A History of the World Since 9/11

by Dominic Streatfeild

  Half an hour later, The Egyptian was pulled from the jeep, taken into a building and shoved into a chair. He was addressed by the assistant who had spoken to him ten days earlier, who told him that he was to be medically examined. He was led into another room where two men grabbed him and restrained him. When he tried to struggle, they hit him. Another man grabbed his head, rendering him immobile. The men then started cutting his clothes from him until he was standing in his underwear. When they tried to cut that off, too, he struggled violently. This one, clearly, was going to need sedating.

  Finally, The Egyptian was pushed to the floor. His arms were pulled back and he felt a boot on the base of his spine.

  Even the senior al-Qaeda member was shocked by what happened next. ‘I then felt a stick or some other hard object being forced in my anus,’ he later recalled. ‘I realized that I was being sodomized.’

  Actually, he wasn’t being sodomized: he was being administered an enema. The operation complete, The Egyptian was pulled up again, shoved into a corner, his feet were bound together and his blindfold removed. A bright flash blinded him temporarily – he was being photographed. When he recovered his sight, he saw that he was surrounded by between eight and ten gloved, hooded men, all dressed in black.

  The Egyptian was given a diaper and a dark-blue sports suit with short sleeves. He was blindfolded again and his ears were plugged with cotton wool. Headphones were placed over the top. A bag was then pulled over his head and his hands were chained to a belt around his waist. He was taken outside, shoved into another car, then on to an aircraft, where his captors spread-eagled him, securing his arms and legs to the floor. An injection was administered. The Egyptian passed out.

  In terms of rendition protocols, the Skopje job was unexceptional. The hooded men, the cutting-off of clothes, the diaper, even the enema: this was how these things were done. What was unusual about The Egyptian operation was the fact that, from the outset, it had been compromised.

  Rendition, and especially Extraordinary Rendition, was always conducted in complete secrecy: even within the CIA, few officers were read into the programme. Not this time. The security breach, which would later prove catastrophic both for the rendition programme and the Agency itself, was the result not of any action by a foreign intelligence service, or even al-Qaeda, but of an amiable self-employed Spanish urban planner in his mid-forties.

  Secretary of the Association of Aeronautical Photographers of Mallorca, Josep Manchado had been logging planes landing at Palma International Airport for five years. Since Mallorca was a major tourist destination, there was no shortage of international airliners, but the Association was more interested in unusual aircraft.

  ‘We can see British Airways or Iberia every day’ says Manchado. ‘But a plane from Nigeria doing an emergency stop: that’s more interesting.’

  For the Association – only eight people strong – the hobby was rather like stamp collecting. ‘You want to get all the planes in your collection,’ Manchado explains. ‘Of course, it’s impossible, but you try.’

  To this end, the spotters would listen in to air-traffic radio frequencies to learn which planes were coming in, and where they were likely to make their approach. Sometimes Association members would travel to Amsterdam, Frankfurt or Miami to photograph aircraft there.

  Manchado visited Palma Airport to spot planes on weekends. There were more around then. But on Friday, 23 January 2004, the morning The Egyptian was rendered from Macedonia, he decided to take some time off work. Pedro, a friend from the Association, had heard that an unusual plane – an Austrian Boeing 777 – was coming to Palma. Perhaps they might get some shots of it. The pair arranged to meet in the old control tower, which the Association’s spotters had received permission to use for their hobby.

  Just after 10 a.m., Manchado drove his Volkswagen to Palma Airport, parked in the employees’ car park, shouldered his camera bag and made his way to the control tower, where Pedro was waiting.

  ‘It was quite a boring day,’ he admits. ‘Nothing special, nothing different.’

  Pedro, however, commented that there was an interesting plane in the airport, a private Boeing 737 Business Jet parked in the General Area. He had taken some photographs of it already.

  Since around forty private 737s landed at Palma each year, Manchado wasn’t entirely thrilled about the plane, but figured that so little was happening he might as well take a look. Pedro told him not to bother. ‘It’s not a good time to take pictures,’ he warned. ‘The sun is in the wrong place.’

  Manchado ignored his friend’s advice. At 2 p.m., he left the tower and headed for the passengers’ car park next to the General Aviation area. There, 150 metres in front of him, was the 737.

  ‘It was a very new, clean aircraft. Completely clear, cream colour with only a registration and a line along the side. Nothing else.’

  Aside from the plane’s registration number, N313P – which Manchado did not have in his notebook – there was nothing unusual about it. Despite the fact that the sun was behind the plane, Manchado snapped a few pictures.

  At home the next day, he examined the photographs. As Pedro had predicted, they were overexposed: the 737 was largely silhouetted. But one was usable. Manchado transferred the image on to his computer, then used Photoshop to clean it up. When the picture was as clear as it was going to get, he uploaded it on to the planespotters’ website, Airliners.net. Alongside the photograph he posted a date and a description:

  A VERY NEW BBJ [Boeing Business Jet], ALSO NEW VISITOR IN PMI [Palma Mallorca International].

  After departing Skopje at 0230, Boeing Business Jet N313P flew 1,375 miles. First stop was Baghdad, Iraq. From there, the aircraft headed to Kabul International Airport, Afghanistan. On board, The Egyptian, blindfolded, sedated and secured to the aircraft’s floor, was unaware of his destination. That was entirely as it should be: if the al-Qaeda operative was to be interrogated effectively, confusion regarding what was happening, and where he was, would help. The guy behind the recruitment of the 9/11 bombers was likely to put up considerable resistance. He was going to need breaking down.

  From the moment N313P landed at Kabul, his treatment was cursory and harsh, partly to assist in the softening-up process. Frogmarched off the plane, The Egyptian was thrown into the boot of a car and driven for around ten minutes, then dragged out and down a flight of stairs, his hands held high above his head. When he stumbled or slowed, he was physically picked up and dragged. Occasionally, he would collide with a wall or a pillar. Finally, he was thrown to the ground and one of the hooded men placed a foot on his neck to restrain him, while another removed the chains and the blindfold. Then, as suddenly as they had appeared, the hooded men vanished, locking the door behind them.

  Looking around, The Egyptian found himself in an unlit, cramped cell with crumbling plaster on the walls. On the floor was a stained plastic carpet, a dirty military-style mattress and some torn clothes bundled into a makeshift pillow. Through a small opening in the wall near the ceiling, he saw the last rays of the setting sun and realized that he must have been travelling for twenty-four hours.

  Thirsty after his ordeal, he peered through the grille in his cell door and demanded water. Outside, an Afghan guard pointed behind him to a small, filthy, plastic bottle in the corner of the cell. The Egyptian lifted it to his face and sniffed. Not only was the water inside dirty and green, it stank. When he put the bottle down in disgust, he noticed that the smell of the water lingered on his hands. Eventually, he took a swig, but the stench, and the acrid taste, were unendurable. The Egyptian threw up.

  At this point, the cell door opened and four men wearing black uniforms and masks entered, dragged him into the corridor and to another cell. Waiting inside were three more masked men, one of whom told him to undress. The Egyptian stripped down to the diaper, then stopped. He was instructed to remove it. When he did, he was then told to stand still while he was photographed. One of the men in the masks took blood and urine samples.r />
  Like all al-Qaeda operators, this prisoner appeared considerably less brave now that he was in custody: he complained about his treatment. His cell was cold. The water was rancid. He was told that the Afghans were responsible for the condition of the cell and the water. Then, incongruously, he was asked whether he had any dietary restrictions: would he perhaps like halal food? When he admitted that he would, the men laughed: halal food. What a joke.

  The next night the process was repeated. This time there were seven interrogators. One asked if he knew why he was there. ‘That’s the question I wanted to ask you,’ replied The Egyptian, cocky as always.

  The man indicated a large file on the table and told him that it was his dossier. ‘You attended terrorist training camps here in Afghanistan,’ the interrogator said. ‘Your passport is forged, and you had contact with important terrorists like Mohammed Atta, Ramzi Binalshibh and others in Germany’

  But the Egyptian wasn’t giving anything away. He had heard about these people, he said: perhaps he had read about them in the newspaper. Then he began to whinge again, demanding that his interrogators contact the German embassy. The lead interrogator indicated that this was not going to happen. They weren’t going to let diplomats and lawyers on to this case.

  ‘You’re in a country,’ he told the al-Qaeda man, ‘where there are no laws. No one knows you are here. We can do what we want with you.’ When he again protested his innocence, the interrogator became angry. ‘If the charges here weren’t correct’ – he indicated the dossier on the table – ‘they wouldn’t have flown you here from Skopje.’ Why else would he be here?

  The Egyptian said that he had been arrested because he was a Muslim.

  ‘Everyone claims that when we start interrogating them,’ said the man. ‘But they’re not Muslims. They’re terrorists.’

  Inside the CIA, officers were aware that rendition skirted the boundaries of international law. But that did not mean it was entirely without merit. According to the US Supreme Court’s Ker-Frisbie doctrine, a court was entitled to ignore the details regarding how a defendant was brought to face justice – so long as he was brought to face justice.

  Admittedly, snatching a suspect abroad was probably illegal in the country concerned, but that was a relatively minor issue: espionage violated the law, too. That had never stopped the CIA doing it. The question was, did the benefits of bringing the character to court outweigh the unusual methods used to apprehend him? To all concerned, the answer was clear: yes.

  ‘The snatch is something that goes on on the dark side,’ agrees Professor John Radsan, assistant general counsel for the CIA from 2002 to 2004. ‘But when you bring them back to justice there will be a light side. The person that is snatched will then appear as a defendant in a court, will have lawyers. There is transparency at the back end of the process.’ This transparency ‘at the back end’ was what allowed the programme to proceed.

  Prior to 1995, rendered suspects were delivered to face justice in US courts, where due process was guaranteed. With the arrival of al-Qaeda, however, the rules changed. Under President Clinton, it became acceptable to snatch suspects abroad, then deliver them to foreign countries for trial. This raised significant risks of unlawfulness. Many of the countries where these suspects were wanted had questionable human rights records. It was entirely possible that rendered suspects might be tortured after they were handed over. If this happened, the United States’ rendition operation would become unlawful: delivering anyone to torture, or the threat of torture, was specifically banned under both the Refugees’ Convention and the Convention Against Torture.

  President Clinton appears to have struggled with this dilemma. When the programme was updated in 1995, his administration requested assurances from the CIA that no rendered suspect was ever to be delivered to torture. The Agency thought that the White House was being naive.

  ‘We said very clearly,’ recalls Michael Scheuer, ‘“If we turn these people over to [Egypt’s] Hosni Mubarak, two months from now, six months from now, you’re going to have your State Department condemn the Egyptians for their human rights or judicial issues.” We didn’t say there was a chance. We said, “They will be tortured.” Because that’s the way those countries work.’

  The White House then asked whether it might be possible for the CIA to obtain an undertaking from the receiving country that the suspect would be treated according to the norms of its own legal system. When the Agency confirmed that these people were entirely likely to be treated according to the receiving country’s legal norms – that was the whole problem – the point seems to have been missed. The programme received a green light.

  Lawyers were less equivocal about this development, especially when one of the first rendered suspects, Talaat Fouad Qassem, having been located in Croatia, was handed over to Egypt. He promptly vanished and was later presumed to have been tortured and executed. Still, however, the programme had safeguards in place. The CIA was only ever to render suspects facing prosecution, and they were only ever to be delivered to trial.

  ‘We had no permission to pick anyone up who wasn’t either the subject of a conviction in absentia or had an outstanding legal warrant,’ says Scheuer. Even then the process was subject to vetting by lawyers from the CIA and at the National Security Council. Only after leaping through all kinds of hoops could the Agency transport suspects to and from foreign countries.

  President George W. Bush’s 17 September Memorandum of Notification removed these safeguards. The nature of rendition now changed radically. Suspects were to be snatched, then transported to countries where there were no warrants out for them. The goal of the operation was no longer ‘rendition to justice’, but what one protagonist refers to as ‘rendition to interrogation’: they were snatched not with a view to delivering them to court but pre-emptively, to prevent them from doing bad things, and with a view to grilling them for intelligence about what they might have been planning.

  Legally, this shift was highly problematic. In John Radsan’s terminology, the snatch part of the operation took place on ‘the dark side’ of the law, and as such was only justifiable if a trial, the ‘light side’, was imminent. Transporting subjects to Third World countries where no judicial process was planned was very different.

  ‘That’s something from the dark side to the dark side,’ he says today. The process was ‘troubling’.

  Other changes were afoot, too. Post-9/11, the Agency was offered the opportunity to get involved in the interrogation process itself.

  ‘For some reason,’ says Michael Scheuer, ‘the Bush administration believed that if we interrogated these people ourselves we would get more information from them than the Egyptians or Jordanians or Saudis.’

  Frequently, high-ranking al-Qaeda suspects were transferred not to other nations’ custody but to secret sites administered by the CIA. This way their interrogations could be conducted properly by US interrogators; this way there would be no barriers between the US intelligence community and the terror suspects.

  This put the Agency in a difficult position. Where were these terrorists to be kept? In a move similar to that of the Australian government’s ruling on asylum seekers’ rights outside of its dependent territories – which had facilitated the establishment of the Pacific Solution – the United States decided that international treaties regarding humanitarian treatment of prisoners – such as the Convention against Torture (CAT) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) – did not apply to US citizens outside of the United States. As in Australia, the result was the creation of a grey zone where international law appeared not to apply at all. Provided the suspects were kept well clear of the United States, they were in a legal vacuum. America could do what it wanted with them. A number of potential sites was considered: ships at sea, isolated islands, then friendly nations.

  ‘Black’ CIA sites were established around the world where suspects could be held and interrogated indefinitely. The first of these app
ears to have been in Egypt and Jordan, longstanding partners in the rendition programme. Further sites would eventually appear in Thailand, Pakistan, Jordan, Poland, Romania, Iraq, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan.

  One of them, an abandoned brick factory ten minutes north of Kabul International Airport, was known as the Salt Pit. It was here that The Egyptian was being interrogated. Things were not going well.

  After four nights of questioning, when The Egyptian still refused to talk, his interrogators decided to let him stew for a while. They’d had enough of his demands for representatives from the German embassy. He was duly left alone for three weeks without visitors. A period of quiet reflection, it was thought, might bring home to him the gravity of his situation.

  Not that The Egyptian was entirely without company. Despite a ban on communication with other prisoners in the Salt Pit, he immediately set about establishing contact, leaving clandestine notes in the lavatory for other al-Qaeda suspects. He also managed to whisper to them when the guards were not paying attention. Late at night, the Salt Pit’s inmates recited their names, addresses and phone numbers to each other in the hope that if one was eventually released he might be able to contact the others’ families, or perhaps even al-Qaeda handlers, to let them know where they were. Day by day The Egyptian scratched the date on the wall of his cell, so he could keep track of his time there. He also managed to keep a diary, including dates and details of his treatment. When other prisoners informed him that it would be confiscated if the guards found it, he memorized this, too.