Ex-CIA Chief, Former UK Ambassador Blast "Rendition"

The Sunday Herald of Scotland is running a special today about rendition, the immoral and utterly useless practise of exporting suspects to nations where they can be tortured.

Britain is being sued by one of the world's foremost human rights lawyers for its complicity in acts of torture.

Habashi’s lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, OBE, who is acclaimed in both the USA and UK for his human rights work, is now to sue Britain for breaching the Convention on Torture. Stafford Smith said: “The UK was complicit in this process. What happened to Benyam was morally wrong and stupid. People will say anything when you take a razor blade to their genitals.”

Habashi is now imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay. During his interrogation he was forced to admit to plotting to “dirty bomb” the USA, and to being al-Qaeda’s “ideas man”. Before his arrest, he was a teenager in London with a drug problem who couldn’t even speak Arabic. Stafford Smith added: “The US government used false information, that stemmed from the point of a razor blade, to scare the whole world.”

There's also more about Benyam Mohammed al-Habashi and his trip to torturers around the globe at CIA expense here. Imagine being a teenager who doesn't even speak Arabic and being told that you are Al-Qaida's ideas man. Imagine having your scrotum scliced with a scalpel until you confessed.

And lastly the Herald talks to Michael Scheuer, the CIA chief who invented the programme, and Craig Murray, the UK ambassador to Uzbekistan:

IF there are two men in the world who know about “extraordinary renditions” then they are Michael Scheuer, the CIA chief who invented the programme, and Craig Murray, the UK ambassador to Uzbekistan who saw first-hand the devastating consequences for British intelligence of using renditions.

In exclusive interviews with the Sunday Herald they blew apart any justification for the rendition system, saying the US government deliberately refused to opt for a legal alternative to renditions which was presented to the President by the CIA and that the programme undermined Western democracy, damaged the prosecution of the war on terror and “contaminated British and US intelligence”.

Definitely worth a read.