Like "ethnic cleansing," the term "extraordinary rendition" is already a notorious euphemism, dressing up barbaric behaviour in the most banal language.
The latest batch of state documents from the US sheds further light on the torture network orchestrated by the CIA and spanning at least four continents.
For the past 10 years, people suspected of planning, executing or possibly knowing something about anti-Western acts of terrorism have been freighted across the world in unmarked aeroplanes, trussed up and delivered for torture in Cuba, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Romania, Poland, Egypt, Morocco, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates and elsewhere.
These vile operations make a mockery of US pretensions to be fighting a "war against terror" in defence of civilised values, democracy and freedom. Equally disgusting is the way that Cuba, itself a victim of US state terrorism, has been dragged into the web because the US military still squats in Guantanamo Bay.
But the biggest issue for the people of Britain must be our own government's complicity in US Torture Inc. Admissions that British airports and overseas territories such as Diego Garcia were hosting rendition flights had to be dragged out of former foreign secretary David Miliband. To this day, ministers and intelligence chiefs deny any complicity by British agents in torture sessions, despite mounting evidence to the contrary.
Only recently, the Gibson judicial inquiry into these matters set up by the Tory-led coalition imposed such restrictions on its own proceedings that British victims of US Torture Inc. are withdrawing from the process.
The International Criminal Court is very quick off the mark to indict political and military leaders who fall out of favour with the West. It will do its own failing credibility a power of good when it indicts George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Tony Blair, Jack Straw, Geoff Hoon and their ilk who have waged unprovoked war and organised or covered up "extraordinary rendition" on a horrendous scale.
By: The Morning star
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