How the CIA Used Assad's Torture Chambers.

One of the first things the victorious rebels did in Syria was head for Bashar Al- Assad’s notorious Sednaya prison near Damascus, nicknamed “the Human Slaughterhouse.” The press and social media tagged along, and we’ve been inundated with horrific images of desperate figures in dank, crowded cells, brutal instruments of torture, and first-hand accounts of the ruthless treatment of men, women, and children incarcerated there, some for years. Thousands of others were executed or succumbed to the sub-human conditions.

Editorialists and world leaders have reacted with expected outrage. President Biden celebrated “the fall of a regime that “brutalized and tortured and killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians,”

Our leaders and the media—and ourselves--however, have been afflicted by historical amnesia:

The fact is that those barbaric prisons and their professional torturers served not only Bashar al-Assad but the U.S. and the CIA. Those facilities became part and parcel of the “Global War Against Terror,” which George W. Bush—and Vice President Dick Cheney— launched after the attacks on 9/11.

Bush and Cheney wanted a no-holds-barred war against terrorism—beating the sh*t out of anyone to get to the truth—to protect and avenge America.

The problem was America’s legal system, with its pesky strictures against torture, was an impediment. So, CIA director George Tenet came up with some lawyerly solutions. First, they created a new category of brutal questioning “enhanced interrogation techniques. Those included “stress positions” (forcing the detainee to remain in body positions designed to induce physical discomfort), “cramped confinement” in a box, “insult slaps,” (slapping the detainee on the face with fingers spread),), forced nudity, sleep deprivation while standing, and water-boarding. Now, none of those methods was to be considered “torture”— even though the United States prosecuted Japanese interrogators for “waterboarding” U.S. prisoners during World War II.

The CIA also devised a new tactic of avoiding U.S. laws, called “Extraordinary Rendition.” Rather than using brutal interrogation techniques themselves in U.S. facilities, they would contract the dirty work out to governments not as squeamish about human rights. CIA interrogators might supply the questions, even sit in on the interviews, but in theory, they never sullied their hands by using electric shocks, breaking bones, or crushing testicles.

According to a Open Society Justice Initiative report, fifty-four foreign governments cooperated with the U.S. program. “Suspected terrorists were seized and secretly flown across national borders to be interrogated by foreign governments that used torture, or by the CIA itself in clandestine “black sites” using torture techniques.”

One of the countries –along with Egypt and Jordan--most willing to give the CIA access to its prisons and torturers -was Syria. Bashar al-Assad had just succeeded his father as President. We don’t know what the CIA offered al-Assad in return for his help, but he certainly didn’t cooperate out of shared horror of 9/11/.

Indeed, the U.S. at the time had listed Syria as “A state sponsor of terrorism.”

According to the Open Society report, ‘One Syrian prison facility contained individual cells roughly the size of coffins. Detainees report incidents of torture involving a chair frame used to stretch the spine (the “German chair”) and beatings.

Another country cooperating with the U.S. program was Canada. Indeed, Canadian authorities went along with America’s illegally dispatching to Syria a Canadian citizen, Maher Arar. He was born in Syria in 1970 but immigrated to Canada with his parents in 1987.

According to Amnesty International’s report,

“While transiting through a New York airport on his way home to Canada in September 2002, Canadian citizen Maher Arar was detained and interrogated by FBI and immigration officials for nearly two weeks.

They then took him from his cell in shackles at 4:00 in the morning and advised him that based on classified evidence he was found to be a member of Al Qaeda, and that he was being removed to Syria rather than Canada.

Maher was taken on a private jet to Jordan, where he was beaten for eight hours, and then delivered to Syria, where he was beaten and interrogated for 18 hours a day for a couple of weeks.

He was whipped on his back and hands with a two-inch thick electric cable. For over ten months he was held in an underground dark, damp grave-like cell – 3 x 6 x 7 feet – where he could hear others being tortured.

After a year in Syria, Maher was released without any charges and is back home in Canada with his family.”

In 2007, the Canadian government formally apologized to Maher for its complicity in his rendition and awarded him a $10.5 million settlement.

But not the U.S.

Now comes the genuinely Kafkaesque part of the story, again from the Amnesty report.

“The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) represents Maher in U.S. court against the US officials who sent him to Syria to be tortured, including former Attorney General Ashcroft, former Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson, FBI director Robert Mueller, and several immigration officials.

The lawsuit not only seeks compensation, but to expose the truth about what the officials did to Maher, known as an "extraordinary rendition", and to put a stop to this practice through which the Government abducts people and delivers them to other countries to be interrogated through torture.

The Government officials have moved to dismiss the case, arguing essentially that even if they conspired with Syrian officials to have Maher tortured, they can't be liable, because the decision to send Maher to Syria was a discretionary immigration decision – a mere deportation - that the court cannot review.

They also argue that no non-U.S. citizen transiting through the U.S. has constitutional rights except at most a right to be free from gross physical abuse, and that Maher had no constitutional rights in Syria, even if he was held at the behest of the U.S.

They further claim that they can't be held liable because they didn't torture Maher themselves and he wasn't in their custody, and because their decision purportedly related to national security concerns.

The Government has also asserted the "state secrets" privilege, asking the court to dismiss Maher's case because the reasons they deemed him a member of Al Qaeda and sent him to Syria instead of Canada are so-called state secrets. They contend that litigating the case would disclose these state secrets, revealing intelligence gathering methods and harming national security and foreign relations.

Aggravating the fact that the U.S. Government labeled Maher a member of Al Qaeda is the fact that it continues to maintain that claim, despite the fact that the Syrian and Canadian Governments have said he has no links to Al Qaeda, and despite the fact that it's never provided any evidence that he does.

Former Attorney General Ashcroft has noted that even whether the U.S. obtained diplomatic assurances would be considered a state secret. Of course even if diplomatic assurances are obtained, they're not monitored and they're not enforceable. Even our current Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez has admitted that they can't control what countries do to someone once they are.”

The bottom line is that in 2010, the US Supreme Court declined to hear Maher’s case, effectively ending his legal avenues in the United States.

They turned down not just Maher but the ACLI’s case on behalf of Khaled El Masri, another victim of the extraordinary rendition program.

Over the years, many experts testified that testimony gained through torture was of little, if any, use. In 2009, President Obama signed an Executive Order supposedly ending its practice.

However, Obama did not terminate the Extraordinary Rendition program altogether. The CIA preserved the to detain terrorist suspects on a short-term, transitory basis before rendering them to another country for interrogation or trial.

Meanwhile, another notorious artifact of George Bush’s Global War on Terror is the United States military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

Since it was created after 9/11, at least 780 persons from 48 countries have been detained there, of whom 740 have been transferred elsewhere, and nine died in captivity.

Only six have ever been charged by the U.S. with criminal offenses.

It’s been an embarrassment to the U.S. and political football since its establishment.

Several organizations have concluded that the detainees had been systematically mistreated in violation of their human rights.

President Obama tried to close the prison down. However, in 2018, Donald Trump signed an executive order to keep it open indefinitely.

Enter Joe Biden, who vowed to close the camp before his term ended, although his administration continued to expand military courtrooms and other facilities with multi-million dollar projects.

Memo to Elon Musk, head of the Trump Government’s “Department of Government Efficiency:

Re: Guantanamo.

Elon, We have a problem here.

Thirty detainees remain in this sprawling place, of which 16 are awaiting transfer.

The annual cost to run Guantanamo is $540 million. That translates to over $18 million per detainee.

Compare that with the $78,000 yearly cost per inmate in US supermax prisons.

A no-brainer, right?