In the past days and weeks, stories about CIA flights and secretly shifting detainees around the world have spilled on to the front pages and led television news bulletins all across Europe. Media and MPs alike have demanded answers, in connection with possible interrogation centres, in such places as Poland and Romania. Governments have sometimes been less forthright in their demands for clarity, perhaps aware of their own potential complicity. Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, remains charming and unbending, insisting that everything that the US Government does is by the book. In Ms Rice’s reassuring if not entirely convincing words: “We believe in the rule of law.”
Even as the political and media storm about the CIA flights and alleged torture engulfs Europe, the US administration appears to believe that it can simply sit the dramas out. Washington has sat out many storms before, and there are in any case as many questions as answers, when it comes to the details of CIA prisoner transfers and alleged interrogation centres in continental Europe. But the evidence that the Americans are breaking the rules is overwhelming. The refusal to be bound by international laws may yet return to haunt the United States. The widespread unease does not look set to dissipate quickly.
The documented pattern of CIA flights – from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Guantanamo Bay, for example, and onward to the United States, with stop-offs in eastern Europe on the way -- throws up odd questions, at the very least, about what those flights were doing. The locations suggest that these were not refuelling stops. Any country that commits or is complicit in torture is in clear breach of international law. So, too, is any government that allows people to be sent to countries where they are at risk of torture. Clear answers are needed. The US television network ABC News reported on 5 December that, according to current and former CIA officers, the United States “scrambled to get all suspects off European soil” before Ms Rice’s arrival in Europe. According to ABC, the CIA “held in Poland” 11 “high-value” detainees; they are said to have been subjected to “waterboarding” – being held under water until the victim thinks he or she will die, notorious in Latin American military dictatorships as the submarino.
The Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, put his name to a letter from the European Union requiring some answers from Washington. The letter was sent on behalf of the EU presidency, which Britain holds until the end of the year. But the evasive tone of Mr Straw’s comments when asked about the letter suggests that he himself was far from eager to confront the Americans on this issue. As ever, the UK seems almost more embarrassed by allegations against the Americans than the Americans themselves.
The pattern of lawlessness is scarcely new. Already in the past few years we have seen a documented pattern of what the US authorities themselves have described as “extraordinary rendition”. The phrase sounds like some arcane legal procedure. In reality, it can be seen as a synonym for “government kidnap”. Condoleezza Rice talked this month as if extraordinary rendition merely involved handing over suspects to another government. But the comparison with extradition is misleading.
Unlike extradition, “extraordinary rendition” does not rely on cooperation between two sovereign governments. Nor – again, unlike extradition – does it offer the prospect of due process once the rendition has taken place. Thus, one notable case involved the abduction by CIA officials of the radical cleric, Abu Omar, from the streets of Milan. Italian prosecutors have opened an investigation into the kidnapping.
Sometimes, torture is “subcontracted”, through rendition to a country where there is a risk of torture. Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen, was snatched while going through New York’s JFK airport en route home to Canada. The Americans handed Arar over to the Syrians – after gaining “appropriate assurances” that he would not be tortured. He was, of course, tortured. In Canada, a commission of inquiry is now being held into the case.
Human Rights Watch has documented the cases of more than two dozen named detainees who have been picked up and simply removed from circulation. Such prisoners have become known as “ghost detainees” – invisible and inaccessible to the International Committee of the Red Cross. The men on that list are not necessarily “good guys”, far from it. They include alleged ringleaders of al Qaida, involved in some of the worst terror attacks we have seen, including 9/11 and the Bali bombing. But that is a reason to prosecute them, not to treat international law as an irrelevant distraction. The experience of Latin America and elsewhere has taught us clearly that, where detainees are “disappeared” in this way, torture usually follows. If the intention is not to torture after all, why bother with keeping the detainees away from all oversight, by the International Committee of the Red Cross or anybody else?
Ms Rice declared, before setting off for Europe: “The US Government does not authorise or condone torture of detainees.” In reality, the authorities have repeatedly made clear that they believe that (to use our own Prime Minister’s phrase) the rules of the game have changed. The administration has repeatedly tried to rewrite the rules to give its own operatives more latitude. The White House continues to insist that CIA agents abroad should not be bound by the same rules that constrain others. The Republican Senator John McCain – himself held prisoner by the North Vietnamese – has sought to confront this lawless behaviour, and the Republican-dominated Senate recently voted 90-9 against official attempts to allow the CIA to stand completely above the law. Even now, however, the White House refuses to back down.
Condoleezza Rice talked, on the occasion of her European trip, of the importance of the rule of law. But Washington sends a more consistent and very different message – that the old rules no longer matter, if we are to stay safe from the terrorist threat. In reality, a good case can be made for suggesting that the abandonment of rules – at Guantanamo, at Abu Ghraib, and now, it seems, in Europe, too – has played a key role in helping make the world a more dangerous place. The impact of the continued trampling of law is incalculable. In the most obvious sense, that is a US problem. But the British Government, too, needs to send that message much more clearly than it has done until now. That is important for us all.
Published in The Tablet
