FIRST PUBLISHED ON THE BBC WEBSITE – SEPTEMBER 20th 2011

By Stephen Grey File on 4, BBC Radio 4

Technology was used to monitor the conversations of pro-democracy activists, evidence suggests

A UK firm offered to supply “cyber-spy” software used by Egypt to target activists, the BBC has learned.

Documents found in the headquarters of the country’s security service suggest it was used for a five-month trial period at the end of last year.

Hampshire-based Gamma International UK denies actually supplying the program, which infects computers with a virus that bugs online voice calls and email.

The foreign secretary says he will “critically” examine export controls.

William Hague, who speaks for the government on computer security issues, said: “Any export of goods that could be used for internal repression is something we would want to stop.”

He also admitted the law governing software exports was a grey area.

Egyptians searched through secret police files after storming the building

The documents seen by the BBC were found at the looted headquarters of the Egyptian state security building earlier this year.

They describe an offer by Gamma International UK Ltd to supply a software programme called Finfisher.

Finfisher is described as a toolkit “used by many global security and intelligence services” for secretly gaining access to people’s computers.

The files from the Egyptian secret police’s Electronic Penetration Division described Gamma’s product as “the only security system in the world” capable of bugging Skype phone conversations on the internet.

They detail a five-month trial by the Egyptian secret police which found the product had “proved to be an efficient electronic system for penetrating secure systems [which] accesses email boxes of Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail networks”.

Another document discovered by German public television network MDR is thought to reveal the first-known victims of the Finfisher program.

The document describes how, during the period of the software trial, the secret police successfully broke into and recorded encrypted Skype calls.

Sherif Mansour, from the US democracy group Freedom House, was in Egypt last year to help monitor parliamentary elections.

‘Outsourcing repression’

Named in the document as a victim of the bugging, he blamed the Finfisher software and urged the British government to take action.

“We democracy and human rights activists already face a lot of troubles and get a lot of threats. I expect that from government but not from software companies.

“We have never looked to them to [be] enabling repression, to outsourcing repression.”

According to the Department for Business Innovation and Skills, Finfisher does not require an export licence because it does not use encryption.

Mr Hague told File on 4 that the UK had a strong export licence system.

He said a number of licences had been withdrawn from companies exporting items of concern to Libya, Tunisia and Bahrain – but he conceded software was a difficult product to legislate for.

“This will be a greyer area because there can be many many uses for a given piece of software.

“But nevertheless, we will look at that critically and if any evidence is supplied to the government – or we come across any evidence of British technology used for internal repression in other countries – then we will take the same very tough line on that as we do on other items.”

Gamma International UK Ltd is owned by a 49-year-old Briton, Louthean Nelson, who is listed as having addresses in Salisbury, Hamburg and Beirut.

The BBC wanted to ask Mr Nelson about the contradiction between Gamma’s claim it did not supply the software, and the information contained in the Egyptian documents. He did not reply.

‘Abuse of technology’

But although Gamma has refused to comment publicly, a company representative called Martin Muench is due to speak next week at a conference in Berlin on cyber warfare.

Gamma is listed as a “sponsor and exhibitor” with a speaker due to address the conference on “applied hacking techniques used by governmental agencies”.

Also speaking at the conference are colonels from the British, US and German armies, and the director of intelligence at US Cybercommand.

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File on 4 is on BBC Radio 4 on 20 September at 20:00 BST and Sunday 25 September at 17:00 BST

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Elsewhere in the Middle East, reports emerged this month of claims that French and South African firms helped monitor phones and the internet for Libya’s Col Muammar Gaddafi.

In Bahrain – where the regime has so far survived the protests – human rights activist Abdul Ghani al-Khanjar says he only learned the extent of surveillance in his country after being arrested.

He had just returned from London where he spoke at a meeting in the House of Lords.

“Within two days, masked civilians and riot police raided my house and arrested me and I have been tortured about my many activities,” he told the BBC.

“It was amazing when they showed me some text messages from my phone and told me about my calls.”

He added: “This is a bad abuse of technology.”

The Bahraini government says it has launched an inquiry into torture allegations. But Siemens and Nokia have both been implicated in the bad publicity surrounding the case.

In the past Siemens sold Bahrain a “monitoring centre”, which is thought to have allowed the regime to secretly track and bug its citizens’ phones. The company is said to have sold the same system to 60 countries worldwide.

But Ben Roome, a spokesman for Nokia Siemens Networks – a joint venture between the two companies, says it has now pulled out of making interception tools, precisely because of concerns that they can be abused.

“If you provide technology you cannot be blind to how potentially it can be used,” he said.

File on 4 is on BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday 20 September at 20:00 BST and Sunday 25 September at 17:00 BST. Listen again via the Radio 4 website or download the podcast.

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.”

BBC Newsnight broadcast a film by me with new revelations about the spy whose evidence, more than any other, provided the intelligence case for the Iraq war.
We find Rafid Alwan, aka Curveball, in a town in Germany; and discover just how many doubts existed about Curveball – before the war – among both US and British intelligence.

Watch the film

By STEPHEN GREY – first published Mail on Sunday on 11th November 2007

A senior British Army officer has hit out at the lack of protection given to his former translator after the man was forced to go on the run when Iraqi insurgents murdered his brother-in-law and kidnapped his wife.

He says the Iraqi interpreter, who also worked for the Foreign Office, was turned away by British officials and told: “Make your own way to safety.”

Last night, Lieutenant Colonel Nicholas Mercer, who was head of the Army’s legal service in Iraq, said Britain had an obligation to help Haider Samad.

He said: “We owe this man an enormous debt – we can’t abandon him and his family.”

Lt Col Mercer said Samad had been crucial to his work in establishing law and order after the British took over in southern Iraq. “We couldn’t have done it without him,” he said.

The news comes despite Foreign Secretary David Miliband’s promise to protect former employees of UK Forces in Iraq and allow them to settle in Britain.

Last night, Haider Samad was on the run in Basra and in desperate danger after he was turned away from the British base at the city’s airport.

Armed militias behind a terror offensive against British troops in the region have launched a manhunt for him, and have already launched a murderous attack on his family.

Other former translators who worked for British Forces say the situation is serious. The Foreign Office’s own figures suggest that 40 ex-employees of the British have been killed so far.

Many in the Army believe there has been insufficient care taken to remember those who have died a manhunt for him, and have already launched a murderous attack on his family.

Other former translators who worked for British Forces say the situation is serious. The Foreign Office’s own figures suggest that 40 ex-employees of the British have been killed so far.

Many in the Army believe there has been insufficient care taken to remember those who have died.

Samad had worked for British forces since they first arrived in 2003; he had been held for the previous four years under house arrest by Saddam because of his pro-democracy work.

In March 2007, he left his final job as an interpreter for ArmorGroup, a UK firm running a Foreign Office contract to train local police, after death threats from Shia militias.

In September his brother-in-law Ali was captured and killed by the militias. They left a note on his body urging Samad to give himself up.

Samad then fled to Iran but his wife and children and his wife’s uncle, Ahmed, were kidnapped last weekend.

They were all later released but Ahmed is in an intensive-care unit with four bullet wounds in his chest.

Samad said: “I appeal for anyone with a conscience to help me. This is a question of life or death for us.”

A Foreign Office spokesman said officials were ‘keeping closely in touch’ with Samad and doing their best to help him.

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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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