Right or wrong, Britain did benefit from evidence obtained by from the CIA’s now-notorious programme of High Value Target (HVT) interrogation, the use of methods like waterboarding, sleep deprivation, confinement in boxes, and throwing prisoners against (specially-modified) walls.

That’s what emerged from an investigation I did for BBC Radio’s File on Four and BBC World Service ‘Assignment‘ into the vexed question of alleged UK complicity into the methods used by the United States in combatting terrorism. (Download the PODcast of this program here or Listen to File on Four now 0r World Service version here. )

The former No 2 at Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), also known as MI6, Sir Nigel Inkster, was among those on the program. Asked by me if the UK agencies reap the benefits of the most controversial US methods, he said:

“To some degree I would say that the answer to that question is yes they did…Lets not forget that we’re dealing with a situation in which both the UK and the US had significantly under-invested in intelligence and security capacity for the preceding decade, so neither the CIA nor their British counterparts were exactly staffed up to deal with this global insurgency. And the material that came from these detainee interrogations was unquestionably valuable; one has to say for better or worse because as it now becomes evident you know some of the ways that information was obtained are ones that the UK government could never willingly have gone along with.”

What’s interesting is that, like some ex high-ups in the CIA I interviewed for this program, the significance Sir Nigel makes of these HVT interrogations is not their revelation of great plots but rather the way they filled in the details of an Al Qaeda network that on 9/11 was still largely un-canvassed. Not much of a ticking bomb scenario, in other words. That’s not really how it worked at all.

The program deals with specific cases of alleged UK complicity – as in the alleged torture in Pakistan of Ranzieb Ahmed (now convicted in the UK of Al Qaeda membership and directing terrorism), and torture in Pakistan and Morocco of Binyam Mohamed (released from Guantanamo this year after years inside the CIA rendition system & military detention).

It also includes the first broadcast interview with Iqbal Madni, another former detainee at Guantanamo who believes he was the first of two prisoners that were sent through the British island of Diego Garcia in CIA renditions. The legal charity, Reprieve, is launching an action in the High Court on his behalf. The crucial point is that, although he ended in ‘Gitmo’, that was only after his interrogation and he says torture had taken place in Egypt. Reprieve says that flight to torture was a crime. (More details on the BBC website here or in my piece for ABC News here).

Others interviewed on the program include: Lord (Peter) Goldsmith, the former Attorney General under Blair, who wishes the UK had been more outspoken against renditions etc, Sir David Omand, the former Intelligence and Security Co-ordinator at Downing Street, and Fran Townsend, former counter-terrorism adviser to President Bush. Townsend says it’s unlikely the Brits were informed about waterboarding etc — because even she wasn’t briefed on the program and she was at the heart of things.

By Stephen Grey

ONE of the most important members of the Al Qaeda captured by the CIA in the months after 9/11 has been found dead in an alleged “suicide” in a jail in Libya, according to the country’s news media.
Ibn Al Sheikh al Libi, a former Al Qaeda camp commander, was controversially sent by the CIA to Egypt as part of the agency’s “extra-ordinary rendition” program and was allegedly subject to extreme torture, returned back into CIA custody, and then transferred onwards to Libya.
Described by former CIA director George Tenet in his 2006 autobiography as “the highest ranking al-Qa’ida member in U.S. custody” just after 9/11, al Libi was captured by the CIA before the agency had established its own secret prison program. And he was one of a handful of the most senior Al Qaeda leaders in US custody that were sent for interrogation at the hands of foreign countries.
According to agency insiders he was subject to far worse torture than techniques like waterboarding used against prisoners like Khalid Sheikh Mohamed inside the CIA’s own jails.
Al Libi’s testimony – albeit extracted under alleged torture – was probably more important than that of any prisoner captur after 9/11. According to a secret CIA cable, after being effectively buried alive – held for 17 hours in Egypt in a wooden box – he provided evidence linking the former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein with Al Qaeda.
After first denying the Saddam-bin Laden connection, the torture persuaded al Libi to acknowledge the link. This ‘intelligence’ was later used by former secretary of state Colin Powell before the United Nations when he gave evidence justifying the invasion of Iraq.
Picked up crossing the border from Afghanistan to Pakistan in early January 2002, al Libi was first held in FBI custody. Former counter-terrorism FBI agents Dan Coleman and Jack Cloonan revealed how, despite hopes that al Libi would be peruaded to testify against other members of Al Qaeda, al Libi was snatched from FBI hands into the CIA’s custody and transferred “ in a box” to Egypt.
Ever since he was transferred by the CIA to Egypt, Al Libi’s whereabouts have remained a mystery. Tenet’s autobiography confirmed his destination was Egypt and other former CIA prisoners suggested he was transferred back into US custody in Afghanistan. But when all other CIA high value prisoners, including KSM, were transferred to Guantanamo, al LIbi was missing from the list and no information was released by the US Government about his detention.
Last month, al Libi was finally tracked down by Human Rights Watch to a jail in Libya. Seen by researchers at 6pm on April 26, at the Abu Salem prison in Tripoli, al Libi refused to speak, angrily demanding

“where were you when I was being tortured in American prisons.”

The organisation’s statement is here.

Now the full story of his detention may never be known after the discovery of his dead body, announced in the Libyan state newspaper OEA.
Last night, British human rights group, Reprieve, alleged there was reason to doubt al Libi had committed suicide. “Reprieve has good reason to believe that he may have died from untreated tuberculosis that developed during his years in US custody.”

UPDATE: Binyam Mohamed returned to the UK on February 23, 2009

(Published in the Sunday Times, Feb 8, 2009)
by Stephen Grey and David Leppard

Prisoner No 1458 at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, woke up each day last week in his solitary cell and waited for the inevitable: the arrival of a team of guards to take him down the corridor in shackles to be painfully force fed through a tube.
This was not another attempt to extract a confession, but an attempt to keep Binyam Mohamed alive. The 30-year-old former resident of Notting Hill, west London, was continuing his hunger strike against what he sees as failed promises to set him free. When he last saw his lawyer two weeks ago, his arms, she said, stuck out of his 6ft body “like little thin twigs”.
Although previously accused by US authorities of plotting a terrorist attack on American soil, Mohamed has not been charged with any crime. His former military prosecutor declared a month ago that he presented no threat to either America or Britain.
After losing almost 50lb in weight, and wasting further by the day, he was probably in no state to be told or even to care that two High Court judges in London last Wednesday were appealing for the public release of “powerful evidence” that might help prove his astonishing claims of mistreatment to be true. The issues at stake, said the British judges, were nothing short of the lofty interests of “law, free speech and democratic accountability”.
Involved shocking allegations of extreme mental and physical torture at the behest of America’s CIA, it is a case that has threatened to embarrass the new administration of President Barack Obama, whose inaugural speech included a pledge to halt such activities, as well as to shed an unwelcome spotlight on what exactly the British government knew and kept secret about potential crimes committed by its closest ally.
IT was about 10pm local time on July 21, 2002, when the men in black ski masks arrived to collect Mohamed from where he was being held at Islamabad airport. They began by stripping him naked. They put him in a nappy and a tracksuit, blindfolded him and taped a mask across his mouth, he recalled.
They were a CIA paramilitary team that had come to scoop him up and place him on an executive jet used by the US spy agency to “render” terrorist suspects to and from jail cells across the world. In Mohamed’s case, his destination, where he arrived at 3.43am the following day, was the Moroccan capital, Rabat.
Though never confirmed officially by the United States, evidence that verified this “rendition” to Morocco came from the flight logs of the now notorious Gulfstream jet involved. It matched the exact details of Mohamed’s testimony. It has always been much harder to assess the truth of his account of torture that he said occurred in Pakistan before his transfer and in Morocco soon after, even if there are many who report similar treatment.
After he was first arrested in Karachi in April 2002, Mohamed said that soon after the first questions from Americans, Pakistani interrogators followed up by hanging him by a leather strap round his wrist, beating him, and threatening him with a pistol to the head. Then, when this stopped, an agent from British intelligence came to hint to him that he should cooperate or face being sent to be tortured by Arabs. When he was flown to Morocco, he said, it got worse. He was beaten savagely and at one stage his genitals were cut with razor blades.
Again there was a British connection, he alleged. A book of photographs of people at a London mosque had been shown to him, as well as searching questions posed about his life in Notting Hill. The agents called their paperwork the “British file”.
In January 2004, Mohamed said he was rendered onwards by the Americans to Kabul (again confirmed by CIA flight records). This time he was held in a covert CIA “black site” known as the Dark Prison. Inmates here were held day and night without light while being bombarded with constant loud music.
Only after a journey of more than two years between secret prisons, did Mohamed, by his account, emerge from clandestine detention to the more open but still harsh world of US military detention. And in Guantanamo, he finally got to tell his story to the British lawyer Clive Stafford Smith.
Born in 1978, Mohamed had moved to Washington DC with his family when he was young. He and his father, an Ethiopian Airlines official, then moved to London, where he lived from the age of 16 to 22.
Some time in the spring of 2001, Mohamed travelled to Afghanistan. According to later accusations (and it is not clear which, if any, charges US prosecutors still aim to pursue), he attended training at Al-Qaeda camps, went on the run after 9/11, and became a companion of a former street gangster from Chicago named Jose Padilla, or the “dirty bomber”. The pair were said to have associated with Al-Qaeda leaders such as Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohamed and to have hatched plots to explode a devastating radioactive bomb in the US.
While Padilla was arrested in May 2002 as he returned to the US and later convicted of lesser charges, Mohamed was seized a month earlier in Karachi when trying to board a flight to Europe using a false passport. With American intelligence alerted, his journey through the system began.
During his detention, Mohamed made several confessions. He argued later that these were all forced out of him by torture. But with the US refusing to confirm even in court any aspect of its secret programme of rendition and detention, he, like most of its subjects, has struggled to find positive proof to document that physical abuse.
The twist in his tale came from lawsuits filed in London that in effect forced the British government, against its earlier wishes, to take up the cases of Guantanamo detainees such as Mohamed who, while legally resident in Britain, were not UK citizens. In turn, this forced the government in Mohamed’s case to reveal what evidence was held in secret British intelligence files that might be useful to prove his innocence.
After judgments last year exposed the fact that the UK was holding some secret evidence useful to Mohamed’s defence – mainly information shared with Britain by US intelligence – the US government let Mohamed’s defence team see those documents, provided that they remained secret.
Last week, however, Lord Justice Thomas and Mr Justice Lloyd Jones, took matters further, arguing that while it was not for them to order public disclosure of US secret material, particularly in the face of clear and dire “threats” by the US government to reduce intelligence-sharing with Britain if they did, there was a pressing case for the information to be revealed in public.
In the House of Commons, David Miliband, the foreign secretary, denied there were such explicit threats. But he did confirm that releasing the documents despite strong US protests would result in “real and significant damage” to Britain’s national security.
One way or another, it was a court judgment that put Obama’s White House on the spot. Despite the new president’s condemnations of the Bush administration and its promise to break with the past on issues of rendition and torture: how far was Obama willing to go in exposing the secret trail of evidence that would document the most controversial aspects of the years since 9/11? Was he willing to publish material that could help set free terrorist suspects? Or material that could result in the prosecution of CIA officers or the officials who advised them? Or would he prefer to see the whole matter left buried in a dusty but well-guarded vault?
The 42 secret documents obtained by the High Court – summarised in just seven paragraphs censored from the public judgment – were said to refer only to one part of Mohamed’s treatment, his alleged torture in Pakistan. But establishing the principle of exposing such things, some US officials suggest, could open the floodgates to exposing the secrets of rendition and secret detention.
Even just this limited material, said the judges, gave rise to an “arguable case of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” in law. As “admissions” by US government officials about how Mohamed was treated, they could possibly be used as evidence in a criminal court.
At Thames House, the riverside headquarters of MI5, intelligence officials were understandably made jittery last week by all this attention drawn by the High Court’s judgment. It threatened to expose lingering tensions in the darker side of the agency’s “special relationship” with its American “cousins”.
While the pre-Obama CIA might have believed sleep deprivation and waterboarding were sometimes acceptable ways to interrogate prisoners, Whitehall officials were keen to point out that for Britain they were certainly not. British intelligence had a strict “no torture” policy.
However, for Mohamed’s legal team Britain’s alleged complicity in the case of their client is more subtle – but still significant.
After being told by the Americans of Mohamed’s arrest in 2002, MI5 had dispatched an officer to speak to him in Karachi, evidence in the High Court case confirmed.
Mohamed was said to have told the MI5 officer about his time in the UK. This included details of mosques he attended and how he was recruited to go to Afghanistan for terror training. He admitted he had seen a computer file in Lahore that apparently contained details of how to make a dirty bomb. But Mohamed told the MI5 officer – whom he knew as “John” – that he thought the whole thing was a joke.
“John” was clearly unimpressed. But his report back to Thames House may well come back to haunt him.
“I told [Mohamed] that he had an opportunity to help us and help himself. The US authorities will be deciding what to do with him and this would depend to a very large degree on his level of cooperation.
“I said that if he could persuade me he was telling the complete truth I would seek to use my influence to help him . . . I said it must be obvious to him that he would get more lenient treatment if he cooperated.” Shortly after the interview Mohamed disappeared into the CIA’s rendition programme.
This weekend, amid rumours in Westminster that the police might now be called in to investigate MI5, senior Whitehall officials admitted that “John’s” report could present MI5 with difficulties. Under the 1988 Criminal Justice Act it is illegal for British officials to commission or acquiesce in acts of torture anywhere in the world. The crime can be punished by life imprisonment.
Whether or not Mohamed was tortured, and whether or nor “John” was culpable, his case raises a far larger question. Despite Gordon Brown’s declarations suggesting otherwise, do the British security services use intelligence that has been obtained through torture?
In a little noticed debate in a House of Lords committee last Thursday, Baroness Eliza Manningham-Buller, MI5’s director-general between 2002 and 2007, went further than any of her colleagues in explaining the moral dilemma.
“It is pretty well impractical always to check whether something has been derived from torture unless you have reason to suspect it at the beginning,” she said.
“Literally thousands of pieces of intelligence are shared daily between the UK, our allies and people who might not so reasonably be described as our allies. I hope the minister will be able to confirm my comment on the amount of material that is going round the place and the impracticality of checking each bit for torture.”
That amounts to an admission that MI5 knows it has almost certainly used torture-stained intelligence, despite claiming it does not condone it.
It also emerged last week that none of the 42 documents unearthed by the High Court hearing about the Mohamed case had been passed to a full-scale inquiry into the practice of rendition by parliament’s intelligence and security committee in 2007. The inquiry had cleared the UK government of complicity in the US programme. Britain, the report suggested, was never told by the CIA exactly where it was holding prisoners and what techniques were being used to extract intelligence.
The chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), Sir John Scarlett, had told the committee it had never “crossed my mind” that US intelligence was coming from torture. After all, he said: “We are talking about the Americans, our closest ally.”
In their ruling last week the judges said the MPs could now use the new documents to reopen their inquiries and ask witnesses from MI6 and MI5 some “searching and difficult questions”. The conclusions of the inquiry might be different, they suggested.
In Washington the questions may be even tougher. In a US federal court hearing on rendition in San Francisco tomorrow, lawyers for Mohamed and others will hope to hear whether Obama will abandon what has so far been a blanket defence that has sunk every court case lodged on torture and rendition in American courts – namely that any court hearings on the subject would simply violate “state secrets” and should be blocked.
For Mohamed himself, none of these endless hearings seem to move him a step closer to freedom. After 2,248 days in captivity, his last words to his military lawyer as she left were: “They don’t care if I live or die.”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0MJAzFeNbU&rel=1]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cz80NWS9vvE&rel=1]

Published on Salon.com

The fate of prisoners secreted away under the Bush administration is in some ways worse than even Hollywood has portrayed.

By Stephen Grey

Nov. 05, 2007 At 3:44 p.m. on Jan. 24, 2004, a luxury Boeing 737 business jet operated by the Central Intelligence Agency landed at Kabul Airport in Afghanistan. Onboard were its flight crew, eight members of a CIA rendition team and a blindfolded prisoner who was shackled by his wrists and feet.

The behavior of the prisoner, a German citizen named Khaled el-Masri, concerned the CIA team leader onboard. According to an agency insider, the leader sent word to Washington that “there was something strange about el-Masri. He didn’t behave like the others they’d captured. He was asking: Is he the right guy?”

Within days it emerged that el-Masri was indeed the wrong man. It was a “100 percent case of mistaken identity,” said another former agency official. Yet, despite this discovery, el-Masri spent 18 weeks in solitary confinement in a CIA “black site,” or secret prison used by the United States in its war on terror. He is still waiting for an apology or an explanation.

The case of el-Masri — whose lawsuit against the CIA has been dismissed by U.S. courts on the grounds of protecting “state secrets” — caused a huge controversy within the CIA at the time of his capture. A five-month standoff between employees at the Counterterrorism Center and others in the clandestine service led then director George Tenet to step in. “On at least this occasion, Tenet made the right choice,” a source told me. “He ordered the release of a man who was clearly not a terrorist.”

The current Hollywood movie “Rendition” looks at a fictional case of a wrongly identified terrorist. It calls to public attention the CIA program of “extraordinary rendition,” the practice of nabbing terrorist suspects abroad and transferring them without legal process to a third country — often one where torture is commonplace — for detention and interrogation.

In the course of investigating the rendition program for the past four years, I have interviewed victims, CIA pilots, case officers who have actually carried out renditions, senior CIA officers who directed such operations and officials at the White House who were involved in authorizing such measures. All of these sources told me in private or on the record that repeated claims by the White House that we “don’t send people to countries where they will be tortured” are plain lies.

As Tyler Drumheller, head of CIA covert operations in Europe from 2001 to 2005, said in an on-camera interview, the assurances obtained from countries like Egypt that prisoners would not be tortured were hardly treated as serious. “You can say we asked them not to do it, and they do say that, but you have to be honest with yourself and say there’s no way we can guarantee they are not going to do that.”

Hollywood’s “Rendition” makes some mistakes. It is not true, as the movie depicts, that CIA officers stand by in some Egyptian or Syrian torture room while a prisoner is electrocuted. Most CIA officers would find that abhorrent, and it would breach the CIA’s own rules and be a clear violation of U.S. law.

But in some ways the truth about rendition is worse than what is depicted in the Hollywood film. When prisoners are handed over to countries like Egypt or Syria, CIA officers keep well clear of what happens next because agency rules prevent them from witnessing any strong-arm interrogations. But keeping their eyes wide shut, in effect, allows for much darker, more immoral things to occur, and for the U.S. government to preserve plausible deniability.

Inside its own “black site” prisons, the CIA uses interrogation methods that — while falling short of the medieval techniques used in the Arab world — still, in the eyes of many within the agency, amount to straightforward torture. It is not only the physical methods like waterboarding (simulated drowning), but also refined techniques of sensory deprivation, that can cripple a prisoner psychologically.

One witness to such abuse was Bisher al-Rawi, a longtime British resident who was snatched by the CIA and held for more than four years, first in Afghanistan, then in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. In a recent interview he told me about the “dark prison” where he was held in solitary confinement while being bombarded with strange music. It was freezing cold and so dark, he said, “you couldn’t see the end of your nose.” Physical torture, like the beatings he later endured, could be overcome, he said, but psychological torture “lives with you all your life.”

The Bush administration now acknowledges its program of rendition and the existence of its black sites. But much remains a deep secret. Most of the terrorist suspects involved remain in custody and cannot talk. And we know the fate of just a small fraction of the thousands of prisoners captured by U.S. forces around the world since 9/11.

Recently, by refusing to hear the lawsuit of Khaled el-Masri, the U.S. Supreme Court has added to this veil of secrecy. It left standing a judgment by the circuit court that however bad el-Masri’s treatment, the objectives of national security outweighed the public interest in airing the truth about his arrest and detention in a public court of law.

As long as a terror suspect remains a “ghost prisoner” whose location and fate can only be guessed at, then a prison guard or interrogator need feel little fear of the consequences of what he or she might do. Secrecy is a friend of the torturer.

– By Stephen Grey

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“We were chained by our legs for a period of about a month after our arrival. When they called us for interrogation, they bound us by the hands and legs, and covered our heads.”

“The police tried to force me to admit my husband was a member of Al Qaeda. I
told them he was just a businessman. They kept banging on the table. They
threatened to strangle me if I didn’t tell them the truth.”

“It’s called plausible deniability. The agency and the bureau are not going to
admit that they were witting of this at all, … but they probably were the power
brokers behind the scenes pushing this forward. … This new era of going onto the
African continent and outsourcing [interrogation], I think, is frankly new.”

AN EGYPTIAN preacher who was seized by the CIA in daylight on a Milan street has revealed the details of 14 months of torture to which he says he was subjected after his “extraordinary rendition” to Egypt.
Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, known as Abu Omar, described how Egyptian interrogators stripped him, shackled his arms and legs in a crucifixion position and then beat him and gave him electric shocks. He claimed they had twice attempted to rape him.
Now living in Alexandria, Nasr, 44, walks with a limp, is deaf in one ear and bears scars.
Last Friday the trial opened of 26 American defendants accused of kidnapping him on February 17, 2003, in an operation prosecutors say was coordinated by the CIA and Italian intelligence. None of the US defendants, a number of whom were identified by aliases, attended.
Nasr fled Egypt in 1988 after he was accused of being a member of Gama’a Islamiya, an Egyptian militant group that later carried out terrorist attacks. He denied the allegation and was granted political asylum in Italy. When he disappeared he was walking to midday prayers at a radical mosque where he was a part-time preacher.
He became a “ghost prisoner”, his arrest and detention confirmed to nobody. “I was out of history. My lawyer searched prisons all over Egypt and no one could find a trace of me,” he said.
Senior CIA officials have confirmed that Nasr was regarded by the US as an Al-Qaeda operative. A team from Langley, Virginia, was dispatched to Milan to snatch him and fly him to Egypt.
According to Nasr, his ordeal began in CIA hands after he was bundled into a white van and driven to Aviano air force base. He claimed he had been beaten while bound and gagged, and thought he would die.
“I was bleeding: bleeding from my face, bleeding from my knees, bleeding from other parts of my body,” he said. “My mouth started foaming.”
Throughout his 13-hour journey via Ramstein in Germany to Egypt, nobody spoke to him. The CIA agents had wrapped him in masking tape “like a mummy” that made his face bleed when it was ripped off later.
Nasr claimed that in Cairo he had been taken to a room and told he was meeting two “pashas”, important people. He was asked: “Do you want to be an informer for us? If you say yes then you can be back in Italy in 24 hours.” When Nasr said no, they sent him back to his cell.
For the first seven months, he said, he had been in the hands of Egyptian foreign intelligence, allies of the CIA. He alleged its operatives had stripped him and given him constant beatings with bare knuckles, sticks and electric cables. One method involved handcuffing his leg to his hands, so he was forced to stand for hours on the other leg, while being beaten.
On September 14, 2003, he was handed over to Egyptian state security at its interrogation compound in the Nasr City district of Cairo. For the next seven months, his treatment grew worse.
“Once I was thrown on the floor and my hands were cuffed to my back and they brought a security agent who mounted my back and slapped on top of me so as to rape me. That’s when I broke down and I started screaming till I passed out.”
In April 2004, he was released for 23 days but was told it was on condition he did not speak to the media, telephone his wife and family in Italy or talk to human rights groups.
When he broke the rules and phoned home, his calls were tapped. A tap in Italy alerted the police to his kidnapping and they began the investigation that eventually identified the CIA team. Another phone tap in Egypt resulted in his rearrest. He continued to be held without charge in prison until early this year. At no point was he charged with any offence.
Nasr’s allegations are hard to verify in detail. He has not been examined by a doctor; nor has he been brought before a court.
According to Amnesty International, which alleges 18,000 prisoners are held without trial in Egypt, his account is credible.
Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, an Amnesty expert on Egypt who interviewed Nasr, said: “Sending him back to Egypt, knowing that Egypt practices torture on a widespread scale and knowing that Abu Omar was wanted by the intelligence services, they knew he would be tortured.”
Egypt has acknowledged receiving 60 to 70 prisoners from the US. It denies that torture is routine and says when cases are identified, those responsible are punished.
The Egyptian interior ministry said Nasr was an unreliable character. “The information we had about him was that he was, one way or the other, an individual who embraced the ideology of jihad,” it said.
The CIA and the US government refused to discuss the case and refused to cooperate with the Italian judicial inquiry.
Stephen Grey interviewed Nasr for Dispatches, Kidnapped to Order, on Channel 4 tomorrow at 8pm

Dispatches exposes a new phase in America’s dirty war on al Qaeda: the rendition and detention of women and children. Last year, President Bush confirmed the existence of a CIA secret detention programme but he refused to give details and said it was over. Dispatches reveals new evidence confirming fiercely-denied reports that many of the CIA captives were held and interrogated in Europe. Those prisons may now be closed but the programme is by no means over, it’s just changed. A new front has opened up in the Horn of Africa and America has outsourced its renditions to its allies.Reporter Stephen Grey (author of Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Programme) investigates America’s global sweep for prisoners – obtaining exclusive interviews with former detainees who claim they have been kidnapped and flown halfway across the world to face torture by America’s allies.The film opens with an examination of the most notorious rendition story to date – the kidnap of Egyptian cleric Abu Omar. This month in Italy the trial opens of twenty-five CIA officers accused of snatching Omar from the streets of Milan in broad daylight and flying him to Cairo four years ago. Grey travels to Egypt to secure an exclusive interview with Omar who defies the warnings of his interrogators not to speak publicly about his treatment. He details the torture that was inflicted upon him in his fourteen-month detention and the number of other ‘ghost detainees’ he encountered – people who are being held in secret, without charge.The film then turns to Pakistan – one of America’s most significant allies in the ‘war on terror’. Since 9/11, the state’s intelligence services have apprehended over a five hundred people as terror suspects. Grey investigates what happens to the ‘disappeared’ amid claims that America pays Pakistan a bounty for every suspect they capture. Turning his attentions closer to home, Grey gains exclusive access to an official European investigation which has found evidence that CIA prisons housing al Qaeda suspects have also existed in Europe and reveals the interrogation techniques that have been used against such high-value prisoners. The Bush administration claim such techniques stop short of torture but Grey discovers that many in the CIA disagree and are concerned that using them may leave them open to criminal proceedings in the future and make the evidence gained inadmissible in a trial – preventing terrorists from being convicted in court.Dispatches then examines the new battleground of America’s war on terror – the Horn of Africa. Grey travels to Kenya, and Ethiopia to investigate allegations of mass renditions involving women and children – where prisoners thought to have al Qaeda connections have been illegally transferred from country to country for imprisonment and interrogation. Grey uncovers evidence of secret rendition flights on which suspects were flown from Nairobi into war-torn Somalia – a state with no effective law or government. Amongst the suspects were women and children – he hears a first-hand account from one Briton who was on one of the flights who describes being beaten, interrogated and finding himself in a prison cell opposite a woman and a five-year-old boy. Another woman who was rendered to Somalia describes being flown on to Ethiopia with other women and children – where one pregnant woman gave birth to her child whilst in detention.Dispatches questions the legality and effectiveness of America’s rendition programme and asks whether the way detainees have been interrogated will undermine the legal process to bring real terrorists to trial and conviction.