Torture and Secrecy Scandal Intensifies

"Rendition" -- what many call kidnapping -- is the highly controversial practice of transporting detainees seized overseas by US agents to countries known for using torture, and holding them there for interrogation.

On Sunday, the Washington Post detailed how a German citizen was seized in Europe by the CIA, beaten, drugged and held in a secret Afghanistan prison for five months before the agency realized they had the wrong man.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived in Europe on Monday for a five-day trip to address the issue. 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. Meanwhile, the American Civil Liberties Union announced it is taking the CIA to court over its rendition program.

Citing interviews with current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials, the Post reported that after the September 11 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."

Amy Goodman of radio show Democracy Now! interviewed Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Andrew Tyrie, a British Member of Parliament, who is a Tory and a chair of the All Parliamentary Group on Extraordinary Rendition.

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 US, 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."

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.