Rendition, Torture, and the “Values” of the U.S. Empire
August 4, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
During a press conference on August 1, Barack Obama said that in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. “did a whole lot of things that were right, but we tortured some folks.” The torture that Obama referred to was part of the Central Intelligence Agency program to capture individuals who the U.S. claimed were involved in terrorism and sending them to secret prisons in various countries around the world for “enhanced interrogation.”
This program of kidnapping (known as “extraordinary rendition”) and torture began in the 1990s under the Democrat president Bill Clinton. It took a leap under George W. Bush, who moved to openly legalize torture against prisoners. All this was completely against international law—these actions were blatant, unconscionable war crimes. But no U.S. official has ever been charged, much less convicted, for these crimes. When he first came to office in 2009, Obama made clear that he was not going to investigate, much less prosecute, those who carried out torture in the previous administration—from Bush and Dick Cheney to CIA officials and operatives. At the recent press conference, Obama said that those who carried out the torture were “working hard under enormous pressure and are patriots.” And to this day, the U.S. government refuses to even reveal the locations of the secret CIA prisons—called “black sites” because they operated completely in the dark.
A week before Obama’s “we tortured some folks” remark, a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights officially confirmed the location of one of those secret CIA torture chambers—the Eastern European country of Poland. The court ruled that Poland violated the European Convention on Human Rights by allowing two men to be transported by the CIA to a secret prison at a military base where they were tortured.
One of the two men, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi Arabian citizen, was captured in Dubai in 2002 and first taken to a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan known as the “Salt Pit.” Next he was taken to another black site in Thailand, where he was waterboarded—forced to the point of near drowning by the torturer. Then al-Nashiri was “rendered” to Poland.
According to the Open Society Justice Initiative, which represented al-Nashiri at the European human rights court, “In Poland, U.S. interrogators subjected al-Nashiri to mock executions with a power drill as he stood naked and hooded; racked a semi-automatic handgun close to his head as he sat shackled before them; held him in ‘standing stress positions’; and threatened to bring in his mother and sexually abuse her in front of him.”
The court said Poland also violated the human rights convention by allowing the CIA to transfer al-Nashiri and the other prisoner in the case, Abu Zubaydah, to the U.S. prison at Guantánamo despite the clear danger of a “flagrant denial of justice” and the threat of the death penalty.
These two are among the 136 known cases of people who were subjected to rendition, secret detention, and torture by the CIA in the Bush years—these are the victims that Obama casually referred to when he said, “We tortured some folks.” According to a report last year from the Open Society Justice Initiative, “There may be many more such individuals, but the total number will remain unknown until the United States and its partners make this information publicly available.” (Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition)
The report gives brief descriptions of what happened to each of those 136 known victims of CIA rendition and torture. One example is Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian citizen and resident of Britain who was rendered in 2002 to Morocco and then to Afghanistan: “In Morocco, his interrogators tortured him in various ways: they subjected him to regular beatings, causing multiple broken bones and occasionally until he lost consciousness; sliced his genitals; poured hot liquid onto his penis while cutting it; and threatened him with rape, electrocution, and death. He was also repeatedly drugged, subjected to incessant loud music day and night, and placed in a room with open sewage for a month at a time.”
The Open Society Justice Initiative report says that “as many as 54 foreign governments reportedly participated in these operations in various ways”—hosting the CIA prisons, helping in the torture, providing intelligence to the U.S., etc. These governments are all partners in crime. But the master criminals—those who led this whole operation—are the imperialist gangsters ruling the U.S.
In the August 1 press conference, Obama said about CIA torture, “We did some things that were contrary to our values.” We won’t, right here, go into the whole history of the U.S. that illustrates the predatory values behind this country—from its foundation on the slavery of people stolen from Africa and the genocide of Native Americans, to the outright theft of half of Mexican territory, wars of conquest and aggression around the world, and countless other crimes and atrocities.
But let’s look at the values and rationales behind the so-called “war on terror” that the U.S. launched after 9/11—which was in reality a war for greater empire. Under the doctrine of “preemptive war,” the U.S. gave itself the right to attack any country in the world or carry out assassinations and other military actions unilaterally anywhere in the world simply based on assertions that someone, some group, or some government might—in the future—do harm to U.S. interests. This has been carried out under the signboard of “protecting American lives”—but this war for empire is not about protecting the safety of the masses of people in the U.S., and certainly not about protecting the people of the world.
When Obama came to office, he announced some changes in how the U.S. operates, like officially renouncing torture and secret CIA prisons. But Obama did not end renditions, and there have been recent reports of secret U.S. prisons in Somalia and Afghanistan.
More fundamentally, Obama has continued—and even intensified in various dimensions—the brutal pursuit of U.S. imperialist interests with total disregard for international law and people’s lives. Under Obama, the U.S. has murdered hundreds of people from the sky with drones, prosecuted violent war across the globe, continued on the road heading toward planetary environmental catastrophe—while stepping up the spying on people and the whole police-state apparatus here in the belly of the imperialist beast.
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