As we’re all aware, Santa Claus doesn’t exist. Neither does the tooth fairy, Frosty the Snowman, the Boogieman, the Easter Bunny, and, of course, Black Sites, nor the illegal seizure and transport of foreign nationals by the United States, a practice known as Rendition.
Were one to ask Maher Arar, he would certainly tell you that Rendition is a very real practice, having been a victim of it. US intelligence leaned on the RCMP, the RCMP offered up a lamb, Arar was seized at JFK, flown to Washington and then to Jordan where he was driven to the Syrian border and handed over to the Syrian authorities who then, over the course of a year, held him in prison and tortured him in an attempt to extract information regarding a subject he knew nothing about – al-Qaeda.
Of course, the inquiry into Arar’s Rendition resulted in the sacking of the head of the RCMP, an apology from the government, and a financial settlement. But thus far US courts have rejected Arar’s attempts to hold the government that was actually responsible for the Rendition accountable.
No real surprise there.
Unfortunately, Canada is not alone in complicity when it comes to aiding and abetting the practice of Rendition. Others have willfully allowed planes Rendering detainees to use their airspace and even land within their borders, fully aware of their cargo and purpose…
“The secret flight plans of American military planes have revealed for the first time how European countries helped send prisoners, including British citizens, to the Guantanamo Bay prison camp.
Despite widespread criticism of alleged human rights abuses and torture at the US base in Cuba, a Sunday Times investigation has shown that at least five European countries gave the United States permission to fly nearly 700 terrorist suspects across their territory.
Three years ago, The Sunday Times published flight logs of CIA civilian jets in Europe, setting off a controversy over the whether countries across the continent have been secretly involved in America’s rendition of terrorist suspects to countries that carry out torture.
The row is now set to be reignited. Inquiries by Ana Gomes, a Portuguese member of the European parliament, have uncovered not only more CIA flight logs but also more sensitive military flight plans, which until now have remained a closely guarded secret.
The logs show how most prisoners changed planes at a Turkish military airbase and flew across Greek, Italian and Portuguese airspace. Others reached Cuba after touching down in Spain, whose governing socialist party once expressed indignation at conditions in Guantanamo.
The flight logs show that three Britons – Shafiq Rasul, Jamal Udeen and Asif Iqbal – were flown across Europe to Cuba on January 14, 2002. Moazzam Begg, another Briton, was taken by the same route to Guantanamo on February 2, 2003; and Binyam Mohamed, a British resident whose release the British government is now trying to negotiate, arrived in Cuba after crossing Europe in a special flight in September 2004.
According to the flight plans, the first 23 prisoners to arrive at Guantanamo – including another British citizen, Feroz Abbasi, then 21, and an Australian, David Hicks – had arrived at the American naval base in Cuba after flying from the Moron airbase in Spain.
Abbasi has claimed in a statement that prisoners were abused within hours of arriving. “We were made to sit on our heels, one foot over the other, supported by one foot’s toes alone, for hours. Some of us were old, weak, fatigued, and injured – they were the ones to drop first in the searing Caribbean heat.”
Described by the Pentagon as the “worst of the worst” from Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, the images of prisoners such as Abbasi dressed in orange jumpsuits, their heads shaved and shackled by their wrists and ankles, shocked the world. Within a day, Donald Rumsfeld, then US defence secretary, announced that the Geneva conventions would not apply to what were now called “enemy combatants”.
Last week, Europe’s leading watchdog on human rights alleged that European countries had breached the international convention against torture by giving the US secret permission to use its airspace.
Thomas Hammarberg, the Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights, said: “What happened at Guantanamo was torture and it is illegal to provide facilities or anything to make this torture possible. Under the law, European governments should have intervened and should not have given permission to let these flights happen.”
Gomes added: “It’s clear to me that Guantanamo could not have been created without the involvement of European countries.”
Methods used at Guantanamo Bay, condemned by Britain’s Court of Appeal as a legal “black hole” and as a “monstrous failure of justice” by one law lord, have included the prolonged use of isolation, sleep deprivation, and use of stress positions. “These are methods that have been declared as unlawful by the European Court of Human Rights,” Hammarberg said.
The military flight plans show that all key flights arriving in Guantanamo had come across European airspace either through Spain or the Incirlik airbase in southeastern Turkey. The Sunday Times compared the military flight plans against a database compiled by Reprieve, the British-based charity that represents Guantanamo prisoners, of when prisoners first weighed in at the camp.
The investigation, cross-checked against other Pentagon documents, shows for the first time which prisoner arrived on which flight at Guantanamo, and by what route. At least 170 other prisoners flew over Spanish territory, more than 700 crossed Portuguese space, and more than 680 were transshipped at Incirlik. Most flights also crossed Greek and Italian airspace, according to a source in European air traffic control.
On February 2 2003, for example, a US Air Force C-17 Globemaster plane took off from Incirlik with 27 prisoners on board for Cuba. The same day, prisoner number 558 weighed in at 136lb (62kg) at the camp. He can be named as Moazzam Begg, now 39, from Birmingham, who was released in January 2005, and has never been charged with a crime.
Interviewed by phone last week, Begg recalled: “Inside the plane there was a chain around our waist, and it connected to cuffs around my wrists, which were tied in the back, and to my ankles. We were seated but it was so painful not being able to speak, to hear, to breathe properly, to look, to turn left or right, to move your hands, stretch your legs, or anything.” At the time flights were landing in Spain and crossing Spanish airspace, socialist leaders there were expressing “indignation” over conditions in Guantanamo. Now the socialists are in government after winning an election in March 2004 just after the Madrid train bombings and they are being asked to defend Spain’s continued collaboration with American operations. Under international law, government and military planes can cross another country’s territory only with diplomatic permission.
In a statement to the European parliament on the visits of CIA planes to Spain, the foreign minister Miguel Angel Moratinos has testified: “Our territory may have been used not to commit crimes on it, but as a stopover on the way to committing crime in another country.”
Spain, it has now emerged, had a specific agreement with the US to allow flights and visits to Spanish airbases for American planes.
In Portugal, the foreign minister Luis Amado has said flights across his country’s airspace took place “under the aegis of the UN and Nato and that Portugal naturally follows the principle of good faith in the relations with its allies”. Nato’s role in Guantanamo stems from a secret agreement made in Brussels on October 4 2001 by all Nato members, including Britain. Although never made public, Lord Robertson, the former British defence secretary who was later Nato’s secretary-general, explained that day that Nato had agreed to provide “blanket overflight clearances for the United States and other allies’ aircraft for military flights related to operations against terrorism”.
Today, Nato is more coy about its role in helping send prisoners to Guantanamo.
In a letter to Gomes, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the current secretary-general, said no Nato planes had “flown to or from Guantanamo Bay” and that Nato “as an organisation has no involvement or co-ordinating role in providing clearance or overflight rights for other flights”. Turkey, meanwhile, has declared that its agencies had “reached no findings regarding any unacknowledged deprivation of liberty conducted by foreign agencies within the territory of the republic of Turkey or any transport by aircraft or otherwise of the persons deprived of their liberty”.
In London, Clive Stafford Smith, legal director of Reprieve, said, with America threatening that Guantanamo prisoners faced the death penalty, European governments had made “pious statements” that they would never send prisoners to the US without obtaining assurances they would not be executed.
Stafford Smith added: “Some European governments, it’s now clear, systematically assisted in clandestine flights and illegal prisoner transfers to Guantanamo Bay. We need a full investigation and Europeans need to face their responsibility for these crimes.”
If Guantanamo is, as the United States has repeatedly claimed, filled with some of the most dangerous terrorists in the world, and they have overwhelming proof of culpability, then why not try them based on the evidence that they have in a wholly transparent fashion? What does the US have to lose by refusing to engage in such a process compared to the military kangaroo court that has been fashioned to deal with it? Of course, given the legal ambiguity of the status given those detained, to undertake truly transparent proceedings would, of course, thrust to the forefront the afore mentioned ambiguity that has been employed by the United States regarding the classification of those being detained. Serious questions would have to be confronted regarding the Geneva Conventions, access to the International Red Cross/Red Crescent, and, most importantly, the legal classification of detainees as it applies to either international law or the laws of the United States itself.
How long will the detainees at Guantanamo be held? If an individual has been interned there for years, what actionable intelligence could they still possess now? And if they possess none, or have run their course as a mole within the population in exchange for God knows what, then they either have to be tried for a crime or released. That’s how the law works, especially as it applies to a nation founded on the rule of law that is holding them beyond the law.
Of course, there are other options to consider. That some of the individuals that were held, and endured God knows what, were flipped because they were told they would spend the rest of their lives as prisoners if they didn’t. Thus, they could be shuttled off to various locations around the world in an attempt to have them infiltrate various known radical elements within certain communities. Then again, who’s to say they wouldn’t simply disappear given the chance? Perhaps threats were made against their families, maybe members of their families are also being detained – the truth is that the possibilities are endless. But one thing that remains constant is the fact that there are hundreds of individuals being held incommunicado and outside of the strictures of any truly recognized legal platform. US Combatant Status Review Tribunals do not apply, no matter the justifications given by the US government, because the rights afforded those that face them are overwhelmingly limited, not to mention the fact that such proceedings, that are without legal precedent both internationally and under US law, are considered matters of national security and thus entirely suspect to the influence of policy objectives.
April 19, 2009 34 Comments