Naming the guilty

So, which European countries are playing host to secret CIA torture centres? The Times has some followup, and points the finger pretty much where expected:

Hungary, Slovakia and Bulgaria rushed to issue denials of their involvement.

But Frantisek Bublan, the Czech Interior Minister, said last night that the US had approached his Government a month ago about holding suspects on Czech territory, but Prague had refused.

Human rights groups point at Poland and Romania as two eastern European countries that have taken in America’s “ghost detainees”. They also claimed that the US was running out of countries willing to host its terror suspects.

And as expected, they use the flight logs from the now-infamous torture plane:

Tom Malinowski, the director of Human Rights Watch, told The Times that his investigators had tracked CIA aircraft transferring detainees from Afghanistan to airfields in Eastern Europe that are closed to the public and press, including two in Poland and Romania.

Mr Malinowski said that Human Rights Watch was “90 per cent certain” the CIA used Szymany airport in Poland.

“This is an obscure, rural airport which is very close to a Polish intelligence facility,” Mr Malinowski said.

He said the second major eastern European site was the Mihail-Kogalniceanu military airbase in Romania.

If proven, this will have major repurcussions. These are countries whose which remember what happened under the Soviets, and which will not tolerate their governments doing a dirty deal with the CIA to resurrect secret prisons where people are tortured. At the least, it will force an end to cooperation and a significant change in foreign policy. At the worst, politicians will be forced to resign, or even prosecuted. In Poland, the government is newly elected, and can easily claim clean hands; Romania's colaition government has no such excuse, and may disintegrate. Both may also have significant problems from the EU and Council of Europe. While the European Commission is being cautious, the European Parliament is already on the warpath. These countries will be facing consequences if they are shown to have cooperated with the US in this. Poland's membership was already in question as the new government wants to reinstate the death penalty; Romania had agreed to join the EU in 2007. They may be kissing that goodbye.

Meanwhile, I wonder whether the CIA are frantically evacuating?

A New European Gulag

We've known for quite some time that the CIA was operating its own secret prison network, in which terrorist suspects were arbitrarily and indefinitely detained, and even tortured, to further the interests of the US's "war on terror". What we haven't known - with the exception of Guantanamo and a few facilities in Afghanistan - is where they are. Today, the Washington Post has a major article shedding more light on the CIA's private gulag. And the biggest shock is where it's located:

The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.

The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.

[...]

The Eastern European countries that the CIA has persuaded to hide al Qaeda captives are democracies that have embraced the rule of law and individual rights after decades of Soviet domination. Each has been trying to cleanse its intelligence services of operatives who have worked on behalf of others -- mainly Russia and organized crime.

So, having struggled for fifty years to bring human rights to Eastern Europe, the CIA is now undoing all of that. Wonderful.

The Washington Post knows which countries are involved, but aren't naming names on the request of the Bush administration, who argue that "disclosure might disrupt counterterrorism efforts in those countries". Given that they admit that the CIA's internment practices and "enhanced interrogation techniques" (such as waterboarding) are illegal in several of the host countries, that's hardly surprising. Public exposure has already forced the closure of the Thai centre, and that's in a country where torture is rife; imagine what would happen in a decent country. The closure of the torture-centre is the least of their worries; people would be prosecuted...

And there's no question that people deserve to go to jail over this. The Washington Post's sources talk candidly about the use of "interrogation" techniques that would be easily recognisable to Torquemada. And they've already led to at least one verifiable death:

The largest CIA prison in Afghanistan was code-named the Salt Pit. It was also the CIA's substation and was first housed in an old brick factory outside Kabul. In November 2002, an inexperienced CIA case officer allegedly ordered guards to strip naked an uncooperative young detainee, chain him to the concrete floor and leave him there overnight without blankets. He froze to death, according to four U.S. government officials. The CIA officer has not been charged in the death.

The US is used to be a decent country. It has laws on its books outlawing torture by US nationals anywhere in the world (see 18 USC 113C - AKA the federal anti-torture statute). It is long past time they actually started applying them.

A sickening account

Today's Guardian has more evidence against the US on its use of torture by proxy in a secret network of ghost prisons in allied countries - in the form of a sickening account from someone who has experienced the system firsthand. Benyam Mohammed, a British resident who grew up in London, is currently being held as an "enemy combatant" in Guantanamo Bay. Before that, he was held for two and a half years, during which time he was shuttled between prisons in Pakistan, Morocco and Afghanistan. Despite the US being a party to the Geneva Conventions, the Red Cross was never informed of his capture. To all effects and purposes, he had disappeared, become an unperson to which anyone could do anything - and so they did. Benyam was systematically tortured - in Pakistan, by beating, hanging, and being threatened with a firearm; and in Morocco by beating, burning with acid, and having his chest and genitals sliced with a scalpel:

They cut off my clothes with some kind of doctor's scalpel. I was naked. I tried to put on a brave face. But maybe I was going to be raped. Maybe they'd electrocute me. Maybe castrate me.

They took the scalpel to my right chest. It was only a small cut. Maybe an inch. At first I just screamed ... I was just shocked, I wasn't expecting ... Then they cut my left chest. This time I didn't want to scream because I knew it was coming.

One of them took my penis in his hand and began to make cuts. He did it once, and they stood still for maybe a minute, watching my reaction. I was in agony. They must have done this 20 to 30 times, in maybe two hours. There was blood all over. "I told you I was going to teach you who's the man," [one] eventually said.

They cut all over my private parts. One of them said it would be better just to cut it off, as I would only breed terrorists.

Faced with treatment like this, Benyam unsurprisingly told his torturers whatever he thought they wanted to hear, and admitted participating in whatever they accused him of. Not that that helped, of couse. According to one of his guards, the torture was

"...just to degrade you. So when you leave here, you'll have these scars and you'll never forget. So you'll always fear doing anything but what the US wants."

This is how Bush's America is "defending western values": by violating them in the most fundamental way. While the actual torture was conducted by Pakistanis and Moroccans, it was clearly done at the behest of the Americans, who shuttled him between prisons and dictated the line of questioning. The US is responsible for this, and it is my dearest hope that when that country eventually regains its sanity and rejoins the civilised world, the people who arranged for Benyam Mohammed to be tortured and brutalised for two and a half years will face justice for their crimes.

Out of control

The Observer today has a special report into the US's secret global gulag. While it mentions all the obligatory background elements - Guantanamo, the torture plane, Maher Arar, and the outsourcing of torture to compliant despotic regimes like Syria - the focus is somewhere else: Afghanistan, which since the US Supreme Court started enforcing constitutional limits over what went on at Guantanamo, is increasingly acting as a hub for the whole system.

The US has dozens of prisons in Afghanistan, away from the eyes of the international media and human rights organisations (and the US courts). There are US-run detention centres in Gardez, Khost, Asadabad, Jalalabad and Khandahar, as well as 20-odd smaller facilities scattered around the country. Then there's Bagram, which seems to be a central "collection point", where several prisoners have died in US custody in highly suspicious circumstances. Prisoners are transferred between the prisons in armed convoys who shoot at anyone or anything which gets in their way - even the Afghan police:

Inside a frozen courtyard, a former policeman, Said Sardar, 25, was sat beside his crutches. On May 1 2004, he was manning a checkpoint when a car careened through. "Inside were men dressed like Arabs, but they were western men," he said. "They had prisoners in the car." Sardar fired a warning shot for the car to stop. "The western men returned fire and within minutes two US attack helicopters hovered above us. They fired three rockets at the police station. One screamed past me. I saw its fiery tail and blacked out."

He was taken to Bagram, where US military doctors had to amputate his leg. Afterwards, he said, "an American woman appeared. She said the US was sorry. It was a mistake. The men in the car were Special Forces or CIA on a mission. She gave me $500." Sardar showed us into another room in his compound where a circle of children stared glumly at us; their fathers, all policemen, were killed in the same incident. "Five dead. Four in hospital. To protect covert US prisoner transports," he says. Later, US helicopters were deployed in two similar incidents that left nine dead.

There's more reports there as well: US soldiers shooting a man dead when he objected to them dragging a woman out of their way, and clearing a crowd of children with a grenade. This casual attitude towards he use of force has attracted complaints - not just from Afghanistan's powerless government, but also from CIA staff. Naturally, nothing is being done.

The Observer interviews former prisoners, who described being abused. And they have obtained

prisoner letters, declassified FBI files, legal depositions, witness statements and testimony from US and UK officials, which document the alleged methods deployed in Afghanistan - shackles, hoods, electrocution, whips, mock executions, sexual humiliation and starvation - and suggest they are practised across the network.

While I'm sure that our local apologists will once again try to muddy the waters, the above is torture by any reasonable definition. And who is it being applied to? The same sorts of people who are in Guantanamo: people are are usually entirely innocent, or of "negligible" intelligence value, who have been swept up on suspicion or fingered by someone under torture in a desperate attempt to get the pain to stop. The system

owes more to Stanley Milgram's Six Degrees Of Separation - where anyone can be linked to everyone else in the world in as many stages - than to analytical jurisprudence.

How much more of this do we need to see before the truth sinks in? The "war on terror" is out of control. The US is no longer "defending western civilisation" - they stopped doing that the day they started applying electrodes to people's genitals. Neither are they "promoting freedom" - not when they look the other way at Uzbekistan's abuses, and throw in a few of their own for good measure. Instead, they are simply providing a never-ending stream of outrages to drive people into the arms of the terrorists.

Friedrich Nietzsche warned that those who fight monsters may become monsters themselves. Sadly, in the case of the US, this warning seems to have come true.