Torture Allies

The OSF report, which offers the first wholesale public accounting of the top-secret program, puts the number of governments that either hosted CIA "black sites," interrogated or tortured prisoners sent by the U.S., or otherwise collaborated in the program at 54. The report also identifies by name 136 prisoners who were at some point subjected to extraordinary rendition.

[...]

Although Bush administration officials said they never intentionally sent terrorism suspects abroad in order to be tortured, the countries where the prisoners seemed to end up -- Egypt, Libya and Syria, among others -- were known to utilize coercive interrogation techniques.

  HuffPo

We were sending them there for vacations.

Obama did not fully end the practice of rendition, which permits the U.S. to circumvent any due process obligations for terrorism suspects. Instead, the administration said it was relying on the less certain "diplomatic assurances" of host countries that they would not torture suspects sent to them for pretrial detention.

Oh. Oh. Pretrial detention. No room for them in the prisons we maintained in Iraq and Afghanistan, apparently. No room in any one place, evidently. They had to go to 54 different countries.

This decision, the OSF report concludes, was tantamount to continuing the program, since in the absence of any public accounting, it was impossible to measure the accuracy of those "assurances."

Without any public government records to read, Amrit Singh, the OSF's top legal analyst for national security and counterterrorism and the new report's author, turned to news reports, the investigations of a global network of human rights organizations, and the proceedings of a handful of foreign courts that have investigated their own countries' practices.

[...]

"By enlisting the participation of dozens of foreign governments in these violations, the United States further undermined longstanding human rights protections enshrined in international law -- including, in particular, the norm against torture," she wrote.

"Responsibility for this damage does not lie solely with the United States," Singh added, "but also with the numerous foreign governments without whose participation secret detention and extraordinary rendition operations could not have been carried out."

Well, at least not outside American soil. So why do you think there were so many different countries involved? Shopping around for the most brutal? Lining up – implicating - “allies” for torture to blunt global opposition? And I do mean shopping.

The CIA paid at least a million dollars to Poland for it to host secret prisons, where it incarcerated alleged 9/11 terror suspects, according to the recent US torture report.

Warsaw had initially tried to halt the transfer of suspects, but after a generous offer, it suddenly became more “flexible.”

  RT