush told Matt Lauer when he confronted him
on the CIA's secret prisons last fall. Anyway, he said, "whatever we have
done is legal."
Many have lauded the making of Rendition as a generally positive
development -- dissent, Hollywood style -- but its happy ending, where a
noble CIA agent exposes the injustice of one judicial miscarriage in
isolation of a state-sanctioned program of kidnapping and torture, stands in
jarring contrast to the case of Maher Arar, whose attempts to clear his name
have been blocked at every turn by the Bush administration. For him, "the
abuse is ongoing." "They have not allowed me to pursue justice in courts,"
he says. "... I have not been able to establish trust in the system."
At one point in Rendition, Jake Gyllenhaal's character, the CIA operative
overseeing his first torture of a rendered prisoner, quotes Shakespeare's
Merchant of Venice to question the validity of torture as an interrogation
technique: "I fear you speak upon the rack, where men enforced do speak
anything." U.S. lawmakers do not labor in a foreign dungeon, nor is their
speech -- or silence -- coerced through simulated drowning. With every
torture taxi that takes off, the U.S. Constitution and the nation's
reputation are extraordinarily rendered along with the victims of a U.S.
program that should have been something out of Hollywood fiction and not
official policy.
Liliana Segura is a freelance writer living in New York.
