When George W Bush declared war on terrorism, a number of liberal intellectuals scurried to express their support. Endorsing the spurious thesis of the "Clash of Civilisations" some, such as Paul Berman, author of Terror and Liberalism (praised by Nick Cohen in the issue of 30 October as one of the most original books to appear after 9/11) made the case for an ideological war against political Islam and Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath regime. The fact that Ba'ath regimes have been the cruellest prosecutors of Islamists does not figure in Berman's account.
Other supporters of Bush's war didn't stop at ideological justifications, but argued that no measures, not even torture, should be spared. Now they have got what they wanted: state-sponsored torture. As Stephen Grey shows in this remarkable book, the intellectual complicity of the likes of Berman was an important factor in smoothing the way to the so-called "extraordinary rendition" programme.
Through painstaking research into its origins, means, collaborators, victims and perpetrators, Grey reveals the story of the CIA programme that transferred detainees to Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Uzbekistan and Morocco - countries where they could be interrogated and tortured to extract confessions and information. Uncovering a world in which kidnapping, arrest, detention, interrogation and torture take place, Grey follows a fleet of luxury jets owned and used by the CIA to carry suspects across the globe. Beyond international law and with the collaboration of the intelligence services of Sweden, Canada, Germany, Italy, Pakistan and other allies, terrorist suspects and, sometimes, ordinary citizens disappear for weeks, months, sometimes years.
The CIA claimed, when the story could no longer be hidden, that it only deported terror suspects to their own countries. The stories of Khaled al-Masri and Binyam Mohammed show that is not true. Al-Masri, a German citizen, was arrested in Macedonia and sent to Afghanistan; Mohammed, an Ethiopian student from London, was arrested in Pakistan and sent to Morocco. Worse still, some of those suspects were not even suspect. Maher Arar, a Canadian wireless technician of Syrian origin, was sent to Palestine Branch, Syria's worst jail, for no other reason than that he was acquainted with someone who was vaguely connected to someone who had been to Afghanistan.
Ghost Plane is not only a brilliant piece of journalistic investigation into the shocking facts of the rendition programme, it's also a history of the practice and an argument against it. Grey places rendition within the long history of CIA covert action: possessing a secret airline and employing proxies to carry out its least attractive and legal missions are practices familiar to the agency since the early days of the cold war. Nor is returning terror suspects to their countries for torture a new policy. Since 9/11, American leaders have talked openly about using "enhanced methods" of interrogation. But what is more dangerous, and what made "extraordinary rendition" possible, is the abandoning of the Geneva Convention and Convention against Torture. By defining al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters as "unlawful combatants" unentitled to the rights of "prisoners of war", George Bush and his team paved the way for all kind of abuses and torture in both foreign and American prisons. Why shouldn't the interrogators of Syria's Palestine Branch or Egypt's Torah prison use "enhanced methods" of interrogation just as the Americans have been doing in their own prisons?
Berman devotes a large part of Terror and Liberalism to exposing the views of Sayyid Qutb, leading thinker of the Muslim Brotherhood and author of the 1964 pamphlet Ma'alim fi' Tariq (Milestones), viewed by both adherents and adversaries as a manifesto for jihad groups. What Berman fails to consider is that Qutb wrote this manifesto in the Torah prison after suffering severe torture. In Ghost Plane, Grey doesn't forget to mention that Osama Bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and others were inspired by this victim of unlawful imprisonment and torture.
Samir el-Youssef's "The Illusion of Return" is published by Halban in January
