Shocking Story of How the US Ignored International Law to Become World's Kidnapper and Torturer

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Forell had witnessed one of the first of Cofer Black’s extraordinary rendition operations. Two men had been abducted from a European capital and taken to the Middle East to be interrogated.

Over the next few years, scenes like this would be repeated hundreds of times across the world. Men were rendered not only from the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq but from Kenya, Pakistan, Indonesia, Somalia, Bosnia, Croatia, Albania, Gambia, Zambia, Thailand and the United States itself. The US was running a global kidnapping programme on the basis of Cofer Black’s plan and the agreements reached at October’s NATO meeting.

Some prisoners were dispatched to Middle Eastern countries, including Jordan and Syria, or to Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. An unknown number were sent to secret prisons that the CIA operated in Thailand, Poland, Lithuania and Romania. Wherever the prisoners ended up, however, they had one thing in common: they were going to be tortured.

On arrival in Egypt, al-Zery and Agiza were taken to the Tora Prison complex, fourteen miles south of Cairo, where they began immediately to suffer appalling abuse. Agiza subsequently appeared before an Egyptian court and was jailed for fifteen years. Almost two years after being rendered, al-Zery was released without charge after the Egyptian authorities accepted what he had always protested: that he had never advocated violence. He was then able to tell how he had been hooded continuously during his first two months of imprisonment and had suffered electric shocks on his genitals, nipples and ears. His first year of imprisonment was spent in a cell less than five feet square.

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