Brown and the "ghost prisoners"

The British government has come under increasing pressure over the last year as details of the routine use of US-sanctioned torture came to light through the CIA practice of “extraordinary rendition” – kidnapping suspects and shipping them out to secret prisons abroad for torture and interrogation.

Under US laws brought in after 9/11, those suspected of terrorism offences can be transferred to military custody on the orders of US President George Bush. They can then be detained indefinitely, tried by military commission with no right of appeal, and even subjected to the death penalty.

Military detainees need not be held on US soil, and there is a deliberate policy of not doing so. They are shipped off to Guantanamo Bay, or face secret torture camps in Egypt, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. According to reports in the New York Times, the CIA has transferred hundreds of terror suspects to foreign prisons since 9/11, of which some of the flights have landed for refueling at Glasgow Prestwick Airport.

These “high-value detainees” are true ghost prisoners, undeclared to the Red Cross, and held, in some cases, for years without any outside communication, even with their families. People considered to be a threat have been quite literally kidnapped off the streets.

At a press conference last year, Tony Blair denied all knowledge of CIA rendition flights passing through British airspace, but this was a lie. A recent report from the Council of Europe named Britain among 14 complicit European countries and identified covert CIA detention centres in Poland, Romania, and the British-controlled island of Diego Garcia.

“We have sufficient grounds to declare that the highest state authorities were aware of the CIA’s illegal activities on their territories,” said the report, which includes testimonies from many serving and former US and European intelligence agents. “What was previously just a set of allegations is now proven: large numbers of people have been abducted from various locations across the world and transferred to countries where it is known that torture is common practice.”

The report gave a shocking depiction of the conditions in which prisoners were held: “Detainees went through months of solitary confinement and extreme sensory deprivation in cramped cells, shackled and handcuffed at all times.” Prisoners were subjected to “a constant hum of white noise from loudspeakers”, punctuated by “cackling laughter, and the screams of women and children.”

Using the 9/11 attacks as moral justification for these disgraceful actions, the CIA operates with the full support of our government. Yet this is an organization that has, in its time, collaborated with Saddam Hussein, providing him with lists of socialists and trade unionists to be eliminated. It also worked with what was to become the Al-Qaeda network, when it fought the Russians in Afghanistan.

This dreadful history is hardly secret, although it is rarely discussed. There are members of the New Labour government – Gordon Brown included – who certainly know the CIA’s record. Today they turn a convenient blind eye to CIA rendition and torture. Now they see these tactics as necessary to safeguard the “New World Order” that they have bought into.