Consistently, we’ve called on the United States Congress to fulfill its constitutional duty of oversight concerning the handling of detainees in the war on terror.
Consistently, we’ve been disappointed and angered by the sheer indifference shown to questions surrounding abuse, sexual humiliation, torture, “ghost” detentions and renditions.
We believed that the only hope for answers rested with our elected representatives. Turns out, our best hope for the truth might be in the hands of other countries.
The Italian government is investigating the disappearance – and suspected kidnapping – of a radical Egyptian cleric. According to the Washington Post, they’ve been asking a lot of pesky questions at U.S.-Italian military bases and tracking the whereabouts of vehicles on the day the cleric disappeared. The Italians suspect the cleric, Abu Omar, was grabbed in a CIA-backed operation.
There are at least two other investigations along the same lines, one in Germany and the other in Sweden.
Rendition is the name given to a snatch-job where a suspect is secretly detained and then shipped off to another country for questioning. Many of the recipient countries are on the State Department’s list of governments that use torture on prisoners. Europeans, rightly, are concerned that the renditions are violations of laws against kidnapping and torture.
The difficult work of uncovering the truth about how the United States deals with perceived threats falls to others.
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