Red Cross delegation will visit detainees at Guantanamo

Torture Is Always Bad -- Or Is It?
Torture Is Always Bad -- Or Is It?
By Greg Mitchell, E & P editor
September 20, 2006

A Washington Post editorial considers the case of an innocent Canadian renditoned and tortured in Syria but fails to take a clear stand against criminal mistreatment of even the possibly guilty.

One has learned to cringe when spotting a new editorial arriving from The Washington Post concerning any military or foreign adventure - especially after its dismal record, and lack of shame for same, in regard to all things Iraq -- but the headline and deck on its key piece today raised some hope.

It concerns the criminal treatment of Maher Arar, the Canadian citizen arrested, renditioned and tortured abroad as a terror suspect, only to be declared fully innocent a few days ago by an official investigation. Surely, in this case, even the Post would say all the right things -- a "slam dunk," as George Tenet might say.

Well, the dunk hit the rim with a clang.

The headline declares "Tortured by Mistake," with the deck: "The case of Maher Arar shows why the Bush administration's secret detention program is wrong."

But why is it "wrong"? Mainly because the U.S. got caught and, in this case, a suspect has been proven innocent. The Post says nothing about the hundreds or thousands of others who have not yet had their day in court, and may have suffered similar treatment.

Consider the Post's lede: "A couple of years ago, President Bush might well have counted Maher Arar as one of the success stories of the CIA's secret program for detaining and interrogating suspected terrorists. Mr. Arar, a Canadian citizen, was arrested at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport in September 2002 because he was on a watchlist; Canadian police said they believed he had connections to al-Qaeda. Rather than being returned to Canada, Mr. Arar disappeared into the CIA's secret system -- he was transported to Syria and handed over to its military intelligence service. For several weeks, Mr. Arar was tortured by his Syrian captors, who beat him with an electric cable. Eventually he broke and confessed that he had trained at an al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan."

In other words: So far so good. Arrested and renditoned with no legal charges brought against him. Sent to a country known for favoring torture where, mission accomplished, he was indeed tortured, leading to a coerced confession.

So what's the problem, in the Post's view? "The problem with this story, as an official Canadian investigation reported Monday, is that Mr. Arar was innocent." So it would have been just swell if only he had been, maybe, a little guilty, or at least, still in legal limbo with all the others?

But then the editorial promises to get back on track: "Mr. Arar's case vividly illustrates a couple of the points that veteran military and diplomatic leaders have been trying to impress on Mr. Bush about the dangers of the CIA program, for which the president is demanding congressional approval." The points are:

-- Torture usually leads to unreliable information, so more humane methods may work better

-- "Cruel treatment of prisoners, even in secret, eventually becomes known and can badly damage the honor and influence of the United States and its relations with allies. The mistreatment of Mr. Arar has hurt U.S. relations with Canada and could impede cooperation with its police and security services in the future. Other cases of rendition have similarly upset U.S. intelligence relations with Italy, Germany and Sweden."

In other words: Torture is not clearly wrong on grounds of morality and decency but because it often does not work and can hurt the U.S. - if it becomes public.

Just to make that clear, the Post concludes, in opposing Bush's attempt to modify the Geneva guidelines, that the reason to do so is not mainly that torture is wrong under any circumstance but "the price of his policies is bad intelligence, the criminal mistreatment of some innocent people, and damage to U.S. prestige and alliances that the country can ill afford."

Note the insertion of the word "innocent" once again. Condemnation of all "criminal mistreatment" of prisoners? Not so much. The high ground was left to Post columnist Harold Meyerson, who concludes his piece today on the same subject with the image of "men who have led us into a moral desert and aren't even looking for a way back home."

CIA Abduction of Al-Masri; Suspected kidnappers identified
CIA Abduction of Al-Masri
Der Spiegel
Thursday 21 September 2006

Suspected CIA kidnappers identified.

The US intelligence agents involved in wrongly kidnapping a German citizen of Arab descent could soon face warrants for their arrest. Clues to their identity have turned up from Spanish authorities and German TV journalists.

Khaled al-Masri says he was wrongly kidnapped by the CIA.

The case of Khaled al-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent who was allegedly kidnapped and tortured in secret CIA prisons, continues to unfold. According to a report in the German press on Thursday, the US intelligence agents who wrongly abducted al-Masri might be confronted with warrants for their arrest, as details of their identities become known to German prosecutors.

Munich's Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that prosecutors had received a list of names of suspected US kidnappers from Spanish officials. "We now have very specific questions for the Spanish authorities," state prosecutor August Stern told the paper.

Al-Masri says he was wrongly abducted on New Year's Eve 2003 in Macedonia and detained in various secret overseas prisons often referred to as "black sites." His five month ordeal finally ended when he was dumped on an abandoned road in Albania.

Al-Masri's case is one of the best known cases of extraordinary rendition, a practice the United States is thought to use against terror suspects. The practice has come under considerable criticism by human rights groups that allege the US officials spirit the suspects away to countries that use questionable interrogation methods illegal under US law.

Spain Provides Names

The list from Spain is key to pursuing al-Masri's abductors since many of the secret CIA flights stopped on the Spanish Mediterranean island of Majorca. Several US intelligence employees were there the day before al-Masri's kidnapping and were booked into a luxury hotel - albeit under fake names. However, Süddeutsche reported that the hotel's staff made copies of their passport photos, enabling them to be identified.

German public broadcaster ARD also reported on Thursday that some of its journalists had been able to uncover the identities of at least three of the US agents in Spain under the aliases Eric Fain, James Fairing and Kirk James Bird, who were all on the plane transporting al-Masri. Perhaps because they were only pilots, the CIA didn't seem to go to great lengths to change their identities. All kept their real first names and all apparently work for the North Carolina firm Aero Contractors, which according to the New York Times has been heavily involved in the CIA's renditions operations.

A German parliamentary committee on Thursday continued its investigation into the al-Masri case. The inquiry is meant to uncover to what extent German intelligence officials knew about the abduction and whether the government at the time was complicit in the kidnapping. Berlin denies keeping quiet about the case.