Growing Evidence U.S. Sending Prisoners To Torture Capital

Growing evidence U.S. sending prisoners to torture capital
Despite bad record on human rights, Uzbekistan is ally

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/articl...NGE5CI9MO1.DTL

Don Van Natta Jr., New York Times
Sunday, May 1, 2005

Seven months before Sept. 11, 2001, the State Department issued a human rights report on Uzbekistan. It was a litany of horrors.

The police repeatedly tortured prisoners, State Department officials wrote, noting that the most common techniques were "beating, often with blunt weapons, and asphyxiation with a gas mask." Separately, international human rights groups had reported that torture in Uzbek jails included boiling of body parts, using electroshock on genitals and plucking off fingernails and toenails with pliers. Two prisoners were boiled to death, the groups reported. The February 2001 State Department report stated bluntly: "Uzbekistan is an authoritarian state with limited civil rights."

Immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, however, the Bush administration turned to Uzbekistan as a partner in the global fight against terrorism. The nation, a former Soviet republic in Central Asia, granted the United States the use of a military base for fighting the Taliban across the border in Afghanistan. President Bush welcomed Uzbek President Islam Karimov to the White House, and the United States has given Uzbekistan more than $500 million for border control and other security measures.

Now there is increasing evidence that the United States has sent terror suspects to Uzbekistan for detention and interrogation, even as Uzbekistan's treatment of its own prisoners continues to earn it admonishments from around the world, including from the State Department.

The so-called rendition program, under which the CIA transfers terror suspects to foreign countries to be held and interrogated, has linked the United States to other countries with poor human rights records. But the turnabout in relations with Uzbekistan is particularly sharp. Before the Sept. 11 attacks, there was little high-level contact between Washington and Tashkent, the Uzbek capital, beyond the United States' criticism of Uzbekistan.

Uzbekistan's role as a surrogate jailer for the United States has been confirmed by a half-dozen current and former intelligence officials working in Europe, the Middle East and the United States. The CIA declined to comment on the prisoner transfer program, but an intelligence official estimated that the number of terrorism suspects sent by the United States to Tashkent is in the dozens.

There is other evidence of the United States' reliance on Uzbekistan in the program. On Sept. 21, 2003, two American-registered airplanes -- a Gulfstream jet and a Boeing 737 -- landed at the international airport in Tashkent, according to flight logs obtained by the New York Times.

Although the precise purpose of those flights is not known, over a span of about three years, from late 2001 until early this year, the CIA used those two planes to ferry terror suspects in U.S. custody to countries around the world for questioning, according to interviews with former and current intelligence officials and the planes' flight logs. On the day the planes landed in Tashkent, the Gulfstream had taken off from Baghdad, while the 737 had departed from the Czech Republic, according to the logs.

The logs show that at least seven flights were made to Uzbekistan by those planes from early 2002 to late 2003, but the records are incomplete.

Details of the CIA's prisoner transfer program have emerged in recent months from a handful of former detainees who have been released, primarily from prisons in Egypt and Afghanistan. In some cases, the prisoners said they were beaten and tortured while being held.

The rendition program was created in the mid-1980s as a way for the CIA to transfer criminal suspects arrested abroad to their home countries. After Sept. 11, the CIA used it to send prisoners suspected of being senior al Qaeda leaders to a half-dozen countries for detention. U.S. intelligence officials estimate that the United States has transferred 100 to 150 suspected terrorists to Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Uzbekistan.

A senior CIA official, speaking on condition of anonymity, would not discuss whether the United States has sent prisoners to Uzbekistan, or anywhere else. But he said: "The United States does not engage in or condone torture. It does not send people anywhere to be tortured. And it does not knowingly receive information derived from torture."

Uzbek Foreign Ministry spokesman Ilkhom Zakirov also declined to comment on whether Uzbekistan accepted terror suspects from the United States. He declined to address the accusations from human rights groups. But human rights activists say that because Uzbekistan's record is well known, it raises questions about why the CIA would send suspects there.

"If you talk to anyone there, Uzbeks know that torture is used -- it's common even in run-of-the-mill criminal cases," said Allison Gill, a researcher for Human Rights Watch who is currently working inside Uzbekistan. "Anyone in the United States or Europe who does not know the extent of the torture problem in Uzbekistan is being willfully ignorant."

The relationship between Washington and Tashkent was formalized at a March 2002 Oval Office meeting between Bush and Karimov. Muhammad Salih, the leader of Uzbekistan's pro-democracy Erk Democratic Party, who is living in exile in Germany, said the relationship had strengthened Karimov's hand.

"It's been a great opportunity for Karimov," Salih said. "But President Bush has to also think about human rights, and democracy. If he wants to have a collaboration on anti-terror matters, he should not close his eyes on other things that Uzbekistan is doing, like torture."

At a news conference last month, Bush was asked what Uzbekistan could do in interrogating a suspect that the United States could not.

"We seek assurances that nobody will be tortured when we render a person back to their home country," Bush said.

The State Department and human rights groups have continued to report on human rights abuses in Uzbek prisons.

The State Department's latest human rights report on Uzbekistan, issued in February, said: "Torture was common in prisons, pretrial facilities, and local police and security service precincts."

Specific cases have been documented. In the summer of 2002, Amnesty International reported, Fatima Mukhadirova, a 62-year-old Tashkent shopkeeper, was sentenced to six years of hard labor after denouncing the Uzbekistan government for the death of her son, Muzafar Avozov, in a Tashkent prison.

An independent examination of photographs of the body, conducted by the University of Glasgow, showed that Avozov died after being immersed in boiling water, human rights groups reported.

Human rights activists pressed for Mukhadirova's release. She was freed shortly before a planned visit by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in February 2004.

I remember the question of rendition being put to Bush at his last press conference. And he brushed it off, sayiing pretty much what was said in this post.

I think this is appalling.