REPORT: CIA USED SYRIA FOR "OUTSOURCING OF TORTURE"

THIS JUST MAKES ME SICK. PERHAPS IT EXPLAINS WHY THE U.S. LETS SYRIA GET AWAY WITH MURDER IN LEBANON.

Report: CIA used Syria for "outsourcing of torture" (World Tribune)

LONDON — The CIA employed Syria as a contractor for detention and torture of Al Qaida suspects, a report said.

The Council of Europe released a report that outlined CIA cooperation with Syria from 2001 through 2004. The report, which focused on secret CIA flights of Al Qaida suspects, asserted that the U.S. intelligence agency sent abducted Syrian natives from Europe to Damascus, where they were imprisoned and tortured by Syrian intelligence.

[The United States has disputed the findings of the report, Middle East Newsline reported. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the report contained "a lot of allegations but no real facts."]

The report cited Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen of Syrian origin, abducted by the FBI during a stopover in New York and flown to Syria. Arar was said to have been tortured for 10 months in a prison operated by Syrian intelligence.

"According to Mr. Arar, the [CIA] agents on board the aircraft never identified themselves, but he heard that they belonged to a 'special removal unit,'" the report said. "In this specific case, the handing over of Mr. Arar to Syria seems to be a well established example of 'outsourcing of torture,' a practice mentioned publicly by certain American officials."

"CIA aimed to take terrorist suspects in foreign countries 'off the streets' by transporting them back to other countries, usually their home countries, where they were wanted for trial, or for detention without any form of due process," the report said.

Syria, deemed by the State Department a terrorist sponsor, was said to have been a leading contractor of the CIA, the report, released on Wednesday, said. The Council of Europe said the regime of President Bashar Assad accepted Syrian natives, including dissidents, who had renounced their Syrian citizenship and resettled in the West.

The CIA did not expect to obtain intelligence from the Al Qaida suspects, the report said. The council quoted former CIA agent Michael Scheuer, who designed the program in the mid-1990s, as saying that the agency doubted the veracity of any information extracted from Al Qaida suspects.

"It was never intended to talk to any of these people," Scheuer told the council. "Success, at least as the agency defined it, was to get someone, who was a danger to us or our allies, 'off the street' and, when we got him, to grab whatever documents he had with him. We knew that once he was captured he had been trained to either fabricate or to give us a great deal of information that we would chase for months and it would lead nowhere. So interrogations were always a very minor concern before 9/11."

Western diplomats said the 67-page report elaborated the U.S.-Syrian intelligence cooperation on the war against Al Qaida. For several years, the CIA and State Department — arguing that Damascus was helping the U.S. intelligence community — opposed congressional sanctions against the Assad regime.