|
The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings, Torture and Big Money |
|
July 7th, 2006 - Algerian Tells of
Dark Term in U.S. Hands |
|
Algerian Tells of Dark Term
in U.S. Hands By Craig S. Smith and Souad Mekhennet New York Times July 7, 2006 Algiers - Two years ago, a
motley collection of prisoners spent night after night repeating their
telephone numbers to one another from within the dark and dirty cells where
they were being held in Afghanistan. Anyone who got out, they said they
agreed, would use the numbers to contact the families of the others to let
them know that they were still alive. At least two of those men
are now free and, thanks to the memorization exercise, are back in touch with
each other. The case of one of them,
Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen who was held as part of the United States'
antiterrorism rendition program, was revealed last year, and German and
American officials have acknowledged that he was erroneously detained by the
United States. But the tale of the other, an Algerian named Laid Saidi, has
never been told before, and it carries a new set of allegations against
America's secret detention program. In May 2003, Mr. Saidi was
expelled from Tanzania, where he ran a branch of Al Haramain Islamic
Foundation, an international charity based in Saudi Arabia that promoted the
fundamentalist Wahhabi strain of Islam and has since been shut down after
being accused of financing terrorist groups. Tanzanian newspapers reported on
Mr. Saidi's expulsion at the time, but nothing was known about where he went. In a recent interview, Mr.
Saidi, 43, said that after he was expelled he was handed over to American
agents and flown to Afghanistan, where he was held for 16 months before being
delivered to Algeria and freed without ever being charged or told why he had
been imprisoned. He acknowledged that he was carrying a fake passport when he
was detained, but he said he had no connection to terrorism. Wearing a white robe and a
white skullcap in his lawyer's office here, he held up two white shoes he
said his captors gave him before setting him free in August 2004. The only
other physical evidence he offered of his imprisonment were fading scars on
his wrists that he said were from having been chained to the ceiling of a
cell for five days. "Sometimes I cry and
shake when I think about this," he said in his first interview about his
imprisonment. "I didn't think I would see my family again." While Mr. Saidi's allegations
of torture cannot be corroborated, other elements of his story can be. American, Tanzanian and
Algerian officials have declined to comment on Mr. Saidi's allegations, but
Mr. Masri said he saw Mr. Saidi in the Afghan prison where he was held. German
prosecutors investigating Mr. Masri's detention now want to interview Mr.
Saidi, said Martin Hofmann, a prosecutor in Munich. In addition, a criminal
investigation of the deaths in 2002 of two Afghan detainees at the American
military detention center in Bagram, north of Kabul, found that prisoners
were often shackled to the ceiling by their wrists for punishment, as Mr.
Saidi said he had been. Military officials, though, said the practice was
stopped after the deaths. A spokesman for the Central Intelligence
Agency declined to discuss Mr. Saidi's claims. "While the C.I.A. does
not as a rule comment publicly on these kinds of allegations, the agency has
said repeatedly that it does not condone torture," said the spokesman,
Paul Gimigliano. He added that renditions, the process of moving captured
terrorism suspects to third countries for interrogation, "are an
antiterror tool that the United States has used for years in accordance with
its laws and treaty obligations." A Shadowy Program Mr. Saidi is one of a
handful of men to publicly claim they were seized in the rendition program
and then mistreated or tortured, before being released without charge or
explanation. Like prisoners released from the American military detention
center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, they represent not only a mounting political
problem, but a potential legal problem for the United States and its allies
that have participated in the extrajudicial abductions. International fallout from
renditions continued Wednesday when prosecutors in Milan arrested two Italian
intelligence officers on allegations that they aided the C.I.A. in the 2003
kidnapping of a radical Egyptian cleric in Italy. The cleric was then sent to
Egypt, where he has been imprisoned. Mr. Saidi was seized as the United
States and Saudi Arabia were cracking down on Al Haramain, which the United
States subsequently declared had provided "financial and other
operational support" for the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and
Tanzania. But it is not known what, if any, specific suspicions the
authorities had about Mr. Saidi. A July 2004 German
intelligence report on Al Haramain made note of Mr. Saidi's expulsion but
said, "It is not yet clear whether there existed concrete assessments
that this person had links to terrorism." It added that "the
Tanzanian government justified their procedure with the not very credible
argument that he had broken legal regulations for foreigners." In addition to the German
prosecutors, the Council of Europe, a multinational human rights watchdog,
wants to interview Mr. Saidi as part of its investigation into whether any
European countries have breached the European Convention on Human Rights by
participating in renditions. Mr. Saidi said he believed
that his captors were Americans because they spoke English and appeared in
charge at the Afghanistan prison. He said he hoped to file a lawsuit against
the government later this year. "We don't know who to sue yet,"
said Mostefa Bouchachi, Mr. Saidi's lawyer. "We don't know who is
responsible, the C.I.A. or F.B.I." Mr. Saidi said he left
Algeria in 1991 to escape the violence then engulfing the country. He studied
in Yemen before moving to Kenya and then Tanzania in early 1997. He began
working for Al Haramain and became director of its branch in the costal city
of Tanga, a job that gave him a public profile. He said that during that
time he was using a fraudulent Tunisian passport and living under the name
Ramzi ben Mizauni ben Fraj. He said he had lost his passport and bought a
fake one because he was afraid of going to the Algerian Embassy while Algeria
was fighting a civil war with Islamists. He denied that he had any reason to
hide his identity or that Al Haramain's activities were anything but
charitable. United States intelligence
officials have long suspected that Al Haramain was involved in financing
terrorism, according to the report of the 9/11 Commission. Suspicion rose
after the August 1998 bombings of the United States Embassies in Kenya and
Tanzania. After the Sept. 11 attacks, American and Saudi authorities alleged
that some Haramain money was being diverted to terrorist groups and that the
organization was infiltrated by people with links to those groups. By 2003, several Haramain
branches were shut down, and the following year the Saudi authorities
dissolved the charity. It is not clear if the
crackdown on Al Haramain led to Mr. Saidi's detention, but on Saturday, May
10, 2003, Tanzanian police officers surrounded his car as he left home for
work, according to Mr. Saidi, his wife and press reports at the time. That
night the police drove him to Dar es Salaam and put him in jail. "I thought I might have
been arrested for holding a false passport, but I didn't tell them it was
fake," he said. Three days later, he said, he
was bundled into a white Land Rover and driven to the Malawi border, where he
was turned over to Malawians in plain clothes who were accompanied by two
middle-aged Caucasian men wearing jeans and T-shirts. They spoke English with
the Malawians, Mr. Saidi said. That is when he realized that something more
ominous was going on. A Place 'Out of the World' Shortly after the expulsion,
a lawyer representing Mr. Saidi's wife filed an affidavit in the Tanzanian
court saying that immigration documents showed Mr. Saidi was deported through
the border between Kasumulu, Tanzania, and Malawi. After being held for a week
in a prison in the mountains of Malawi, Mr. Saidi said, a group of people
arrived in a sport utility vehicle: a gray-haired Caucasian woman and five
men dressed in black wearing black masks revealing only their eyes. The Malawians blindfolded
him, and his clothes were cut away, he said. He heard someone taking
photographs. Then, he said, the blindfold was removed and the agents covered
his eyes with cotton and tape, inserted a plug in his anus and put a
disposable diaper on him before dressing him. He said they covered his ears,
shackled his hands and feet and drove him to an airplane where they put him
on the floor. "It was a long trip,
from Saturday night to Sunday morning, " Mr. Saidi recalled. When the
plane landed, he said, he was taken to what he described as a "dark
prison" filled with deafening Western music. The lights were rarely
turned on. Men in black arrived, he
said, and he remembers one shouting at him through an interpreter: "You
are in a place that is out of the world. No one knows where you are, no one
is going to defend you." He was chained by one hand
to the wall in a windowless cell and left with a bucket and a bottle in lieu
of a latrine. He remained there for nearly a week, he said, and then was
blindfolded and bound again and taken to another prison. "There, they
put me in a room, suspended me by my arms and attached my feet to the
floor," he recalled. "They cut off my clothes very fast and took
off my blindfold." An older man, graying at the temples, entered the
room with a young woman with shoulder-length blond hair, he said. They spoke
English, which Mr. Saidi understands a little, and they interrogated him for
two hours through a Moroccan translator. At last, he said, he thought he
would learn why he was there, but the questioning only confounded him. He said the interrogators
focused on a telephone conversation they said he had had with his wife's
family in Kenya about airplanes. But Mr. Saidi said he told them that he
could not recall talking to anyone about planes. He said the interrogators
left him chained for five days without clothes or food. "They beat me
and threw cold water on me, spat at me and sometimes gave me dirty water to
drink," he said. "The American man told me I would die there." He said his legs and feet
became painfully swollen because he was forced to stand for so long with his
wrists chained to the ceiling. After they removed him from the chains, he said,
he was moved back to the "dark" prison and a doctor gave him an
injection for his legs. After one night there, he
was moved to a third prison. He said the guards in this prison were Afghans,
and one told him that he was outside Kabul. There were two rows of six
cells in the basement, which he described as "filthy, not even suitable
for animals." Each cell had a small opening in the zinc-clad door
through which the prisoners could glimpse one another as they were taken in
and out of their cells. At night, they would talk. "This is where I met
Khaled el-Masri," Mr. Saidi said. A layout of the prison he sketched
closely matched one drawn by Mr. Masri. Mr. Masri had been seized in
Macedonia in December 2003, and it was later revealed that he had apparently
been mistaken for a terrorism suspect with a similar name. He said he was
able only to glimpse Mr. Saidi a few times in Afghanistan. But he said their
cells were close enough for them to talk at night. "At the beginning of
our prison time together, I was in the last cell and he was two cells away
from me," Mr. Masri said by telephone from Germany. "Whenever I
wanted to go to the toilet or was taken for questioning, I had to pass his
door." Mr. Masri and Mr. Saidi said
they got to know other prisoners, including two Pakistani brothers from Saudi
Arabia, whose phone number Mr. Masri also memorized. Using that number, The
New York Times reached relatives of the brothers, Abdul al-Rahim Ghulam
Rabbani and Mohammed Ahmad Ghulam Rabbani, who said they had heard from the
Red Cross two years ago that the brothers were being held in Afghanistan.
Pentagon documents show that two men with those names are now detainees at
Guantánamo Bay. A Dire Misunderstanding In prison, Mr. Saidi said,
he was interrogated daily, sometimes twice a day, for weeks. Eventually, he
said, his interrogators produced an audiotape of the conversation in which he
had allegedly talked about planes. But Mr. Saidi said he was
talking about tires, not planes, that his brother-in-law planned to sell from
Kenya to Tanzania. He said he was mixing English and Arabic and used the word
"tirat," making "tire" plural by adding an Arabic
"at" sound. Whoever was monitoring the conversation apparently
understood the word as "tayarat," Arabic for planes, Mr. Saidi
said. "When I heard it, I
asked the Moroccan translator if he understood what we were saying in the
recording," Mr. Saidi said. After the Moroccan explained it to the interrogators,
Mr. Saidi said, he was never asked about it again. "Why did they bring me
to Afghanistan to ask such questions?" he said in the interview.
"Why didn't they ask me in Tanzania? Why did they have to take me away
from my family? Torture me?" Mr. Saidi said the
interrogators also accused him of hiding rockets in his house and of
funneling money to Al Qaeda, allegations that he strongly denies and for
which he said evidence was never produced. While he was in prison,
however, the United States Treasury Department asked the United Nations to
add Al Haramain's Tanzanian branch to the list of charities alleged to have
financed terrorist organizations. In its January 2004
announcement, the department said an unnamed former director of Al Haramain
in Tanzania was responsible for making preparations for the advance party
that planned the 1998 embassy bombings. But the department declined to
identify the former director or to comment on Mr. Saidi's case. Mr. Saidi said interrogators
asked repeatedly about the Haramain director who preceded him, a Saudi named
Muammar al-Turki. But he said he was no longer in touch with him. Mr. Saidi said the
interrogations eventually stopped. In the late spring or early summer of
2004, he said, he was flown to Tunisia, apparently because his captors
thought he was Tunisian. But when Arabic-speaking men boarded the plane, he
said he told them he was from Algeria and that his Tunisian passport was
fake. "I didn't want to get
into more trouble," he explained. He spent 75 more days in
jail, he said. In late August 2004, he again prepared to travel. His captors
gave him the pair of white shoes he still has. The flight took about 10 or 12
hours, and when the plane landed, he said, he was turned over to Algerian intelligence
officials. They held him for a few days, then bought him some clothes, gave
him a small sum of money and drove him to a bus stop in the Algiers
neighborhood of Bir Khadem. After 16 months, Mr. Saidi
was free. He was reunited with his wife and children. Mr. Masri had been
released a few months before. He tried to contact Mr. Saidi at the Tanzanian
phone number he had memorized, but the number was disconnected. Eventually,
Mr. Saidi sent him a text message with a new number in Algeria, which Mr. Masri
called. "I know him from his
voice," Mr. Masri said, "and I recognized his voice from the first
phone call that we had after his release." Mark Mazzetti contributed
reporting from Washington for this article. Copyright 2006 The New York
Times Company External link: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/07/world/africa/07algeria.html |