Features » February 4, 2008
Extraordinary Rendition on Trial (cont’d)
At the end of the day, the case is about sending a clear message to U.S. companies that they will be held accountable for profiting from human rights violations.
Flight records show that Bisher Al-Rawi was flown to Kabul, Afghanistan, where intelligence reports confirm that the United States detained him at a secret CIA facility known as the “Dark Prison,” and later at Bagram Air Base.
In a sworn affidavit, Al-Rawi describes what happened to him upon his arrival:
From the outset I was held in complete darkness and isolation and kept in leg shackles 24 hours a day. I was given very little water and fed only once every one or two days. Despite the extreme cold, I was not provided with adequate clothing or blankets. Strange music and loud man-made sounds were played around the clock, which in addition to the screams of other prisoners around me, made sleeping extremely difficult.
He says things got worse after U.S. officials transferred him to Bagram. “I was kicked and dragged along the floor … held in a squalid cell [for two months] and forced to undergo prolonged periods of isolation and sleep depravation,” he testified. “I was threatened with death or transfer to another country to be tortured.”
Al-Rawi was finally transferred to the U.S. Naval Base at Guantánamo on Feb. 7, 2003, where he would spend the next four years without being charged. He was released on March 30, 2007, and was flown on a luxury Lear Jet back to the United Kingdom, where he currently resides. He has received neither an apology nor an explanation for his ordeal.
Breaking the Code
Connecting Jeppesen Dataplan to the rendition flights was nothing short of a journalistic grand slam.
In 2005, Italian investigative reporter Claudio Gatti “broke the Jeppesen code” when he managed to trace the company’s unique originator identification number to specific rendition planes using public flight databases.
Then in 2006, journalist Stephen Grey further exposed the nuts and bolts of the program with his book Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program, in which he documents the cases of nearly 90 people who were rendered by the CIA.
Between the work of the two journalists and that of the U.N. Committee on Torture and governmental agencies throughout Europe, there’s little about extraordinary rendition that hasn’t been exposed.
What is clear is that the activities that constitute the program are illegal under universally accepted international standards and conventions.
Among them, U.N. General Assembly Resolution 47/133, ratified in 1992, expressly prohibits “enforced disappearances,” and spells out that such operations “render their perpetrators and the state or state authorities which organize, acquiesce in or tolerate such disappearances liable under civil law.”
The Jeppesen plaintiffs are seeking compensation of no less than $75,000 each and unspecified punitive damages.
But the ACLU’s Wizner says at the end of the day, the case is about sending a clear message to U.S. companies that they will be held accountable for profiting from human rights violations.
“More and more of our military and security services are turning to private contractors and it might very well be difficult for them to carry out these operations without these contractors,” Wizner says. “If some of those private contractors look at the Jeppesen case and think twice before taking the CIA’s money to participate in these illegal and immoral operations, then we will have succeeded.”
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Appeared in the February 2008 Issue
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