This report published at Common Dreams looks at the senate torture report -- which has still not been released (only a redacted summary):
In December 2014, the Bureau, alongside The Rendition Project, began a major project to trace the history of the RDI programme. The impetus for our investigation came from the long-awaited publication of a report into CIA torture by the US Senate Select Intelligence Committee. The authors of this report had high-level access to internal CIA documents, which they mined to produce a damning assessment of the torture programme's brutality, mismanagement and ineffectiveness. But they were compelled by the Obama administration, and by the CIA itself, to censor — "redact" — all parts of the report that could identify specific times and places where abuses had occurred.
This is important, because without being able to tie illegal activities to specific times and places, the quest for redress is hamstrung, and meaningful accountability — legal, public, historical — remains a mirage.
The Senate report did offer a crucial insight, however: the first complete list of prisoners held in the CIA's black sites. 119 names, each with a date of custody (redacted) and a record of how many days they were held (also partly redacted).
In the days after the publication of the Senate report, we set to work reconstructing this list to reveal the hidden dates. Figuring out a date often meant that we could match it to a flight record; matching to a flight record meant that we could determine where a prisoner was brought from or sent to. As we cross-correlated thousands of data points — from declassified government documents, footnotes in the Senate report, aviation data, records of corporate outsourcing of rendition flights, legal cases, media reporting and NGO investigations — the contours of the CIA's programme of secret detention and torture began to emerge more clearly. Rather than just understanding certain individual histories, we could begin to discern the entire scope of the programme's development.
Key Findings include:
• Identification of the 28 individuals whose renditions were facilitated using UK territory as crucial staging and refuelling posts. This includes the at least two individuals who were rendered using the British-owned island of Diego Garcia: Mohammed Iqbal Madni and Umar Faruq.
• It identifies the individual to whom the ISC referred as the “unknown detainee” – Umar Faruq – believed to have been rendered through Diego Garcia in September 2002.
• Included in this list of individuals rendered using UK territory or airspace is Abd Al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who was tortured in Thailand among other places while current CIA Director Gina Haspel allegedly ran the black site there.
• This includes the use of Glasgow airport in the rendition of Ibn Sheikh al-Libi, whose torture in Egypt led to the false information which provided part of the case for the Iraq War. The ISC report revealed that an MI6 officer stood by and watched as he was rendered to Egypt in a coffin.
• Among these detainees rendered with the assistance of UK territory or airspace was Saifullah Paracha, currently the oldest detainee in Guantanamo, who was rendered to torture and arbitrary detention for what has now been almost 19 years.
• The report lists a total of 28 cases of UK territory or airspace being used for renditions, which compares with the 28 cases the ISC report identified in which it found the UK “suggested, planned or agreed to rendition operations proposed by others”. While the number itself may be a coincidence, the new report raises the question of whether the UK agreed to the use of its territory and airspace to facilitate these renditions as part of these plans and agreements.
• The report names Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni, who faced severe torture after his rendition to Egypt in January 2002, and who may be one of the “29 renditees” referred to in the ISC report as having been rendered to a country believed to be Egypt.
h/o to Robert
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