More evidence of US government’s torture by proxy

n an article in the February 14 issue of The New Yorker, “Outsourcing Torture,” journalist Jane Mayer documents the increased use of rendition since 2001. Mayer notes that while before September 11 rendition was carried out on a limited basis, over the past four years it has come “to include a wide and ill-defined population the Administration terms ‘illegal enemy combatants.’” One estimate is that 150 people have been rendered since 2001.

Both the international Convention Against Torture (CAT), ratified by the US in 1994, and domestic US law passed subsequent to that treaty prohibit the transfer of prisoners to countries where there is “substantial grounds for believing” they will be tortured. However, in 1995 President Clinton signed a presidential directive authorizing the CIA to render prisoners, and the agency has used the “substantial grounds” clause as a loophole to ignore legal constraints.

The CIA’s use of torture—both directly and by proxy—is an open secret. The New York Times reported in May 2004 that after the attacks of September 2001, the Justice Department and the CIA established a set of rules for the treatment of CIA prisoners. Included in the list of acceptable methods was “water boarding,” a notorious technique used by interrogators in which a prisoner’s head is repeatedly submerged in water to convince him that he will drown if he does not speak.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2005/feb2005/rend-f12.shtml