A new report from the George Soros-controlled Open Societies Foundations details the enormous lengths the United States went to preserve a program of "secret detention and extraordinary rendition" of terror suspects begun during the George W. Bush administration.
The report, called "Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition," outlines more than 50 countries that participated in the program. It describes in excruciating detail what was done to 136 named victims of the program when they were seized and flown to be interrogated by foreign governments or to CIA prisons known as "black sites" where the agency interrogated detainees with "enhanced interrogation techniques" that have been labeled as torture.
Section V of the report gives a never-before-seen look into the scope of worldwide participation in the program. It details 54 foreign governments that participated in some way in the secret detention and extraordinary rendition program. That included hosting CIA prisons, aiding in transportation and logistics, provided enhanced interrogators, or detaining, torturing or interrogating inmates.
Described as "affirmative acts of assistance," the report is a condemnation of the widespread clandestine support for a program that was internationally condemned in public.
President Barack Obama was among those who condemned the program, signing an executive order upon taking office that was supposed to close the Guantanamo Bay facility in Cuba within a year. More than four years later, it remains open. Obama has also not ended the practice of extraordinary rendition, according to a January report in The Washington Post.
According to the OSF report, the countries listed as materially aiding and abetting the U.S. extraordinary rendition program include the prominent allies of Canada, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom.
As a result of their involvement, the report concludes, multiple nations and high ranking officials are being tried for human rights abuses in international criminal court:
The European Court of Human Rights recently held that Macedonia’s participation in Khaled El-Masri’s abduction, torture, and secret detention violated the European Convention on Human Rights, and that his treatment by the CIA amounted to torture. Italy’s Court of Cassation upheld the convictions of U.S. and Italian officials for their role in the extraordinary rendition of Abu Omar to Egypt.