As torture victims the world over know all too well, decades can separate them from the redress they are entitled to under international law. But for most survivors of torture the required remedies never come at all: no truth is revealed, no justice done, no compensation paid, no official apology uttered.
If the United States government has its way, persons tortured by its agents — and by foreign agents acting on its behalf – in the former administration’s “rendition program” will fall into the latter category. Victims have come forward; flight logs have been disclosed; intelligence officials have confirmed aspects of the program; and the CIA has acknowledged the use of unlawful interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, on prisoners held in secret.
Despite the wealth of public information, including former President George W. Bush’s recently televised proud admission that he personally authorized waterboarding – otherwise known as torture – all three branches of the current US government have failed to take the necessary action to close the accountability gap. On Bush’s admission alone, the US should have immediately commenced a criminal investigation into the former president’s actions.
If those victims of these abuses who are determined to pursue justice get their way, however, some redress may be in the offing: in European countries and in regional courts and commissions where a concerted effort is underway to resurrect respect for human rights from the ashes of the Bush administration’s “war on terror”.
A new report by Amnesty International condemns the yawning accountability gap in the US, but argues that Europe remains fertile ground for such accountability. The report, titled Open Secret: Mounting Evidence of Europe’s Complicity in Rendition and Secret Detention makes quick work of the US (virtually no accountability to date) and then moves on to Europe, highlighting eight countries – Germany, Italy, Lithuania, Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Sweden and the UK — where inquiries, investigations, disclosures of information, or processes in regional courts or human rights commissions offer a glimmer of some sort of remedy. The idea that the “truth will out” is apt: the US’s refusal to cooperate with these investigations has hurt, but not hobbled, them. The examples below represent a series of recent “firsts” in getting at that truth.
For a Saudi national in US custody for the last eight years and currently awaiting trial by military commission at Guantanamo Bay, a measure of justice could come from a seemingly unlikely place: Poland. In October, the Warsaw prosecutor investigating allegations that Poland hosted a secret prison for the CIA from 2002-2004 granted Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri formal status as a victim, which guarantees his lawyers a role in the proceedings: the first time that a named victim will have such representation in a European country alleged to have helped the CIA imprison him in secret. The CIA has acknowledged that al-Nashiri, the alleged mastermind of the USS Cole bombing, was subjected to waterboarding, but also suffered under “unauthorized” techniques such as having a gun that he didn’t know was unloaded and a drill held to his head, and being implicitly threatened with the sexual assault of his women relatives.
After several failed attempts, rendition victim Khaled el-Masri might also finally see some justice. A German national, El-Masri was secretly held for weeks in 2003 by Macedonian agents before being shipped from Skopje to Afghanistan by the CIA. The US Supreme Court refused to hear his case, invoking state secrecy to justify knocking el-Masri off the docket, and the German government absolved its agents of any responsibility. So el-Masri has taken his case to the European Court of Human Rights, putting Macedonia on the hot seat by accusing its agents of unlawful imprisonment, ill-treatment, and complicity in his transfer to Kabul where he claims to have been tortured in the notorious “salt pit”. The case is the first time the European Court is likely to consider a CIA rendition case on the merits.
The first ever criminal convictions of CIA and foreign agents for actions related to a rendition came in November 2009, along with an order to pay the victim compensation. An Italian court convicted US and Italian agents for the 2003 kidnapping of Egyptian national Usama Mostafa Hassan Nasr (aka Abu Omar) in Milan. Abu Omar was subsequently transferred to Egypt where he reportedly was tortured. High-level Italian intelligence officials, however, were protected from conviction under the state secrets doctrine and some US diplomats were granted diplomatic immunity. But the intrepid Italian prosecutor appealed and last month argued in the appeal proceedings that state secrecy should not be used as a shield to protect Italian officials from scrutiny for egregious human rights violations – and that kidnapping hardly constitutes a diplomatic duty for which an official should be granted the privilege of immunity.
Other recent “firsts” include the long-awaited announcement in July 2010 that the UK would hold an independent inquiry into its involvement in some of these practices. That process is set to get underway in early 2011 and may offer a glimmer of hope for rendition victims such as former Guantanamo Bay detainee, Binyam Mohamed. Mohamed was held in Pakistan, Morocco and Afghanistan, where he claimed he was tortured, including by being sexually mutilated. Mohamed’s credible claims of British complicity in his mistreatment have dogged the government for years. The admission by Lithuania in December 2009 that its agents prepared secret detention facilities for use by the CIA was the first time that this Baltic state appeared on the radar, confirmed as having participated in the rendition and secret prisons’ operations. In January 2010, a criminal investigation was opened. The European Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) visited both sites last June, the first time an independent monitoring body made public a visit to secret CIA prison in Europe.
The global span of the CIA’s rendition program provided the US government with everything it needed to round people up worldwide: willing complicit allies, landing points for fuelling stops, proxy interrogators, and a secret prison network that included sites on at least four continents. But taking advantage of such reach has had an unintended effect: it has provided numerous jurisdictions and forums in which victims can now seek legal accountability. The US may be an “accountability-free zone” at the moment, but the rest of the world – Europe, in particular – may just be ripe with real opportunities for those seeking justice for the complicity of the many governments that eagerly participated in the US’s pernicious “coalition of the willing.”
Julia Hall is a human rights lawyer and Amnesty International’s expert on counter-terrorism and human rights in Europe in the organization’s international secretariat in London, England
Susan Hall
January 10, 2011 at 4:41 pm
There are so many synonyms for torture, including cruel and unusual punishment, solitary confinement, kidnapping, hanging people with their arms behind them like seen in the pictures of what was common for the Nazi regime, stuffing rags down people's throats until they "DIE", and so many other things that most everyone in the US knows has taken place first under the Bush administration and then covered up and continued by the Obama administration. The words cruel and unusual punishment is suppose to be a part of the law that the US does NOT take part in doing to anyone in the world because their government wanted to pride itself on being upright and moral in their higher level culture, government and law system.
Now that the people of the US and the world see that the US does business regularly through cruel and unusual punishment they are beginning to realize that they are of a lower level cultural development that should wake up and begin to care about their children and the next generation. It is not beneficial for any human being to have to live in governments of great cruelty and atrocities and it would be merciful to those past present and future that would be tortured by such violent cultures. Throughout history those cultures that have followed such horrors do eventually change, which is why there was such ignorance when Pres. Obama was elected. He said the magic words of "change" & people ignored the fact that he was not calling for an end to killing poor people where there is oil and resources for big corporations, he wasn't calling for accountability but rather ignore the suffering, be positive and don't ask for accountability. It is a shame that humans have to be hurting a little themselves before they care about others, but it seems to be the case and finally the US citizens are beginning to recognize that you can't ignore bullies and expect them to go away. Not to mention a bully will pick on as many weak victims as he they (US & World Oligarchies) can and there is neither a limit to what they will do, how much they will do it nor when they will commit crimes against the weak.
I am so glad the UK is BEGINNING TO care more about their people than the few rich thieving rich bullies. This is told in the article above and the settlement given to the Guantanamo tortured hostages that were returned and the Foreign Sec. Hagues demand for the last hostage, Shaker Aamer.
However this is not to say that the UK has found a real backbone yet to stand against the US bully. The Uk should be proud and protective of the truth with Julian Assange, unlike the US torturing the it's young truthteller, Bradley Manning. Not only should the UK publicly call the US bullies, but the leaders should be known as war criminals from the 10's of 1,000's of documents that reveal the murders, tortures, kidnapping and tons and tons of hernias crimes that have been ordered by the last two US presidents, including Bush's allowance of 10'000 Iraqi executions, 500 decapitations, 200 children tortured to death, the secret bombing of Obama killing citizens in Yemen and declaring the country too violent because of al Qaeda for the Yemen 9 yrs. Guantanamo hostages to return to their families.
I as a citizen for many generations would like to encourage every country to begin to set up block-aids against the US until they answer for the horrible human rights abuses they have committed. No country should torture, kidnap and lock up people without hard evidence given in an UNBIASED trial that is held within a few weeks of a trial.
Thank you to the author, editor and publisher of this paper that provides the truth.
David Ferrier
November 17, 2010 at 6:08 pm
A great article! I have followed the misfortunes of Mr. Mahar Arar since his extraordinary rendition and refoulement came to my attention in 2004 and thus know of what I speak. In 2004 I resided in the federal constituency represented by the Hon. Anne McLellan. I wrote Anne McLellan about the matter and found that the Canadian government then had about the same attitude as the US Government now. Fortunately, wiser heads prevailed in Canada, resulting in a Commission of Enquiry that exonerated Mr. Arar and a subsequent monetary settlement.