Torture and Disappearances in the 'War on Terror'

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A Senate committee defied President Bush on Thursday by rejecting his revised plan to interrogate and prosecute terrorism suspects and approving alternative legislation that he strongly opposed.

The Senate Armed Services Committee passed the bill affirming Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits inhumane treatment. The White House wants military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay to maintain the right to use evidence obtained through coercion and to keep elements of prosecution cases secret from those accused.

Four Republicans, including Arizona's John McCain and committee chair John Warner, joined Democrats in approving the measure. The White House says it will fight the legislation because it would mean the end of the CIA's program of interrogating detainees.

Meanwhile in Europe, the Spanish government has admitted Spain may have been used as a stopover for secret CIA flights in the practice of transferring prisoners known as extraordinary rendition - what others call kidnapping. The news comes a week after President Bush acknowledged for the first time that the CIA has been operating a secret network of overseas prisons.

Today we turn to a new documentary that tells the stories of two men who have survived extraordinary rendition, secret detention, and torture by the U.S. government working with various other governments worldwide. It's called "Outlawed" and it's produced by the international human rights organization Witness. The film highlights the cases of Khaled El-Masri and Binyam Mohamed.

• Outlawed: Extraordinary Rendition, Torture and Disappearances in the 'War on Terror' - an excerpt of the documentary produced by the international human rights group Witness.

AMY GOODMAN: Today, we turn to a new documentary that tells the stories of two men who survived extraordinary rendition, secret detention and torture by the U.S. government, working with various other governments worldwide. It's called Outlawed, and it’s produced by the international human rights organization Witness. The film highlights the cases of Khaled El-Masri and Binyam Mohamed.

Mohamed is a 23-year-old Ethiopian national who was arrested by Pakistani forces at Karachi airport in 2002 while boarding a flight to return to his home in Britain. He was then handed over to U.S. custody. His family was given an unclassified copy of his diary. In the documentary Outlawed, Binyam Mohamed’s brother, who wanted to keep his identity concealed, reads from Binyam’s diary.

BINYAM MOHAMED: [read by his brother] “I refused to talk in Karachi until they gave me a lawyer. I said it was my right to have a lawyer. The FBI said, ‘The law has changed, there are no lawyers. You can cooperate with us the easy way or the hard way.’ On the first day of the interrogation ‘Chuck’ said, ‘If you don’t talk to me you are going to Jordan. We can’t do what we want here. The Arabs will deal with you.’”

NARRATOR: July 21, 2002, Pakistan to Morocco. Mohamed is flown from Pakistan to Morocco in a CIA plane and imprisoned in an undisclosed location. Louise Arbour, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

LOUISE ARBOUR: The rendition actually is the transfer of a person who is in the custody of state a to state b with no judicial supervision.

NARRATOR: Michael Scheuer, chief architect of the CIA's rendition program.

MICHAEL SCHEUER: The goals of the rendition program were only two at the beginning, and I think primarily they remain the same. They were, one, to get individuals off the street, who we knew were senior in al-Qaeda or its allies and who posed a threat to the United States. The second goal of the rendition program was very simply at the time of the capture of any individual or the time a cell was disrupted, to seize whatever documents were available. Interrogation was never a central goal. After 9/11, the rendition program shifted, in the sense that we were going to begin holding people ourselves.

BINYAM MOHAMED: [read by his brother] “I was taken from airport, blindfolded and cuffed by a van to the security zone. It was when I got to Morocco that they said that some big people in Al Qaeda were talking about me. They told me that the U.S. had a story they wanted from me and that it was their job to get it. They talked about Jose Padilla, and they said I was going to testify against him and big people. The interrogator told me that we have been working with the British. I was surprised that the British were siding with the Americans. I sought asylum in Britain rather than America because it’s known as the one country that has laws that it follows.”

NARRATOR: According to the 2006 report by Swiss Senator Dick Marty on behalf of the Council of Europe, governments throughout Europe have actively participated in unlawful CIA operations, leading to the rendition and secret detention of European citizens and residents.