LONDON — The CIA employed Syria as a contractor for
detention and torture of Al Qaida suspects, a report said.
The Council of Europe released a report that outlined CIA cooperation
with Syria from 2001 through 2004. The report, which focused on secret CIA
flights of Al Qaida suspects, asserted that the U.S. intelligence agency
sent abducted Syrian natives from Europe to Damascus, where they were
imprisoned and tortured by Syrian intelligence.
[The United States has disputed the findings of the report, Middle East Newsline reported.
State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the report contained "a lot
of allegations but no real facts."]
The report cited Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen of Syrian origin,
abducted by the FBI during a stopover in New York and flown to Syria. Arar
was said to have been tortured for 10 months in a prison operated by Syrian
intelligence.
"According to Mr. Arar, the [CIA] agents on board the aircraft never
identified themselves, but he heard that they belonged to a 'special removal
unit,'" the report said. "In this specific case, the handing over of Mr.
Arar to Syria seems to be a well established example of 'outsourcing of
torture,' a practice mentioned publicly by certain American officials."
"CIA aimed to take terrorist suspects in foreign countries 'off the
streets' by transporting them back to other countries, usually their home
countries, where they were wanted for trial, or for detention without any
form of due process," the report said.
Syria, deemed by the State Department a terrorist sponsor, was said to
have been a leading contractor of the CIA, the report, released on
Wednesday, said. The Council of Europe said the regime of President Bashar
Assad accepted Syrian natives, including dissidents, who had renounced their
Syrian citizenship and resettled in the West.
The CIA did not expect to obtain intelligence from the Al Qaida
suspects, the report said. The council quoted former CIA agent Michael
Scheuer, who designed the program in the mid-1990s,
as saying that the agency doubted the veracity of any information extracted
from Al Qaida suspects.
"It was never intended to talk to any of these people," Scheuer told the
council. "Success, at least as the agency defined it, was to get someone,
who was a danger to us or our allies, 'off the street' and, when we got him,
to grab whatever documents he had with him. We knew that once he was
captured he had been trained to either fabricate or to give us a great deal
of information that we would chase for months and it would lead nowhere. So
interrogations were always a very minor concern before 9/11."
Western diplomats said the 67-page report elaborated the U.S.-Syrian
intelligence cooperation on the war against Al Qaida. For several years, the
CIA and State Department — arguing that Damascus was helping the U.S.
intelligence community — opposed congressional sanctions against the Assad
regime.
Authored by Swiss parliamentarian Dick Marty, the report said some of
those abducted and sent to Damascus were Syrian opposition members without
ties to Al Qaida. In at least one case, the Western media were provided
disinformation that suggested that the detainee was an Al Qaida
operative.
In October 2001, the report said, Mohammed Zammar, a German of Syrian
origin, was detained in Morocco. Several weeks later, Zammar was taken on a
CIA-linked aircraft for a flight to Damascus.
"There have been allegations that Mr. Zammar's arrest in Morocco was
facilitated through the provision of information by German services, that he
was tortured by Syrian services and that he was questioned in Syria by
German officials," the report said. "Mr. Zammar's arrest in Morocco was
objectively facilitated by exchanges of information between the German
services and their Dutch, Moroccan and also American counterparts."
The report said Jordan and Morocco also cooperated with the CIA in the
secret flights and detention of Al Qaida suspects. Other countries cited
were Algeria, Cyprus, Egypt, Iraq and Turkey, described as detainee transfer
or drop-off points.
In October 2003, the report said, Muhammad Bashmila and Salah Ali Qaru
were arrested in Jordan and "disappeared." In 2002, Binyam Mohamed Al
Habashi, an Ethiopian national and resident of Britain, was arrested in
Pakistan, interrogated by U.S. officials and sent to Morocco for detention.
"Upon asserting his [Al Habashi] right to a lawyer, and later upon
refusing to answer questions, American officers are alleged to have told
him: 'The law has been changed,'" the report said. '"There are no lawyers.
You
can cooperate with us the easy way, or the hard way. If you don't talk to
us,
you're going to Jordan. We can't do what we want here, the Pakistanis can't
do
exactly what we want them to do. The Arabs will deal with you."