CIA-Sponsored Kidnappings And Torture Undermine Anti-Terror Efforts

Wednesday, 07 February 2007
By Eric Mink
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Imagine agents of a foreign government — say, Russia or China — deciding that certain Americans might be plotting against their country. Imagine those agents seizing the Americans while they're on vacation abroad. Imagine those agents then secretly transporting the Americans for interrogation to a third country notorious for its use of torture in interrogations, where they are — no surprise — tortured.

Finally, imagine the outrage that would sweep America at the discovery of such conduct and the anger we would feel toward the governments responsible for the seizure and torture of our fellow Americans.

That should give you some idea of how outraged and angry some of our most stalwart allies — Canada, Germany, Italy and others — are at America, whose agents have snatched citizens of those countries and taken them to such countries as Syria and Egypt for imprisonment, interrogation and torture.

Late in January, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper called a press conference in Ottawa and issued a formal apology "on behalf of the government of Canada" to one of its citizens, Maher Arar, and his family. In addition to the public apology, Canada agreed to pay Arar more than $10 million.

In a very real sense, however, Canada was apologizing and paying for what the United States did to Arar. The CIA kidnapped him in September 2002, when he stopped to change planes at JFK Airport in New York after a family vacation in Tunisia. It flew him to Jordan, then drove him to Syria and turned him over to Syrian interrogators who tortured him for 10 months. Then they let him go.

After initially doubting his story, the Canadian government established an independent commission of inquiry to investigate his claims. Two-and-a-half years later, the commission led by Dennis O'Connor, the associate chief justice of Ontario, determined that the Syrian-born Canadian citizen was an innocent man. It found that inexperienced and poorly trained investigators at the Royal Canadian Mounted Police — caught up in a fevered, post-9/11 mentality — gave Arar's name to U.S. intelligence, having falsely concluded that he might have had some ties to people who might have had some ties to radical Islamists. The Americans took it — and him — from there.

The O'Connor commission actually produced two reports. The first, a factual inquiry released in September, cleared Arar of any wrongdoing, affirmed the credibility of his accounts of torture and harshly criticized the RCMP not only for its initial incompetence but also for attempts to cover it up by smearing Arar after his release from Syria and return to Canada.

On Dec. 6, Guiliano Zaccardelli, the commissioner of the RCMP, resigned.

A week later, the commission's second report, a policy inquiry, made detailed recommendations for creating new agencies to provide independent oversight and review of the actions of Canadian police and intelligence activities — while still protecting Canadian national security.

Prime Minister Harper has called on the United States to apologize to Arar. Our government has not. Indeed, three days after the release of O'Connor's second report, the U.S. ambassador to Canada, David Wilkins, issued a statement claiming that America has information about Arar from sources other than the RCMP. It is because of that information — no details provided — that Arar remains on a U.S. terrorist watch list, the statement said. The ambassador did not explain why a Canadian citizen on his way to Canada was taken by American intelligence agents to Syria, rather than to Canada.

Welcome to the world of "extraordinary rendition." In government-speak, this deceptively bland phrase refers to the apprehension and transportation of people deemed to pose threats to U.S. security. In truth, it describes U.S. intelligence agents — operating without warrants and in defiance of American and international law — kidnapping people and taking them to countries where interrogators use torture to extract information of dubious reliability — including but not limited to confessions.

Arar's case was unusual in that the CIA grabbed him on American soil. But it was not unique:

Last Wednesday, German prosecutors in Munich issued arrest warrants for 13 people it called CIA operatives and charged them with kidnapping a German citizen in Macedonia late in 2003, holding and interrogating him for nearly a month, then flying him to a prison in Afghanistan and interrogating him for five more months. His treatment included beatings and sexual abuse. Khalid el-Masri, a Lebanese-born German, finally was determined to have no connection to terrorism, flown back to Europe and dumped on a hillside in Albania.

The man's account of his abusive treatment was the subject of investigations by German authorities and a special committee of the European Parliament, which essentially confirmed its accuracy. Unnamed former and current CIA officials told the Washington Post that Masri's kidnapping was a case of mistaken identity. Former German Foreign Minister Otto Schily testified to a German parliamentary committee that the CIA mistake was acknowledged to him by Daniel R. Coats, then the U.S. ambassador to Germany. And at a joint press conference with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in 2005, German Prime Mininster Angela Merkel said that American officials had admitted to her that Masri's abduction had been a mistake.

But a mistaken-identity explanation still begs the question: Whether Masri had connections to suspected terrorists — for which there seems to be no evidence whatsoever — or merely was unlucky enough to have a name similar to someone who does, what right does any country, even the United States, have to kidnap the citizens of another country on foreign soil and deliver them into the hands of torturers?

Now consider the dicier case of Osama Moustafa Nasr, called Abu Omar, a radical Islamist cleric who fled political persecution in Egypt and settled in Italy. On Feb. 16, 2003, he was snatched off a street in Milan and taken back to Egypt where, according to several accounts, his treatment has included electric shock and sexual abuse.

Italian prosecutors, after a sweeping investigation, issued arrest warrants for 25 CIA operatives and an Air Force officer for their alleged involvment in Omar's kidnapping and transport to Egypt. Subsequent revelations indicated varying degrees of involvement by Italian agents, leading to the resignation in November of Nicolo Pollari, the head of Italy's military intelligence service.

Here's the twist: A leading Italian anti-terrorism prosecutor has blamed the CIA's meddling for ruining its ongoing intensive video, wiretap and computer surveillance of Omar. The information from that surveillance, the prosecutor told the Washington Post, might well have given authorities information about terrorist plans in Italy and elsewhere in Europe and the Middle East.

Omar clearly has been associated with radical groups in Egypt. Masri and Arar, just as clearly, had no terrorist connections. What the three men share, however, are Arab names and heritage, illegal victimization by American intellgence agents and the anger and resentment toward America their cases have fostered in Europe.

If these cases — and the dozens of similar incidents identified by European investigators — represent the brilliance of America's anti-terrorism activities abroad, we are in big trouble. "