Snap, Crackle, Pop

US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, went to Europe to sing "America the Beautiful", but gave the wrong rendition.

"This week the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, came to Europe to mend the rifts of the Iraq war, but found herself embroiled in a damaging dispute over the prisoner flights. As she left Washington, Rice made an extraordinary statement: both the first formal admission that the US flies suspects elsewhere for interrogation and a detailed defence of it. She said the practice enabled intelligence gathering "where the local government cannot detain or prosecute a suspect, and traditional extradition is not a good option".

In late 2003, Khaled el-Masri, a German of Lebanese background, was detained in Macedonia on suspicion of holding a false passport. His name also sounded like that of an al-Qaeda suspect. When the CIA learnt of his arrest, it persuaded the Macedonians to hand him over. He says masked agents flew him to Afghanistan, where he was beaten and held for five months in isolation in a freezing cell, while the CIA interrogated him.

Last year the United States freed Masri, saying there was no longer "evidence or intelligence to justify his continued detention". But before it did so, US officials told Schroeder's interior minister, Otto Schily, that they wanted to free Masri as quietly as possible. According to media reports that have not been denied, Schily and his government colleagues not only agreed, they refused Masri's lawyer any help in investigating the case. These revelations and others have provoked a storm of questions across Europe about the role of European governments in the US policy of "extraordinary rendition" - the abduction of terrorism suspects and their removal to countries where they can be interrogated outside the protection of US law.

It is believed that in the past four years the US has "rendered" about 150 suspects, mainly to Middle Eastern countries such as Egypt, Jordan and Syria. How many of these men have been tortured is unclear. Two who say they were are Canadian Maher Arar and Australian Mamdouh Habib.

Rice insisted the US was categorically opposed to torture and did not move suspects to countries "for the purpose of interrogation using torture". Where appropriate it sought assurances that suspects would not be tortured.

Rice's defence in effect sought to absolve the US of responsibility for what happens when a suspect is sent away, [The Washington Post] argued. Indeed, the national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, acknowledged this week he did not know how many transfers of suspects had been wrongly made. "The folks who are fighting the war on terror have a difficult job," he said. "Sometimes mistakes get made."

Mistakes such as the abduction of Muhammad Zery, perhaps. In December 2001 a CIA jet landed at Stockholm Airport and six hooded CIA agents stepped onto the tarmac. Inside an airport police station, they took charge of two alleged Islamic radicals from Egypt, Zery and Ahmed Agiza, said The Washington Post. They sliced off their clothes and searched inside their mouths and ears, before leading them in chains to the plane.

The men were flown to Egypt, where, they later told lawyers and Swedish diplomats, they were tortured. Agiza was charged with being a leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad - an accusation his lawyers said was once true but had not been for many years - and convicted in a military court. He is serving a 15-year jail sentence. Zery was released in October 2003. Egyptian officials told the Swedish Government last year he was no longer under suspicion, though his lawyer says he remains under surveillance.

The case caused a furore in Sweden because the Government, believing the men to be a security threat, had co-operated in the kidnapping. The parliamentary investigator found that the CIA agents subjected the prisoners to "degrading and inhuman treatment". Sweden's security police deserved "extremely grave criticism" for losing control of the operation and for being "remarkably submissive" to the Americans. A parliamentary committee is due to open hearings into the expulsion.

The heat is on both sides of the Atlantic. Recently, the Republican Senator John McCain moved an amendment to a defence appropriations bill that sought to make the US Government ban on torture explicit and inescapable.

One casualty of the row could be ties between US and European intelligence services, which have strengthened in recent years after the divisions over Iraq. Nevertheless, Professor Paul Wilkinson, of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at Scotland's St Andrew's University, thinks the EU must pursue the allegations. "Respect for the rule of law and human rights is an absolutely essential part of tackling terrorism," he says. "It is not a kind of luxury you can duck out of when you wish."

He believes opposition to torture and detention without legal process is not just moral but the way to win the war on terrorism. "If we don't show that we live up to the declarations and conventions that we proclaim we follow, then we are open to the charge of hypocrisy," he said.

"The battle of ideas may not be very dramatic or glamorous. But in my view it's essential if we are to prevent future generations of angry, alienated Muslim youth from being attracted to terrorist organisations"."

The nowhere men

"SO-CALLED renditions are not new. The US began using the policy in the 1980s, sometimes to seize Latin American drug lords who could not be extradited. In 1994 France seized the terrorist Carlos the Jackal from Sudan in a similar way.

In the mid-1990s the US began to apply the policy to Islamic terrorism, bringing the mastermind of the first World Trade Centre bombing, Ramzi Yousef, from Pakistan to the US.

In those days torture was not on the menu, and renditions were mainly extra-judicial extraditions. But the CIA didn't want terrorism suspects to enjoy the due process of the law. It didn't want to have to disclose secrets in US courts about its intelligence gathering, either.

Besides, it didn't always have enough evidence to convict. It needed to find countries where suspects could be interrogated but not tried under US law.

First it chose Egypt, then Morocco, Jordan and Syria - all countries that have been cited for human rights violations, including the use of torture.

After September 11, new imperatives drove US policy. National security trumped the niceties of international law. Vice-President Dick Cheney spoke of the need to "work through … the dark side".

An insight into the new thinking came from Cofer Black, then head of CIA counter-terrorism, who told a senate committee in 2002 that the arrest and detention of terrorists was "a very classified area … all you need to know is that there was a before 9/11 and … an after 9/11. After 9/11 the gloves came off". From there a straight line led to the legal memos, many of them written in the office of a White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales, that changed the definition of torture to enable a range of harsh interrogation methods to be used.

Serious doubts are now emerging about whether the approach works. Michael Scheuer, a former head of the CIA's Islamic militant unit who helped to devise the policy, said he hadn't considered "what would happen when it was found out we were turning them [terrorism suspects] over to governments that the human-rights world reviled."

Once detainees' rights had been violated, he said, "you absolutely can't" reinstate them into the court system. "You can't kill him either. All we've done is create a nightmare"."

Trials beyond the law

"The US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, has indicated a shift in US policy on harsh interrogation of prisoners, saying a ban on US personnel subjecting prisoners to cruelty extended to Americans working overseas.

"As a matter of US policy, the United States's obligations under the CAT [Convention Against Torture], which prohibits cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment - those obligations extend to US personnel wherever they are, whether they are in the United States or outside of the United States," Dr Rice said yesterday.

The Bush Administration had previously said the ban on cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment did not apply to Americans working overseas.

In practice, that meant CIA employees could use methods in overseas prisons that would not be allowed in the US. Human rights organisations and critics in Europe have called that a loophole for treatment almost indistinguishable from torture.

The move is also an important concession in US domestic politics, where Senator John McCain, a Republican and a former prisoner of war who was mistreated in Vietnam, has pressed the Administration to close the loophole. The Vice-President, Dick Cheney, had resisted legislation proposed by Senator McCain that was widely backed in Congress.

Dr Rice's visit to Germany - the first stop of her four-day tour - had been billed as the start of a new era in relations but instead it was dominated by the trans-Atlantic row over the CIA's activities in Europe, and one case in which the CIA mistook a German citizen for a terrorist suspect and abducted him. A large part of Dr Rice's talks with Dr Merkel focused on the case of the German national Khaled el-Masri, who was flown by the CIA from the Balkans to Afghanistan, held for five months and released because he was the wrong man.

"I am happy to say that we spoke about the individual case, which the US Administration has accepted as a mistake," Dr Merkel said. However, US officials later bridled at Dr Merkel's comments. They said Dr Rice had informed Germany about Mr Masri's detention and release. "We are not quite sure what was in her head," one senior US official said, referring to the German Chancellor.

The row was a bad conclusion to a meeting that the US and Germany had hoped would usher in a new era of ties following the appalling relationship between Gerhard Schroeder, Dr Merkel's predecessor, and Mr Bush."

Rice rethinks US torture policy