The Talking Dog interviews journalist Stephen Grey, author of “Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program.” Excerpt:
As to the CIA officers I spoke to, again, I was impressed with their honesty. They had no illusions that the people being sent to Egypt, Syria or Morocco would be tortured– they were realistic. They made it perfectly clear to the White House and the Justice Department that these people were tortured, but the higher ups in the American government proceeded to continue doing this anyway, and then insisted that the United States did not send people to places that torture.
Maher Arar just received $10 million in compensation from the Canadian government after he was seized on a stopover in New York on the way home to Canada and deported to Syria where he was detained and tortured for a year. Canadian police (the RCMP) had fed the U.S. erroneous information, leading to his arrest.
Despite a two-year federal government investigation, which cleared him of any links with terrorist organizations, Mr. Arar still remains on the U.S. no-fly list and the American government insists that he is still a danger. I see it more as the U.S. government stubbornly refusing to admit that they were wrong and an innocent man went through hell.
They made it perfectly clear to the White House and the Justice Department that these people were tortured,
That statement above doesn’t make sense.. It was the White House who initiated the directive to torture, so why would the White House need clarification?…Unless the statement above is intended as a confirmation that their directives were being complied with.
Swami–
The official cover was that Syria, Egypt, Morocco, etc. had “provided assurances that they would not engage in torture”. This was the thin reed grasped for our “legal workaround” for our evasion of established international and American law precluding our kidnapping people and sending them off to be torture (indeed, if anyone was killed in the course of this, capital punishment is an available penalty.) So one can see the need for these “legal workarounds”.
Now, we all know this was Orwellian nonsense, but this as been the cover story carried on as late as this week, when Gonzales repeated that same exact tripe to Senator Leahy, who was duly outraged; what really matters is if the public continues to be apathetic, and if Speaker Pelosi continues to say really stupid things like “impeachment is off the table”.
Because the violations of domestic and international law associated with the rendition program, all by themselves, should land a lot of people in the dock, somewhere.