For sheer audacity, nothing beats the sight of a spokesman for the Egyptian interior ministry describing someone else’s experience of being kidnapped, blindfolded, taken to a far-away prison and tortured this way: “Some people love to attract the limelight to give themselves more importance than necessary.” That display of official cynicism is just one of the treats Frontline has in store for tonight’s exploration of the anti-terrorist kidnapping practice known as extraordinary rendition.
The rendition subject the Egyptian interior spokesman described is Abu Omar, a hardline Egyptian-born cleric who was kidnapped by the Italians in coordination with the CIA in 2003 before being rendered to Egypt and tortured. Abu Omar’s rendition was superficially a success — the snatch worked; and he was indeed tortured — but Italian prosecutors were able to learn the identities of the CIA operatives behind the rendition and have put them on trial in absentia.
Interestingly, Abu Omar gives a kind of non-denial denial when asked by Frontline if he’s a terrorist, which crystallizes the issue at its most complex: is it acceptable to torture people who intend to carry out atrocities?
Frontline also profiles another rendition victim — Bisher al-Rawi, a British national picked up in Gambia in 2002 after the CIA believed he had ties to al-Qaeda — but the program also highlights how U.S. allies are taking their cues from the U.S.’s embrace of rendition as a sound counterterrorism practice. In December, following the Ethiopian invasion of Somalia, the Kenyan authorities rounded up a number of Somalis at their shared border and flew them to Ethiopia for harsh treatment. Among them was the wife of an al-Qaeda operative named Fazul Abdullah, who helped pull off the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that murdered over 200 people. The Ethiopian prime minister unapologetically told Frontline, “You find the wife, you don’t find the husband, and the wife is fleeing the battlefield, you do not know whether the wife is just a wife or a comrade and a colleague in the art of terrorism.”
Several of the victims of the Kenyan-Ethiopian rendition were forced onto Ethiopian TV to state how well they were being treated. After the release of 16 of them, several claimed torture, and some even claimed that the FBI participated in their abuse. The bureau denies involvement, but ex-FBI counterterrorist Jack Cloonan comments, “If you wanna engage in activity that you’re blaming these people for, you need to step above it, rise above it, and stick to what you know to be your way of operating, which is transparency, treat people humanely… that’s what works.”
