Very Extraordinary

by digby

Uhm, rendition and torture for fraud?

Now in a federal court in suburban Washington, a case is unfolding that gives us a practical sense of what an Obama-era rendition looks like. Raymond Azar, a 45-year-old Lebanese construction manager with a grade school education, is employed by Sima International, a Lebanon-based contractor that does work for the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also has the unlikely distinction of being the first target of a rendition carried out on the Obama watch. According to court papers, on April 7, 2009, Azar and a Lebanese-American colleague, Dinorah Cobos, were seized by “at least eight” heavily armed FBI agents in Kabul, Afghanistan, where they had traveled for a meeting to discuss the status of one of his company’s U.S. government contracts. The trip ended with Azar alighting in manacles from a Gulfstream V executive jet in Manassas, Virginia, where he was formally arrested and charged in a federal antitrust probe. This rendition involved no black sites and was clearly driven by a desire to get the target quickly before a court. Also unlike renditions of the Bush-era, the target wasn’t even a terror suspect; rather, he was suspected of fraud. But in a troubling intimation of the last administration, accusations of torture hover menacingly over the case. According to papers filed by his lawyers, Azar was threatened, subjected to coercive interrogation techniques and induced to sign a confession. Azar claims he was hooded, stripped naked (while being photographed) and subjected to a “body cavity search.” On a ride to the infamous Bagram air base in Afghanistan — site of the torture-homicides involving U.S. interrogators exposed in the Oscar-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side — Azar contends that a federal agent pulled a photograph of Azar’s wife and four children from his wallet. Confess that you were bribing the contract officer, the agent allegedly said, or you may “never see them again.” Azar told his lawyers he interpreted that as a threat to do physical harm to his family. Azar alleges that on arriving at Bagram he was shackled to a chair in an office for seven hours and not allowed to move. Then in the midst of a cold rainstorm he was taken to an unheated metal shipping container converted to use as a cell. The cell was brightly lit and although the outside temperature approached freezing, he was given only a thin blanket. He also claims that he was not permitted to sleep during his confinement at Bagram, which lasted over a day. Then he was told he was going to take a plane trip. His handlers would not tell him where he was going. He feared he was being dragged to Guantanamo, there to be “disappeared” and tortured. How else, he thought, could he explain the absence of Afghan authorities, the hooding and other techniques? Before boarding the Gulfstream, Azar was shackled, blindfolded and had earphones placed on his head. Occasionally, the earphones and blindfold were removed so that his interrogation by FBI agents could continue. The 16-hour flight was broken by a refueling stop in Tbilisi, Georgia — which has long served as a pit stop for rendition flights into and out of the Afghanistan-Pakistan region. During the flight, according to papers filed by the Justice Department, Azar confessed to the charges against him–essentially that he was aware of corrupt payments made to a U.S. government contract agent to help Sima International secure or extend its contracts with U.S. government agencies.

If this is true, the world really has gone mad. people are hysterical and overwrought that the government is trying to give everyones health care and the same government is kidnapping and torturing confessions out of fraud suspects and nobody gives a damn.
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