More evidence of US government’s torture by proxy

[IndianaGreen]

More evidence of US government’s torture by proxy
By Joseph Kay
12 February 2005

The Bush administration’s February 7, 2002, policy memorandum announcing that Taliban and Al Qaeda prisoners would not be granted POW status under the Geneva Conventions states that the “United States Armed Forces” must treat prisoners humanely only “to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity.” It says nothing about the CIA. In his confirmation hearings before the Senate, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales stated that the CIA is not prohibited from using cruel and inhumane methods, so long as it is done outside of the US.

The White House and its congressional allies have blocked legislation in the Senate that would ban the CIA from torturing foreign prisoners. (See “White House blocked Senate ban on torture”). An effort in the House to specifically outlaw rendition has also failed.

It was the CIA that made the request that ended in the now infamous “torture memo,” signed by then Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, which defined torture so narrowly as to allow the widest range of methods. Bybee signed another as yet unreleased memo dated March 13, 2002, entitled “Re: The President’s Power as Commander in Chief to Transfer Captured Terrorists to the Control and Custody of Foreign Nations.” Judging from the contents of the memos written around the same time, there can be little doubt that this memo argued that the president as commander in chief has the authority to override international law and order renditions to countries that practice torture as part of the “war on terror.”

One of the most favored countries for the CIA’s rendition program has been Egypt, a close US ally whose intelligence agency is notorious for its brutal treatment of prisoners. Mayer quotes Michael Scheuer, a former CIA counter-terrorism expert and author of the recent book, Imperial Hubris, as noting that some of the early Al Qaeda suspects that the CIA was interested in interrogating were also Egyptian and had been involved in the assassination of the Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat. “‘It served American purposes to get these people arrested,” Scheuer noted, “and Egyptian purposes to get these people back, where they could be interrogated.”

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/feb2005/rend-f12.shtml