Perhaps, just slightly, the horrendous actions of renditioning by the US and the UK - with the complicity of other Governments - are being revealed. It's not difficult to see why the revelations are not the subject of severe condemnation. Its lawlessness at its worst.
Two examples, and the consequences of renditioning, have come to light in the last 48 hours.
First, from IHT Global Opinion:
"The United States government has been trying for almost a decade to hush up what it did to Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen whose story of mistaken identity, abduction and abuse was one of the low points in the C.I.A.’s post 9/11 “war on terror.”
This morning, the cover-up ended. The European Court of Human Rights held that Mr. Masri’s forcible disappearance, kidnapping and covert transfer without legal process to United States custody nine years ago violated the most basic guarantees of human decency. Notably, the court found that the treatment suffered by Mr. Masri in 2003 “at the hands of the special C.I.A. rendition team,” at an airport in Skopje, the capital of the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia, “amounted to torture.”
Although the case was filed against the Macedonian government and the court does not have jurisdiction over the United States, the ruling is a powerful condemnation of improper C.I.A. tactics and of the abject failure of any American court to provide redress for Mr. Masri or the other victims of Washington’s discredited policy of secret detention and extraordinary rendition."
The Guardian covers the same subject here.
Second, also from The Guardian:
"Ministers have agreed to pay more than £2m to the family of a prominent Libyan dissident abducted with the help of MI6 and secretly flown to Tripoli where he was tortured by the security police of the former dictator Muammar Gaddafi.
Having sought for years to avoid the agents of the Libyan dictator, Sami al-Saadi was forced on board a plane in Hong Kong with his wife and four young children in a joint UK-US-Libyan operation. They were then flown to Libya, where all of them were initially imprisoned. Saadi was held and tortured for years.
The Saadi family had accepted a settlement of £2.23m, the high court heard on Thursday. The government paid the sum by way of compensation and without admitting any liability.
Evidence of the UK's role in the operation – believed to be the only case where an entire family was subjected to "extraordinary rendition" – came to light after Gaddafi's fall in 2011.
CIA correspondence with Libyan intelligence, found in the spy chief Moussa Koussa's office in Tripoli by Human Rights Watch, states: "We are … aware that your service had been co-operating with the British to effect [Saadi's] removal to Tripoli … the Hong Kong government may be able to co-ordinate with you to render [Saadi] and his family into your custody."
The operation was arranged in 2004 at the time of Tony Blair's "deal in the desert" with Gaddafi, after which UK intelligence services helped track down and hand over his opponents."
Two examples, and the consequences of renditioning, have come to light in the last 48 hours.
First, from IHT Global Opinion:
"The United States government has been trying for almost a decade to hush up what it did to Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen whose story of mistaken identity, abduction and abuse was one of the low points in the C.I.A.’s post 9/11 “war on terror.”
This morning, the cover-up ended. The European Court of Human Rights held that Mr. Masri’s forcible disappearance, kidnapping and covert transfer without legal process to United States custody nine years ago violated the most basic guarantees of human decency. Notably, the court found that the treatment suffered by Mr. Masri in 2003 “at the hands of the special C.I.A. rendition team,” at an airport in Skopje, the capital of the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia, “amounted to torture.”
Although the case was filed against the Macedonian government and the court does not have jurisdiction over the United States, the ruling is a powerful condemnation of improper C.I.A. tactics and of the abject failure of any American court to provide redress for Mr. Masri or the other victims of Washington’s discredited policy of secret detention and extraordinary rendition."
The Guardian covers the same subject here.
Second, also from The Guardian:
"Ministers have agreed to pay more than £2m to the family of a prominent Libyan dissident abducted with the help of MI6 and secretly flown to Tripoli where he was tortured by the security police of the former dictator Muammar Gaddafi.
Having sought for years to avoid the agents of the Libyan dictator, Sami al-Saadi was forced on board a plane in Hong Kong with his wife and four young children in a joint UK-US-Libyan operation. They were then flown to Libya, where all of them were initially imprisoned. Saadi was held and tortured for years.
The Saadi family had accepted a settlement of £2.23m, the high court heard on Thursday. The government paid the sum by way of compensation and without admitting any liability.
Evidence of the UK's role in the operation – believed to be the only case where an entire family was subjected to "extraordinary rendition" – came to light after Gaddafi's fall in 2011.
CIA correspondence with Libyan intelligence, found in the spy chief Moussa Koussa's office in Tripoli by Human Rights Watch, states: "We are … aware that your service had been co-operating with the British to effect [Saadi's] removal to Tripoli … the Hong Kong government may be able to co-ordinate with you to render [Saadi] and his family into your custody."
The operation was arranged in 2004 at the time of Tony Blair's "deal in the desert" with Gaddafi, after which UK intelligence services helped track down and hand over his opponents."
Comments