A short article about the CIA outsourcing torture in the Middle East.
The CIA has flown about 150 suspected terrorists to torture cells abroad in Egypt, Syria, Pakistan and Jordan, since 9/11. The prisoners are secretly flown out of the US on planes, so that they can be tortured by outsourced CIA operatives operating
in the Middle East–without due process, or the Geneva conventions.
One of the more obtrusive cases is that of 34 year old Canadian engineer Maher Arar. Arar was detained for questioning on September 26, 2002 at JFK, and then flown to Washington, Portland, Maine, Rome, Italy, then imprisoned, and tortured in Amman, Jordan.
Andrea Mitchell at MSNBC quoted Arar saying: "The American officials who sent me there...They sent me there to be tortured."
Jane Mayer at the New Yorker noted that: “Ten hours after landing in Jordan, Arar said, he was
driven to Syria, where interrogators, after a day of threats, “just began beating on me.” They
whipped his hands repeatedly with two-inch-thick electrical cables, and kept him in a
windowless underground cell that he likened to a grave. “Not even animals could withstand it,”
he said. Although he initially tried to assert his innocence, he eventually confessed to anything
his tormentors wanted him to say. “You just give up,” he said. “You become like an animal.”
The sadistic torture of Arar that has become a standard operating procedure for the CIA
during the Bush Administration, is similar to torture that took place at Abu Ghraib. Arar was
released after being repeatedly tortured, because of pressure exerted by Canadian officials. Arar
has filed suit against the US government, and the case has drawn international attention.
Arar said that: “They are outsourcing torture because they know it’’s illegal,” he said. “Why, if
they have suspicions, don’t they question people within the boundary of the law?”
The terror suspects are commonly flown without due process on either 737s, or Gulfstream
5 jets to the torture chambers in the Middle East. The outsourcing of terror has become
a common practice at the CIA, under the Bush Administration.
The terror practices first institutionalized by Attorney General Gonzales in a series of White
House memos during the first term, have become the foundation for the rampant torture
practices at Abu Ghraib, and at the CIA. On February 16, 2005 CIA Director Porter Goss
said that: "Of course, once they're out of our control, there's only so much we can do."
The practice of outsourcing torture needs to stop, and detainees should be interrogated
in the US, under US legal jurisdiction. The CIA has once again has exceeded it’s authority,
and has greatly abused detainee human rights, and international law.