THIS is how “extraordinary rendition” appears to operate. A suspect is pounced upon by US agents or local proxies, and interrogated.

This can happen in any part of the world, but people are more likely to be preyed upon in countries that are subservient to the United States. (Unfortunately, that sort of relationship appears nowadays to be the rule, with just a handful of exceptions.) If the interrogation doesn’t yield the desired results, the suspect is transported to another country keen to curry favour with Washington.

The choice of destination is not random: it is restricted to nations whose security agencies have a high success rate in loosening tongues. Egypt, Morocco, Jordan and Syria have been mentioned among the favoured destinations. Once a suitable confession has been extracted, the suspect may end up at Guantanamo Bay, or at an even less accessible US-operated prison in some other part of the world. These are referred to as black sites. Their existence is not officially acknowledged by Washington, but it also is not denied. Like their inmates, these detention facilities exist in a kind of limbo.

Some of these suspects live to tell the tale. There are likely to be others who do not: where torture is the norm, death in custody is an unremarkable occurrence. Mamdouh Habib was one of the lucky ones — although in the light of his ordeal he could be excused for not considering himself particularly fortunate.

The Australian citizen was, like so many other suspects, arrested in Pakistan. He claims he was flown to Egypt, the country of his birth, where he was a guest of the government for six months. The wide-ranging hospitality included being beaten and hung from hooks, shock treatment with an electric prod, and a range of threats that seemed all too real: drowning, electrocution, rape by dogs. He “confessed” that he had given training in martial arts to the 9/11 hijackers.

He ended up in Guantanamo Bay, which may almost have seemed civilized by comparison. Earlier this year, he was freed without charge (and without apology) and allowed to return to his family in Sydney.

In a number of other cases of this nature, the victims of abduction have related remarkably similar tales.

Last week there was a brief flurry of excitement across Europe amid reports that hundreds of CIA flights, presumably related to cases of extraordinary rendition, had passed through European airports. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was due to visit, and many a pundit pontificated on how European leaders would whisper a few home truths into her ears, making it clear that such behaviour was reckless and unacceptable.

In the event, it didn’t prove too hard for Rice to persuade Nato and European Union leaders in Brussels to shut up and put up. The flights they were complaining about had helped to save lives in Europe, she announced, and no one demanded any proof. Rice’s aura of hubris was relatively subdued in meetings with heads of state such as Germany’s Angela Merkel. The US does not believe in or connive at torture, she said without blushing.

That would have been a welcome statement were it not such a blatant lie. Since last year it has become increasingly obvious that what the world saw of goings-on at Abu Ghraib was only the tip of the iceberg. Lately, the US itself has admitted that it is holding prisoners to whom the Red Cross is denied access. It does not say where. Reports have mentioned detention centres in Poland and Romania — and the former has vowed to look into the allegations. Although it’s hardly a secret that Washington treats former members of the Warsaw Pact virtually as American satellites, it is nonetheless hard to believe prisons could be maintained on Polish soil without the government’s knowledge.

A similar sense of disbelief must be extended to protestations from western European governments that they know nothing about the rendition flights. That sort of ignorance would be tantamount to gross incompetence. A willingness to turn a blind eye to US actions is by far a likelier explanation, and implausible deniability is the risk many of them are willing to take. This extends even to governments that had a decency to take a stand against the war in Iraq. Germany, for instance, agreed not to make a noise about Khalid Masri, a German citizen abducted while holidaying in Macedonia, with the collaboration of the Macedonian authorities, simply because his name resembled that of someone believed to be an acquaintance of one of the 9/11 hijackers.

Masri spent five months in an Afghan prison before being unceremoniously dumped back in Europe, once the CIA realized he had nothing to do with any sort of terrorist activity. And the US ambassador in Berlin asked the Schroeder government not to make a fuss. It complied. Now the American Civil Liberties Union has taken up his case and is suing the CIA on Masri’s behalf. Italy, meanwhile, has been somewhat more robust in its response to the abduction of Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr from a street in Milan. He was flown to Egypt for interrogation and torture.

There are likely to be many other innocents caught up in this dimension of the so-called war on terror, which all too often looks like a war on human rights. But such tactics don’t make a great deal of sense even when there is indeed reason to suspect persons of terrorist involvement. If there is any evidence against them, surely it can be used in a court of law.

Torture, apart from being morally reprehensible, has limited practical value: a person being subjected to excruciating pain will, in most cases, “confess” to anything. Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, for instance, responded to the barbarism of his interrogators by telling them what they wanted to hear: that Al Qaeda had received assistance from Baghdad in preparing from 9/11. For the Bush administration, this sufficed as “proof”.

It is fortunate that Britain’s highest court of appeal, much to the dismay of the Blair administration, has had the decency to rule that any statement obtained via torture is legally inadmissible as evidence. Guantanamo Bay and the CIA-operated prisons in Europe and elsewhere suggest that the ruling clique in Washington does not have the US legal system entirely under its thumb. That falls in the gratitude-for-small-mercies department, but it does not prevent the administration from breaking its own laws.

Extraordinary rendition does not mean that US does not itself practise torture, even if it tries to avoid doing so on American soil. Some survivors have spoken of an American presence in Egyptian and other torture chambers, which is by no means implausible. As for the black sites, we may one day find out what really goes on over there. What we already know is that contentions to the effect that such tactics are making the world a safer place do not stand up to serious scrutiny. In fact, the reverse is a likelier consequence.

Attempts by the US to cover up the most heinous aspects of its behaviour, meanwhile, suggest that the perpetrators are conscious of their wrongdoing. Which means Harold Pinter might have been slightly off the mark in saying, in his much anticipated lecture upon receiving this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature, that the US “no longer sees any point in being reticent or devious”, even though it is difficult to argue with the overall thrust of the celebrated playwright’s remarks.

Ill-health prevented Pinter from travelling to Stockholm to personally receive the honour, but he emerged from his hospital bed to record a video that can be viewed over the internet at www.nobelprize.org. It is a remarkable excoriation of US foreign policy in the post-World War II phase, with particular reference to Nicaragua. And, of course, Iraq: he aptly describes the invasion as “a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law”. “How many people,” he asks, “do you have to kill before you qualify as a mass murderer and a war criminal?” Then he goes on to offer the International Criminal Court of Justice the address of a leading suspect: No.10 Downing Street, London.

Not Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC, because the White House occupant has not ratified the court. Unfortunately for him, he cannot de-ratify the American people, the majority of whom have now woken up to the fact that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake, if not a crime. That majority does not include the Democratic Party.

After conservative congressman John Murtha, who is likely to have put up to it by senior military officers, called for an immediate pullout last month, and was supported by House of Representatives minority leader Nancy Pelosi as well as Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean, a number of Democrats offered the opinion that this was a dangerous tack that could lose them votes in next year’s congressional elections.

On the available evidence, these lawmakers are behind the times: public opinion is more advanced. They desperately need a wake-up call such as the following: “For misleading the American people and launching the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 BC sent his legions into Germany and lost them, [George W.] Bush deserves to be impeached and .... put on trial along with the rest of the president’s men. If convicted, they’ll have plenty of time to mull over their sins.”

That quotation comes not from Harold Pinter but from Martin van Creveld, a leading Israeli military historian who happens to be the only non-American whose writings are on the required reading list for US military officers.

Email: mahirali1@gmail.com