Portland Man: I was tortured in UAE for refusing to become an informant
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
On the topic of schools and supporting torture in client regimes, remember that someone had to both negotiate with the UAE in order to convince them that it would be in their best interest to do as the US says on the topic of torturing foreigners, as well as teach UAE's security forces how to torture in the US-approved way. That way, when someone the US wants information from comes along, they can be tortured by the UAE so that US can keep its PR.
Think about that for a minute. The US is teaching third parties how to torture effectively on its behalf because it wants the torturing done to the proper standard and because it is afraid of the backlash that will occur when torture is exposed. From this thought, we can say that the US has extensive internal standards regarding what methods of torture are acceptable and useful for clients to know, which are likely influenced by how bad and how directly attributable these torture techniques will look when exposed.
A speculation: the US still tortures people directly in addition to third party torture. They already have the secrecy, infrastructure, training, standards, incentive, and targets in hand.
They also have some modern client regimes, like Europe.
I will give you credit for acknowledging the "backward"/"modern" difference. The most important difference is that in the European "client regimes" (to use your language), they at least purport to maintain a semblance of democracy and human rights standards for their constituents. In that respect, call the convergent evolution towards the American-style government policy, a "client" or "vassal" state type of relationship if you'd like, but at least it's one in which (at a minimum) a superficial level of fairness is maintained (i.e., in contrast to sharia law countries).
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/the-hi...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition#Europe...
Gitmo?
There is always the impulse to torture suspects for any law enforcement agency. We need to act as citizens to ensure that torture and the outsourcing of torture are treated as the grand criminal matters that they are. Anyone in the chain of command who participates in or tolerates torture needs to face charges.
1. http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/24/chicago-polic...
I call this "mens rea".
Also, what's the point of putting people on the no-fly list if they can take a private charter jet and get in anyways?
> Sweden paid for a private jet to fly him to Portland five years after he left.
I'd assume the "no fly list" isn't going to apply to requests from other governments to transport US citizens. I don't think the US is worried about friendly European governments shipping terrorists into the US on private planes.
My theory is that someone in a diplomatic role in Sweden called in a couple favors to handle this. Since his request for asylum in Sweden was denied his visa there was likely to expire soon.
> Both TSA officials and FBI Terrorist Screening Center director Timothy Healy confirmed to ABC News last week that the effort to keep U.S. airspace off-limits to terror suspects has not included vetting the passengers and pilots on large private jets such as the one owned by Chagoury, which he has used to shuttle between Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New York and Europe.
I'd suspect there are similar loopholes for private jets chartered by friendly governments. But you may be right and someone in the Swedish government called in a favor.
To intimidate citizens. What do you think?
Most people can't afford charter jets
There are only 500 U.S. citizens on the no fly list, it doesn't appear like it is being used a weapon of coercion on a wide scale.
The US has to share that sort of terrorism suspect list in order to get other countries lists and to make connections.
That said, I'm not sure how the fuck the No-Fly list has survived so long. It is boldly unconstitutional.
True. It's perfectly plausible the FBI would outsource their dirty work in a deniable manner, but equally plausible the UAE would be highly motivated to take extreme measures in interrogating someone circumstantially linked to terrorism entirely of their own accord. Arguably the interrogator volunteering the US and UAE are definitely working together is better evidence for the latter than the former.
Either way the beatings actually add to the suspicion that the approach - joined up or otherwise - was governed more by a "just because we don't have any evidence of your guilt doesn't mean we believe you're innocent" attitude than "we really badly want you to work for us"
I see a report from 2012 which cites 500 Americans, out of a total 21,000 (https://www.aclu.org/national-security/factsheet-aclus-chall...), and a report from 2014 which cites 47,000 total (https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/08/05/watch-commande...), so I would assume the number of U.S. citizens on the no fly list is at least double the figure you list.
Well, we can only speculate as to the extent that this list is being used to "intimidate" individuals. Just because there are only 500 on the list, does not mean it hasn't be threatened upon countless other individuals.
It doesn't even have to be directed at you for you to be scared of it. Heck, I'm even scared that some day some random asshole with the same name as me will do something stupid and get himself on that damn list; and I haven't even done anything wrong. I think you'll find a few news articles online about people being harassed because their name hits against the list.
I guess that brings me to the third point. There are 500 unique names on that list, as I'm under the impression that all that list has is name+surname. Unless they include other details, odds are there are many more than 500 individuals that those names match against.
So what evidence is there that the US condoned Fikre's torture? The alleged statement of a torturer? That doesn't seem very reliable. He couldn't prove his story in Sweden, so how will he prove it in the US?
Isn't it possible that the UAE came to find out that Fikre had some involvement with the FBI over the Portland mosque, wanted to know why, and decided on torture on their own? Maybe they suspected that he had been turned into an FBI informant.
It seems a bit far-fetched that the US would be outsourcing the torture of suspected Muslim terrorists to a largely Islamic country, and just waiting for suspects to travel there so that it can happen. And the State Department's statement that they saw Fikre and he seemed ok seems strange if they had anything to hide.
It seems far fetched to think that the UAE would take a sudden interest in the security of Portland, Oregon but perhaps that's possible. What IS impossible is that a country that's a client of the US would dare to hold, let alone torture a US citizen for a 106 days without the explicit approval of the US.
You think the guy's story is far fetched because he just happened to be in the UAE. Not so much, really. They keep track of the movements of many people (1.5m according to Citizenfour) so they would have known that he was in the UAE. At that point it would only have required one bright bulb at the FBI to come with the idea "hey, why not we get our buddies in the UAE to have a chat with him?"
And I agree, I don't think the UAE cares about Portland. They might care that US security services had taken an interest in this individual though. Are you saying that the UAE security services are totally subordinate to the US and just act as puppets when it comes to US citizens? I would have thought they'd have a bit more independence than that, even if they do cooperate at some level.
It is possible that they took an interest in him out of the blue, but he had done nothing suspicious in UAE to warrant such brutality. Suppose he had done something suspicious in Dubai, does it seem likely that any client regime would do this to a US Citizen to ask them "who was the bearded man you met with last Thursday?" The story that he was asked about the mosque in Portland is much more plausible.
Sadly, the US exercises enormous influence on small regimes like the one in UAE.
There, fixed that for you.
Why is it bad that this sort of thing is happening then? Now it might just be against muslims, but if this becomes a habit, it could soon start to be used against other people, too.