Rendition and torture, it’s the American way?

The European newspaper, the TimesOnline had an interesting article this past Sunday. What bothers me that I can’t find anything similar in the US media. I googled the main phrase ‘flight logs, cia’ and only got the European write-ups, with the exception of a two-year old CommonDreams article reprinted from a French news media outlet. Pathetic wouldn’t you say?

Back to the Times article, which is the second write-up they have done on the CIA’s rendition of individuals. The second paragraph caught my attention:

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. (emphasis mine)

Seven Hundred suspects is quite the load of terrorists isn’t it? Considering the fact that over 400 prisoners have been released over the last few years from Gitmo, more than half the total number incarcerated since the opening days of the war on terror, it gives one pause to think about how many of the secretly kidnapped suspects never made it to Gitmo and what actually happened to them…but I digress.

The three-year-old write-up has quite a bit more information on these flights. Also, this website has all the excruciating details of each flight. A paragraph from the 3-year-old write-up:

Countries with poor human rights records to which the Americans have delivered prisoners include Egypt, Syria and Uzbekistan, according to the files. The logs have prompted allegations from critics that the agency is using such regimes to carry out “torture by proxy” - a charge denied by the American government.

Robert Baer, a former CIA employee has written a book entitled “Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude.” He has commented on the CIA’s rendition of suspects by saying:

“If you want a serious interrogation you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear . . . you send them to Egypt.” (emphasis mine)

So, with many of these flights going in and out of these three countries, one cannot deny that employees of the United States have engaged in torture and making people ‘disappear’, right? Still, we see nothing in our America media on the topics of rendition and torture. Why is our media so complicit in these tactics? Why do they cover-up what our government employees have and are doing? Why is it left up to the Europeans to expose this horrendous bs my dear reader?

Hopefully, this will all be seeing the light of day again. As the TimesOnline article this past Sunday notes:

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.

We need to keep this front and center in the minds of all Americans. We cannot allow it to be swept under the proverbial rug. Our government tortures people. They torture innocent people without any due process. Read the words of one who has been there, British citizen, Feroz Abbasi, then 21 when he was whisked away:

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.”

It’s all so sickening to me. It makes me ashamed to be an American. These European countries are moon-walking their way out of this by saying they might have been complicit..and then again..maybe not. They all have an excuse, like Spain for instance- “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.”

Europeans are examining their countries roles in the US rendition of suspects. We, as American’s, need to do the same. To quote from the TimesOnline article again:

“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.”

One can only hope that a full investigation is done in Europe, because we sure as hell won’t be having one here in the good old US of A…way too many skeletons in that closet.

Crossposted at The Peace Train