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Rice on the Offensive in Europe Over Bush Administration's Use of "Torture Flights"

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The scandal over the Bush administration's use of so-called "extraordinary renditions' is reaching new heights. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrives in Europe today for a five-day trip to address the issue directly. Last month the European Union wrote to Rice expressing concern over reports that the US was using secret jails in Europe for its rendition program. Rice will reportedly respond by telling allies to "back off" over the issue.

The highly controversial practice of rendition involves transporting suspects seized overseas by US agents to countries known for using torture and holding them there for interrogation.

Meanwhile, the American Civil Liberties Union has announced it is taking the CIA to court over its rendition program. The lawsuit - which will be filed on Tuesday - charges the CIA broke both US and international law when they authorized agents to abduct an innocent man, detain him incommunicado, beat him, drug and transport him to a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan.

Over the weekend, the Washington Post reported that the US admitted to German officials in May 2004 that the CIA had mistakenly imprisoned a German citizen for five months but asked the German government to remain quiet about it.

The man, Khaled El-Masri, was arrested in Macedonia on December 31, 2003. He says he was handed to US officials and flown to a secret prison in Afghanistan where he was held in appalling conditions and interrogated as a terrorism suspect. He was returned to Europe five months later when the CIA realized they had the wrong man.

Citing interviews with current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials, the Post reported that after the September 11th attacks, the staff of the CIA's Counterterroist Center - or CTC - quadrupled in size nearly overnight. The center's Rendition Group is made up of case officers, paramilitaries, analysts and psychologists.

According to the Post, members of the group follow a simple but standard procedure: "Dressed head to toe in black, including masks, they blindfold and cut the clothes off their new captives, then administer an enema and sleeping drugs. They outfit detainees in a diaper and jumpsuit for what can be a day-long trip. Their destinations: either a detention facility operated by cooperative countries in the Middle East and Central Asia, including Afghanistan, or one of the CIA's own covert prisons...which at various times have been operated in eight countries, including several in Eastern Europe."

The CIA, working with other intelligence agencies, has captured an estimated 3,000 people since 9/11. There is no tribunal or judge to check the evidence against those picked up by the agency. The CIA's inspector general is now investigating a growing number of what it calls "erroneous renditions." One official told the Post about three dozen names fall in that category.

• Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

AMY GOODMAN: We're joined now in our New York studio by Michael Ratner. He’s president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. Welcome to Democracy Now!

MICHAEL RATNER: Welcome, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, this is an amazing story in The Washington Post, especially in its details about what happened to this one man, Khaled Masri. Beginning with the cooperation of the German government, which was anti-Iraq war, and the U.S., Dana Priest, the writer, begins, “In May 2004, the White House dispatched the U.S. ambassador in Germany to pay an unusual visit to that country's interior minister. Ambassador Daniel Coats carried instructions from the State Department transmitted via the C.I.A.'s Berlin station because they were too sensitive and highly classified for regular diplomatic channels, according to several people with knowledge of the conversation.”

Priest goes on to write, “Coats informed the German minister that the C.I.A. had wrongfully imprisoned one of its citizens, Khaled Masri, for five months, and would soon release him, the sources said. There was also a request that the German government not disclose what it had been told even if Masri went public. The U.S. officials feared exposure of a covert action program designed to capture terrorism suspects abroad and transfer them among countries and possible legal challenges to the C.I.A. from Masri and others with similar allegations.” A remarkable story.

MICHAEL RATNER: Well, Dana Priest's story was absolutely amazing because of the detail. I mean, we have all known about the extraordinary rendition program for a long time. The Center for Constitutional Rights has had this case of Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen who was detained at Kennedy airport, sent to Syria where he was tortured, but what this story does is put detail on it. It talks about this unit that’s set up in the basement of the C.I.A., 1,200 people working on extraordinary rendition. It talks about “black sites,” which are C.I.A. sites, which may even be in Europe, Romania and Poland. And then, of course, it has the story of Khaled El-Masri, who was innocent, picked up, taken to Afghanistan, interrogated, tortured and then released, with the Germans closely involved.

And what I think is going on here is that Europe has been deeply involved in this whole process. Certainly, the intelligence agencies of Europe have been involved. And hundreds of flights, hundreds of flights have gone out of Germany, taking people, C.I.A. flights, all over the world to be tortured. And now that it's being exposed, Europe is sitting there demanding -- supposedly demanding from the U.S., ‘Tell us what's going on. Tell us what's happening.’ Yet at the same time, they have been involved in not only some of their countries allowing these camps to be there, but in allowing these flights to go from Sweden, from England, from Germany, from Spain, all over Europe, to take people to torture facilities everywhere in the world.

What it reminds me of, and I think people should really be aware of this, we all see now that Pinochet in Chile is being condemned and may actually have to stand trial for the Operation Condor, the running of essentially a gulag through South America, where he picked up people, had them tortured and killed and taken to various facilities. And you have to ask yourself: What's the difference between what the United States is doing now in cooperation with Europe, essentially in running a worldwide gulag of detention and torture facilities?

AMY GOODMAN: We are talking to Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights. We're also joined on the phone by a British Member of Parliament, Andrew Tyrie, who is a Tory, a chair of the All Parliamentary Group on Extraordinary Rendition. Welcome to Democracy Now!

ANDREW TYRIE: Hello.

AMY GOODMAN: It's good to have you with us. Can you talk about the issue of the responsibility of countries that either allow planes to land and take off, that are known to be carrying these -- some call them kidnapped people -- people who are going through extraordinary rendition, and also the facilities, for example, in Britain, if there are, places, black sites, where these people are being interrogated or tortured?

ANDREW TYRIE: Well, let's deal with each of those points in turn. First of all, I'm not a lawyer, but it seems to me fairly clear that since Britain, for example, has incorporated the U.N. Convention Against Torture directly into its domestic law, if we are knowingly allowing flights to pass through the U.K., land there, have refueling, and then go on, knowing that it's likely that people are going to be tortured, it strikes me that those actions must make us complicit in the torture and that, therefore, we have broken the Convention. Likewise, I suspect that we may have broken the Human Rights Act if we have done this. There would also be possibly breaches to the criminal law, the ordinary criminal law, which, of course, prohibits torture, and that's a question which another pressure group in Britain called Liberty is actually pursuing with the police authorities at the moment.

As far as your second question is concerned, the problem is, none of us know the facts. None of us know whether there is any holding center in the U.K. I think that's unlikely, because I think we would have got to hear about it. I suspect that's perhaps why the Americans have been -- administration has been setting up these in countries in Eastern Europe. So, I don't know whether that's the case. But I think it's unlikely. What I do know -- I hope I have not gone on too long -- what I do know is that we need a healthy debate about this in a democracy, and we need to make up our minds whether this is the right way to go. I don't; I think torturing people is likely to make the war against terrorism more difficult, not less difficult. Of course, Condoleezza Rice has now said we must have this healthy debate, but only yesterday her spokesman, Mr. Hanley, was saying these are things that shouldn’t be talked about in public. And there does seem to be a pretty flat contradiction between those two points.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you know how many flights, torture flights, have gone through Britain?

ANDREW TYRIE: No. And there are many allegations being made by plane spotters and others that this may be in dozens or hundreds. But it's so difficult to know; unless one can get onto the plane and inspect and find out what's going on, we can’t know. What I do think is -- which is what we will be pressing the government about in the -- today and in the days and weeks ahead, that it's up to the government to make an effort to find out. The benign neglect that they seem to be going in for at the moment is, in my view, absolutely outrageous. A former foreign office minister has himself said that there seems to be an extraordinary lack of curiosity on behalf of the British government about these actions.

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to British M.P. Andrew Tyrie, a chair of the All Parliamentary Group on Extraordinary Rendition. What is the feeling in the British Parliament right now around this issue? And in Britain, do you call it “kidnapping”?

ANDREW TYRIE: Well, the attitude of a lot of people is deep concern without knowing quite where to turn. A lot of people in Britain, and I'm talking now more widely, British public opinion, are very, very concerned about terrorism. You have got to remember that in Britain, we have had 30 years of terrorism, so we're quite experienced about it. And I know it’s relatively new for the United States, but it's not at all new for us. We’ve got a spectrum of opinion from some saying, ‘Well, if you can torture some information out of people and thereby save some lives, maybe that's a good thing,’ right the way through to those who think that torture under any circumstances is completely wrong.