Monday, May 29, 2006

Torture flights: our role in US brutality shames Britain

Continuing with the campaign to highlight torture as the anti-torture month of June approaches, we now, sadly, must examine the role that our own country are playing in this worldwide disgrace.

IF and when the so-called war on terror ever ends, our grandchildren or our great-grandchildren may well look back in disbelief and wonder how it could have been that, at the turn of the 21st century, the two nations that waged a global conflict under the banner of democracy could have so blatantly flouted that principle.

The “extraordinary renditions” programme, which breaches every law on international human rights, sees the United States target suspected terrorists anywhere in the world, kidnap them, drug them, cuff and blindfold them, bundle them on to a secret CIA jet and whisk them off to a “friendly” nation such as Egypt, Uzbekistan or Morocco, where “friendly” secret policemen can torture, rape and murder them.

The UK colludes happily with this. We allow the CIA’s fleet of jets to come in and out of UK airports to refuel and get other logistical support while they ferry their captive human cargo around the world. Scotland has the proud distinction of being the most popular stop-off point for CIA flights on the gulag-and-torture- chamber-express.

The argument that this is a necessary evil in a war against Islamic terrorists who want to blow you and your children to bits does not bear scrutiny. When the US arrests these people, it has no proof that they are terrorists. It is working on suspicion. No court will ever hear the accusations or test the evidence. These people are being “disappeared” by Western democracies.

To make the matter even more Orwellian, many of those taken captive come under suspicion only because some poor soul in a Middle-Eastern torture chamber named them to stop the beating they were enduring.

What we are engaged in is a 21st-century version of the mediaeval witch-hunt. When a suspected witch was being tortured, she’d be asked who her co-conspirators were. Of course, there were no co-conspirators, but just to stop the torture, the woman would have named someone, anyone ...

But Britain and America aren’t just sending these suspects to torturers and then walking away. We are effectively in the torture chamber with the victim. Testimony from captives who have been “rendered” suggests that British and American intelligence officers are often in the same detention centre while the prisoner is being beaten and abused. Reports claim that once the torture stops, or sometimes before it starts, they drop in for a chat, and that British and American intelligence officers will give precise questions for their proxy torturers to put directly to the captive.

As we show today in our investigation into renditions, the CIA officer who developed the programme, Michael Scheuer, had not planned that it would be used in this way.
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