CIA's Assurances On Transferred Suspects Doubted

• Prisoners Say Countries Break No-Torture Pledges

The system the CIA relies on to ensure that the suspected terrorists it transfers to other countries will not be tortured has been ineffective and virtually impossible to monitor, according to current and former intelligence officers and lawyers, as well as counterterrorism officials who have participated in or reviewed the practice. To comply with anti-torture laws that bar sending people to countries where they are likely to be tortured, the CIA's office of general counsel requires a verbal assurance from each nation that detainees will be treated humanely, according to several recently retired CIA officials familiar with such transfers, known as renditions. But the effectiveness of the assurances and the legality of the rendition practice are increasingly being questioned by rights groups and others, as freed detainees have alleged that they were mistreated by interrogators after the CIA secretly delivered them to countries with well-documented records of abuse. President Bush weighed in on the matter for the first time yesterday, defending renditions as vital to the nation's defense. In "the post-9/11 world, the United States must make sure we protect our people and our friends from attack," he said at a news conference. "And one way to do so is to arrest people and send them back to their country of origin with the promise that they won't be tortured. That's the promise we receive. This country does not believe in torture. We do believe in protecting ourselves." One CIA officer involved with renditions, however, called the assurances from other countries "a farce." Another U.S. government official who visited several foreign prisons where suspects were rendered by the CIA after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, said: "It's beyond that. It's widely understood that interrogation practices that would be illegal in the U.S. are being used." [more] and [more]


THE 'COUNTERPRODUCTIVE' USE OF TORTURE: Even to set aside the ideological case against outsourcing torture, the Bush administration's carrying out of the rendition program has been seriously flawed. Firstly, "torture is usually counterproductive." Veteran agents from both the FBI and CIA "doubt the effectiveness of physical coercion as a means of extracting reliable information, " as a prisoner subjected to intense physical pain will admit just about anything to end the torture. Intelligence agents then end up chasing down false confessions instead of devoting time to real leads. A glaring example of this is that the Bush administration's pre-Iraq invasion claims of a connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda came from a prisoner who had been rendered to Egypt, and later "recanted" the same information that he had provided. [more]