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November 16, 2004
U.S. using "torture flights"
The London Times has received confidential logs showing that the United States may be using an executive jet to shuttle suspected terrorists to countries which will use torture to interrogate them. The U.S. denies these charges of "torture by proxy".
Witnesses described seeing the prisoners handed to US agents whose faces were masked by hoods. The clothes of the handcuffed prisoners were cut off and they were dressed in nappies covered by orange overalls before being forcibly given sedatives by suppository.
The Gulfstream flew them to Egypt, where both prisoners claimed they were beaten and tortured with electric shocks to their genitals. Despite liberal Swedish laws on freedom of information, diplomatic telegrams on the case released to the media were edited to conceal the complaints of torture.
Hamida Shalaby, Agiza’s mother, said: “The mattress had electricity . . . When they connected to the electricity, his body would rise up and then fall down and this up and down would go on until they unplugged electricity.”
A month before the Swedish extradition, the same Gulfstream was identified by Masood Anwar, a Pakistani newspaper reporter in Karachi. Airport staff told Anwar they had seen Jamil Gasim, a Yemeni student who was suspected of links to Al-Qaeda, being bundled aboard the jet by a group of white men wearing masks. The jet took Gasim to Jordan, since when he has disappeared. ...
Among the countries where prisoners have been sent by America is Uzbekistan, a close ally and a dictatorship whose secret police are notorious for their interrogation methods, including the alleged boiling of prisoners. The Gulfstream made at least seven trips to the Uzbek capital. ...
In a memo, whose disclosure last month contributed to [former British ambassador Craig] Murray’s removal, he told Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, that the CIA station chief in Tashkent had “readily acknowledged torture was deployed in obtaining intelligence”.
Posted by jnfr at November 16, 2004 09:48 AM