Article: Terror Policies Draw Outrage At Home And Abroad

This article appears on the commondreams.org website...

Published on Tuesday, June 28, 2005 by the Inter Press Service

Terror Policies Draw Outrage at Home and Abroad
by Haider Rizvi

UNITED NATIONS - The George W. Bush administration's policies on indefinite detention and ”extraordinary rendition” are coming under heavy fire from a number of institutions and organizations, including the United Nations, Amnesty International, and members of the U.S. Congress itself.

"Torture does not stop terror. Torture is terror." -- Amnesty International

"The prohibition of torture is non-negotiable," said U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan on the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, held annually on Jun. 26.

Without naming the United States, he added: ”That includes an absolute ban on transferring anybody to another jurisdiction where there are reasonable grounds to believe that the person is at risk of torture.”

Currently, the U.S. administration is pursuing a policy of what it calls ”extraordinary rendition,” which involves seizing suspects and taking them to a third country without court approval.
Human rights groups have documented a number of cases in which U.S. authorities secretly transferred individuals to countries where they were held without charge and routinely tortured.

One such case that came to the media's attention last weekend is now testing diplomatic relations between the United States and Italy, with the issuance of arrest warrants for 13 agents of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) accused of abducting an Egyptian cleric on the streets of Milan and sending him to Egypt.

Click here to read the entire article