THE NEW BOOM INDUSTRY: TORTURE With CIA 'extraordinary rendition'

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Dec 4, 2005 | by Neil Mackay

TO ELIZA ManninghamBuller, the head of MI5, one of the biggest successes of British intelligence in recent years was the foiling of the so-called ricin plot, which she believes would never have been uncovered if it hadn't been for vital pieces of information passed to British intelligence by the Algerian Secret Service.

The Algerians were able to alert the British in January 2003 to the existence of the plot after interrogating and torturing a suspected Islamic militant and former British resident called Mohammed Meguerba who said al-Qaeda affiliates in the UK were planning the mass poisoning of Britons.

The only trouble was, there was no plot. Four of the defendants were acquitted of terrorism and four others had the cases against them abandoned. Only one man, Kamal Bourgass, was convicted in relation to the claims after he murdered Special Branch Detective Constable Stephen Oake during a raid.

The Meguerba case provides an almost perfect snapshot of Britain's complicity in the new global dirty war that the Western powers find themselves sucked into. While Meguerba was almost certainly living on the fringes of Islamic extremism in the UK - and Bourgass was without doubt a dangerous fanatic - Meguerba's claims were fatally flawed because of the abuse he suffered at the hands of his captors.

The use of torture is again in the full glare of publicity after the European Union demanded information about CIA rendition flights. These rendition flights work like this: a suspect is captured in one country and then taken, or rendered (in CIA-speak), to friendly nations such as Egypt, Algeria, Morocco and Uzbekistan which routinely use torture. Often the private CIA jets which transport the captives around the world stop off in the UK - the two favoured airports being Glasgow and Prestwick. After the suspect is tortured, and inevitably confesses, the information is fed back to Western intelligence services like MI6 via the CIA.

As Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, says: torture contaminates the pool of British intelligence. It slips false information into the databanks of the UK's intelligence services which diverts attention and resources away from real threats to fake ones. Claims extracted under torture also end up in the mouths of British politicians who then pour these false claims into the ears of the British public. A lie beaten out of someone in an Algerian prison, therefore, becomes a fixed fact in the mind of the British people.

But Britain's complicity in torture is much more than simply receiving information from either the CIA or a friendly nation's intelligence service which indulges in torture. Take the case of rendered suspect Benyam Mohammed al-Habashi. A British resident, born in Ethiopia, al-Habashi was seized in Pakistan and taken to Morocco where the worst of his torture involved a scalpel being taken to his penis. MI6 visited him in Pakistan and told him he was going to be "tortured by Arabs".

In Morocco, he was told that British intelligence had been working with his Arab interrogators. Questions had been sent to Morocco by UK officers. In effect, says his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, MI6 may as well have been in the torture chamber while al- Habashi was being brutalised.

Then there is the case of another of Stafford Smith's clients, Omar Deghayes. Deghayes became a British resident after fleeing Libya with his family following persecution at the hands of the Gaddafi regime. He was wrongly identified as appearing as a Chechen fighter in a video. Today, however, Deghayes is still in Guantanamo Bay, and blind in one eye after being tortured.

The US used a CIA rendition plane to fly Libyan agents to Guantanamo where they told Deghayes they would kill him. British intelligence visited Deghayes seven times during his detention. One British officer told Deghayes if he helped the Americans "you will be back home in the UK".

MI6 even happily takes intelligence from regimes which literally boil people alive. Murray, former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, said rendered prisoners were tortured by the Uzbek secret police, and the confessions then sent to the CIA who sent the documents to MI6. The intelligence reports, Murray says, were "bollocks" extracted under torture and not worth the "bloodstained paper" they were written on.

The slide towards the kind of torture that men like al-Habashi and Deghayes suffered began within weeks of September 11. One of the first people to publicly advocate a return to the thumbscrews was Alan Dershowitz, the celebrity lawyer and Harvard law professor. With chilling prescience, he said that "torture warrants" signed by a judge would help control "the inevitable" use of torture by the USA.

Dershowitz is an advocate of "nonlethal torture" an example of which, he says, would be slipping "a sterilised needle under the fingernails" of a suspect. While he was mulling over torture publicly, the Bush administration was paving the way behind the scenes for it to become a part of US foreign policy.