United States: Trade In Torture

How can rendition be legal? No one at the justice department would comment. The US legal justification is a state secret. Official Washington’s coyness about defending rendition may have something to do with the increased threat of being held to account in the courts. Apart from the danger of lawsuits in US courts, there are judicial investigations opening into alleged CIA abductions on European soil.

*Also See: Video: Secrets of the CIA*

It has a cast of lawyers, spies, suspected terrorists, innocent bystanders and an ex-CIA boss who believes that ‘human rights is a very flexible concept.‘

A Swedish immigration lawyer, Kjell Jönsson, was on the phone to a client, asylum seeker Mohamed al-Zery from Egypt, on the afternoon of 18 December 2001. “Suddenly there was a voice coming in, saying to al-Zery to end the telephone conversation,” Jönsson recalls. “It was the Swedish police, who had arrested him.”

Jönsson had requested the Swedish government to promise that there would be no quick decision on Zery’s application for refugee status: he feared that Zery would be tortured if sent back to Cairo. But Zery was expelled in the shortest time that Jönsson had encountered in 30 years of asylum work.

Five hours after the arrest of Zery and another Egyptian, Ahmed Agiza, both were deported from Stockholm’s Brömma airport. It was not revealed for another two years that there had been a US plane at the airport, plus a team of US agents who, it has been claimed, picked up the suspects, manacled their wrists and ankles, dressed them in orange overalls, drugged them, and bundled them into the plane.

Jönsson said the US team “were…

Posted by ShiftShapers
Warning: Anyone who takes this blog seriously will be shot. Anyone who does not take it seriously will be buried alive by a Mitsubishi bulldozer. Welcome to (A)utonomous Resistance, GNN’s exclusive one-stop infoshop for radical resources and information....

RELATED ITEMS

• On the Trail of the CIA
  Posted by ShiftShapers on Sunday, December 18th 2005
• CIA 'Torture' Flights Engulfs Blair
  Posted by supercanuk on Wednesday, December 14th 2005
• German Abduction Case Gets Murkier
  Posted by supercanuk on Thursday, December 15th 2005