Wednesday, February 6, 2013

How the U.S. administration itself spread terrror on a global scale

 
Waterboarding as it was used already in 1968 in Vietnam.

The Nation about a new report on the CIA's war on terrror: 
When President George W. Bush launched the “war on terror” in the wake of the Al Qaeda attacks of September 11, 2001, he famously defined the enemy as “terrorist groups of global reach.” But an important report released February 5 by the Open Society Justice Initiative shows that a central element of the Bush administration’s response was itself to spread terror—on a global scale. The report, “Globalizing Torture,” reveals that while the United States was the progenitor of the CIA program that abducted, rendered, disappeared and tortured terror suspects, at least fifty-four other nations are implicated in the program. The report, the most comprehensive to date on the rendition program, names names—from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe—and calls for the accountability that has thus far been almost entirely missing.
Some nations, such as Poland and Thailand, allowed the CIA to establish secret prisons, or “black sites,” on their territory. Some, like Syria, Jordan, Pakistan and Egypt, tortured suspects the CIA rendered to them. Some, like Macedonia, Georgia and Sweden, delivered suspects to the CIA, essentially handing them over to be tortured. Some, like Canada and Britain, provided intelligence that the CIA then used to capture, render or interrogate suspects. Some, like Germany and Britain, participated in the interrogations themselves. Many, including Belgium, Iceland, Greece and Denmark, allowed rendition flights to use their airports and airspace. And nearly all have failed to conduct serious investigations of their complicity in the US turn to the dark side.
What are we to make of these worldwide tentacles of the extraordinary rendition program? The involvement of so many other nations in a program that, once it became public, was almost universally condemned suggests that hypocrisy is not the exclusive domain of Bush officials (who claimed they did not “torture” even as they secretly authorized Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to be waterboarded 183 times). The widespread global condemnation of the rendition program voiced by other countries, it turns out, often masked quiet support for the program by those very same countries. It almost seems as if the United States affirmatively sought to implicate as many other nations as possible, to reduce the likelihood that anyone would call it out.
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