Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Dec 28 2002 (IPS) — As Washington’s anti-terrorist campaign rolls into 2003, it appears increasingly clear that the administration of President George W. Bush has decided to ignore both the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war and the most basic tenets of international law against torture.

>From the continued incarceration without hearing or trial of alleged senior Taliban and al-Qaeda prisoners at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to reports that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is using controversial interrogation techniques and transferring prisoners to foreign nations where torture is routine, the image of the United States as committed to rule of law and human rights is suffering a serious beating.

The latest report, published in the Washington Post on Thursday, undermines years of solemn denunciations by successive U.S. administrations of the practice of torture by foreign governments. It was based on interviews of 10 anonymous “U.S. national security officials – including several people who witnessed the handling of prisoners”.

For years, top U.S. officials have insisted that torture, especially the infliction of physical pain, not only violates U.S. and international law, but that it is also often counter-productive in gathering reliable intelligence.

Indeed, in the mid-1980s, the CIA revised its standard training manual provided to Latin American colleagues to discourage the use of force or torture as a means to gain information because it not only lowers “the moral calibre of the (security) organisation and corrupts those that rely on it as the quick and easy way out”, but also “yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say what he thinks the interrogator wants to hear”.

But it now appears that the United States is facilitating the use of torture by transferring prisoners to foreign intelligence services known for using torture precisely in order to extract information.

The Post account gives new meaning to Secretary of State Colin Powell’s statement after meeting the Egyptian foreign minister here two weeks after the Sep. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and the Pentagon that Egypt has “had to deal with acts of terrorism in recent years” and “we have much to learn from them and there is much we can do together”.

Egypt’s intelligence services, along with those of Jordan, Morocco, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and other countries that are ritually denounced in each year’s U.S. State Department Human Rights Country Reports for practising torture, are a favoured destination for uncooperative prisoners held by the CIA, according to the Post report.

Moreover, the CIA, while barred from participating or being physically present “in the room” during such routine tortures as beatings on the soles of the feet and prolonged and contorted suspensions from ropes, are permitted to witness the interrogations in Saudi Arabia, for example. In other countries, it provides a list of questions and relies on the host agencies to provide the answers.

“They get much better information than we ever could,” one senior official told IPS earlier this year, about an al-Qaeda suspect transferred to Egypt for interrogation.

Sources cited by the Post estimated that the number of such “extraordinary renditions” to third countries in the anti-terrorist campaign numbered less than 100, although several thousand other al-Qaeda suspects of interest to U.S. intelligence have been arrested in or deported to their home countries for interrogation.

The administration, including the CIA itself, would neither confirm nor deny the Post report.

In a letter sent Thursday night, New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW), citing U.S. and international laws forbidding the use of torture or the transfer of foreign nationals to jurisdictions where they might be tortured, called on Bush to issue a statement that “it is contrary to U.S. policy to use or facilitate torture in any circumstances”.

Characterising the Post report as “extraordinarily serious”, HRW also urged the president to promptly order an investigation of the article. Amnesty International USA also said it was “deeply concerned”.

“Torture is always prohibited under any circumstances,” said Kenneth Roth, HRW’s executive director. “U.S. officials who take part in torture, authorise it, or even close their eyes to it, can be prosecuted anywhere in the world” under international law.

The White House failed to respond to requests for comment.

Article 3 of the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which has been ratified by the United States, expressly forbids sending a person to another state “where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture”.

The Post account also reported that prisoners held in secret CIA interrogation centres at Bagram air base in Afghanistan and at the U.S. base at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean are subject to sleep and sensory deprivation, as well as “stress and duress” interrogation techniques, such as “standing and kneeling for hours”, and “being held in awkward, painful positions”.

Such methods of “physical pressure” were used for years by Israeli security forces, which said they were necessary to stop “terror attacks”. But in 1997, the U.N. committee against torture ruled that these methods were also banned under the U.N. Convention, and, in a landmark 1999 ruling, Israel’s High Court agreed.

Such practices virtually ceased in Israel as a result of that ruling, only to begin again after the outbreak of the al-Aqsa intifada in September 2000.

In its 1985 manual, the CIA also appeared to repudiate such physical and mental pressure techniques as inhumane and ineffective compared to exclusively psychological techniques.

The 1985 manual was ostensibly designed to correct a 1983 manual that had recommended that interrogators force subjects into rigid positions “for long periods of time” so that “the immediate source of pain is not the interrogator but the subject himself”.

But it now appears that the CIA is using precisely those practices on many of its prisoners. If that fails to gain the desired cooperation, the subjects are then “rendered” to the intelligence services of their home countries or third countries that use more traditional forms of torture to elicit information.

This appears to be have been what Cofer Black, then head of the CIA Counter-terrorist Centre, was referring to when he told Congressional intelligence committees in September that the agency had adopted new forms of “operational flexibility”.

“This is a very highly classified area,” he said, “but I have to say that all you need to know (is): There was a before 9/11, and there was an after 9/11. After 9/11, the gloves come off.”