Volume 54, Number 1 · January 11, 2007

The CIA's Secret Torture

By Raymond Bonner
Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program
by Stephen Grey

St. Martin's, 372 pp., $25.95

Report of the Events Relating to Maher Arar
by the Commission of Inquiry into the Actions of Canadian Officials in Relation to Maher Arar

Three volumes, 1,657 pp., available at www.ararcommission.ca/eng/26.htm

On December 5, 2005, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, about to fly across the Atlantic, must have known she faced a hard time from the press. Over the previous year, stories had been published that suspected terrorists were being seized by American agents abroad and 'rendered' to third countries, countries with notorious reputations for brutal treatment of political prisoners, such as Egypt, Syria, Morocco, and Uzbekistan. Then, four weeks before her trip, The Washington Post had a front-page story that some of the CIA's secret prisons were in Eastern Europe. The New York Times followed, four days before Rice's departure, with a story that linked the renditions to secret CIA flights. According to the Times's analysis, since September 11, 2001, CIA planes had made 307 flights in Europe; 94 in Germany; 76 in Britain; 33 in Ireland; and more than a dozen in each of Portugal, Spain, and the Czech Republic.[1]



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