Last week, the House of Representatives considered making it legal to deport noncitizen terrorist suspects to foreign jails that torture prisoners. Fortunately, this provision in Dennis Hastert and Tom DeLay's original 9-11 Recommendations Implementation Act was ultimately pulled from the bill. Hastert spokesman John Feehery told Newsweek that the Department of Homeland Security requested the power, but after a few reporters asked questions, the White House “decided they don't want to take this on because they're afraid of the political implications.” White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales wrote to The Washington Post that the president opposed the provision, and “the United States stands against and will not tolerate torture … . The United States does not expel, return or extradite individuals to countries where the United States believes it is likely that they will be tortured.”
But Gonzales' guarantees are hollow and deceptive. The United States has sent suspected terrorists to be interrogated in countries that practice torture. The government calls the practice “extraordinary rendition,” human-rights activists call it “torture outsourcing,” and the bill the House passed last week could give it additional legal cover.
If the provisions in the House bill remain after the upcoming conference committee, and if they are passed and signed into law, the secretary of state may be able to legally override the United Nations Convention Against Torture's prohibition of the deportation of suspects to countries where they are in serious danger of torture simply by “seek[ing] diplomatic assurances that the suspect will be protected.” “Diplomatic assurances” from known torturers not to torture are useless without verification. The United States has already deported at least one suspect based on these promises, and he was tortured anyway.
The victim was Canadian citizen Maher Arar. On September 26, 2002, U.S. immigration officials stopped Arar while he was changing planes at John F. Kennedy International Airport. He was detained for 13 days, questioned about alleged ties to al-Qaeda, and threatened with deportation to Syria. This terrified Arar, who was born in Syria but immigrated to Canada in 1988. He warned Immigrations and Naturalization Service officials several times that Syria would torture him.
The United States got diplomatic assurances from the Syrian government that Arar would not be tortured, and then-Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson -- the second-highest official in the Justice Department -- signed the deportation order. On October 8, 2002, U.S. officials flew Arar to Amman, Jordan, on a small private jet; from Jordan he was conveyed by van to a Syrian military intelligence center.
Arar has alleged to reporters and in court documents that he was tortured severely for the next 12 days. During interrogation sessions that lasted for up to 18 hours, Syrian intelligence officers beat him with thick electrical cables and with their fists, threatened to break his spine, and forced him to listen to other prisoners' screams. Arar noticed that Syrian officials asked him some of the same questions as had FBI agents. The beatings stopped after the Canadian Embassy made contact with Arar, but he spent most of the next 10 months confined in a “grave” -- an underground cell 3 feet wide, 6 feet long, and 7 feet high.
In October 2003, Syria finally released Arar, and he returned to Ottawa, Canada. On November 4, he spoke to the press for the first time about his “nightmare.” Two days later, President Bush gave a speech that announced America's “forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East” and denounced Syria for a “legacy of torture, oppression, misery, and ruin.” The next week, The New York Times reported that anonymous U.S. officials “say [Arar] confessed under torture in Syria” and relayed details of his confession.
Since then, Syrian Ambassador to the United States Imad Moustapha has told CBS that his government considers Arar completely innocent. Arar has never been charged with any crime in the United States or Canada.
Arar is not the only one. On October 5, 2001, Australian citizen Mamdouh Habib was arrested in Pakistan and sent to Egypt on U.S. orders. Former Qatari Justice Minister Najeeb al-Nauimi told an Australian TV program that, according to reliable Egyptian sources, Habib was tortured until he was close to death. Habib was later sent to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where “[a]s a result of his having been tortured in Egypt he used to bleed from his nose, mouth and ears when he was asleep,” according to a written statement by Guantanamo detainees Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal, and Rhuhel Ahmed.
On December 18, 2001, U.S. intelligence agents flew Swedish asylum seekers Ahmed Agiza and Muhammed al-Zery from Stockholm to Cairo on a chartered jet. Sweden received diplomatic assurances from Egypt that the prisoners would not be harmed, but there is credible evidence that they were beaten and tortured with electrical shocks.
All told, the United States “rendered” about 18 prisoners whose names are known during Bill Clinton's and George W. Bush's administrations. (The exact count is uncertain, as it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between suspects turned over to foreign governments and suspects sent to secret U.S.-run jails abroad.) Several of the prisoners, two prisoners' wives, and one prisoner's brother have allegedly been tortured. There are probably hundreds of others targets of extraordinary rendition whose names are not known. George Tenet told the September 11 commission that the CIA conducted “over 70 renditions” in the years before 9-11, and experts agree that there have been more since the attacks.
Intelligence officials do not pretend to be ignorant of what happens to suspects after a rendition. An anonymous intelligence source told The Washington Post, “[W]e don't kick the [expletive] out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the [expletive] out of them.” Vincent Cannistraro, the CIA's former counterterrorism director, spoke to Newsday about a high-level al-Qaeda suspect taken from Guantanamo Bay to Egypt after refusing to cooperate with interrogators. “They promptly tore his fingernails out and he started to tell things,” Cannistraro said.
“If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear -- never to see them again -- you send them to Egypt,” former CIA agent Bob Baer told The New Statesman.
The Abu Ghraib prison scandal may have briefly halted the practice -- but only until it faded from the headlines. Fredrik Laurin, a Swedish journalist who has tracked a Gulfstream jet that the United States uses for extraordinary renditions, shared some of his research with Seymour Hersh. Hersh reported in Chain of Command that the Gulfstream did not make any overseas trips for two months after the prison-abuse story broke -- but restarted in July.
If President Bush meant what he said about “a forward strategy of freedom,” that plane would stop flying and the conference committee would delete the provisions of the 9-11 intelligence-reform bill that help enable torture outsourcing. Until then, the administration's assurances that it “does not tolerate torture” will be as empty as the assurances it seeks from Egypt, Jordan, and Syria before delivering suspects into their hands.
Katherine Hawkins is a third-year student at Harvard Law School. She is currently researching a paper about the legality of extraordinary rendition.
