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Tortuous excuses on torture

By ROBYN E. BLUMNER
Published December 11, 2005

It should have been dubbed the "You gonna believe me or your lyin' eyes?" tour.

During her trip to Europe last week, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice responded to the uproar surrounding the revelations over the CIA's chain of secret prisons, America's rendition activities and the Bush administration's use of abusive interrogation techniques by offering gymnastic legalisms rather than coming clean.

Rice made ridiculous claims in light of the people who keep turning up with credible stories of U.S. agents sending them to foreign prisons where they are brutalized. And her words belied the dogged efforts of our vice president to get an explicit CIA exception to antitorture rules.

When Rice said the United States "does not permit, tolerate or condone torture" of prisoners, she was basing it on a Queen of Hearts definition of torture, which is whatever the Bush administration says it is. Also note the use of the present tense "does not" as opposed to "has not."

When this didn't quell the questioning, she put out a little more rope, proclaiming that obligations under the U.N. Convention Against Torture, which prohibits cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment, "extend to U.S. personnel wherever they are." This is either a change in policy (which the administration denies), a blatant falsehood or a Bizarro World definition of "cruel."

When Rice said that the United States has not "transported anyone, and will not transport anyone, to a country where we believe he will be tortured," she was careful to use the term "will" rather than "may" to maintain "plausible deniability." The agency she heads documents on a yearly basis the abuses prisoners face in Egypt, Syria and other places where renditions have occurred. Her crocodile protests only affirmed in our allies' minds that the Bush administration is populated by a bunch of dissemblers. (See Colin Powell's WMD briefing for more.)

As Rice was declaring America's respect for international treaties against prisoner abuse, Khaled Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent, was filing a lawsuit in U.S. federal court. He was a victim of American rendition and a prisoner for five months, during which time just about every law, rule, policy and treaty against prisoner abuse was violated.

But Masri turned out to be the wrong guy.

Thanks to brilliant reporting by Dana Priest of the Washington Post, we know that Masri's ordeal happened largely as he described it. Here's his story:

Masri, an unemployed husband and father of five, was picked up by Macedonian police on New Year's Eve 2003. He was traveling there on a bus after an argument with his wife. The police found a similarity between his name and that of an associate to a 9/11 hijacker and claimed that his passport was a forgery. The CIA was alerted. For 23 days, Masri was held in a darkened hotel room in Skopje and interrogated while his fate was debated by the CIA.

On Jan. 23, 2004, Masri was handcuffed and blindfolded and taken to an airfield. In a nearby building, he was "severely beaten" with a "thick stick." His clothes were cut off his body and something was "forced inside my anus." It was an enema.

A hooded, earmuffed and blindfolded Masri, now in a diaper and track suit, was taken on a plane where he was shackled to the floor in a spread-eagle position. He was then drugged with two injections. He later learned he was being flown to Afghanistan, where he would spend more than four months in solitary confinement in a small, cold concrete cell. That first night, Masri was warned by an interrogator that he was in a country "where there is no law. If you die, we will bury you, and no one will know."

Masri was photographed naked and aggressively interrogated a number of times by a masked man as other men in ski masks stood by. After he commenced a hunger strike, he was tied to a chair and had a feeding tube "forced through my nose to my stomach."

Eventually, he was put on another plane and dropped with his passport on a dark country road in Albania. As he walked away from his captors, he thought they would shoot him in the back.

The Post reports that the CIA knew within two months of Masri's detention in Afghanistan that it had the wrong man and his passport was valid. But it kept him anyway. Masri's suit is against George Tenet, former director of the CIA, and three aviation companies that allegedly assisted the CIA's rendition activities.

The Post's CIA contacts say there have been dozens of other such "erroneous renditions," including a college professor who, it turned out, had once given a bad grade to an al-Qaida member.

While in Germany, Rice was peppered with questions about the Masri case. She refused to fess up to the mistake (embarrassing the new German chancellor in the process). She refused to apologize for the extralegal actions taken by the U.S. government. She refused to reflect in the slightest on the way the Bush administration is denigrating the values we stand for.

She just returned to her well-trodden script of loophole-ridden assertions that are really just a pack of lies.

[Last modified December 9, 2005, 18:45:03]