Outsourced Terror

[deminks]

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/12/senate_torture_report_s_unnamed_victims_the_cia_had_hundreds_or_thousands.html

As bad as the stories in the Senate torture report are, there is a whole class of victims who aren’t even mentioned. The executive summary released last week makes only passing reference to an integral component of the CIA program: the “extraordinary rendition” of prisoners to foreign custody for “interrogation” by those countries’ intelligence services—with the full knowledge that the men would be tortured.


Because rendition was beyond the report’s scope, there’s still no official account of the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other victims of torture that the CIA is responsible for.


As the Washington Post revealed in 2005, the CIA identified two categories of prisoners for detention and interrogation: “high value” detainees that the agency held onto and “second tier” ones who were farmed out for detention and interrogation to other governments. As former CIA officer Bob Baer explained in disturbing detail, “If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear—never to see them again—you send them to Egypt.”


How many detainees met such fates? The Post reported that more than twice as many prisoners were rendered by the CIA to foreign governments as were held by the agency. Since we now know that 119 men were held by the CIA, that would mean at least 238 people were sent to other countries. And this figure could be much higher: In his January 2003 State of the Union address, President George W. Bush said that “more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries.”

(end snip)

Several accounts are at the link.

[chervilant]

1. I suspect we'll never know how many innocent people

were "disappeared."

[blkmusclmachine]

2. ,

,