European Parliament Condemns CIA Extraordinary Renditions
The European Parliament issued a report on this day condemning the CIA’s practice of “extraordinary renditions.” The report concluded that the practice “has given rise to repeated serious breaches of human rights.”
Extraordinary renditions involved CIA agents who kidnapped suspected terrorists, and stripped, hooded and drugged them before transporting them to secret CIA locations around the world. The suspects were then interrogated and in some cases tortured. It was also revealed that a number of European governments secretly cooperated with the CIA program.
Kidnapped suspects were flown in privately chartered planes operated by American aviation firms that operated under secret contracts with the CIA. In some notorious cases, the CIA kidnapped people who were not terrorists and eventually set them free.
See the exposures of the extraordinary rendition program by the Washington Post on December 26, 2002 and the New Yorker magazine on October 23, 2006.
The extraordinary rendition program began sometime in the 1990s under the presidency of Bill Clinton, but was used sparingly until it was greatly expanded after 9/11 by the George W. Bush administration.
Read the report: http://assembly.coe.int/ASP/Press/StopPressView.asp?ID=1924
Learn more: Alan W. Clarke, Rendition to Torture (2012)
And even more: Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals (2008)
Watch a documentary on extraordinary rendition: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMln8hcw4gw
Learn more: Stephen Grey, Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program (2006)