Demonstrator Maboud Ebrahimzadeh is held down during a simulation of waterboarding outside the Justice Department in Washington November 5, 2007.

By Mick O’Reilly Senior Associate Editor GULF NEWS

Dubai: Some were picked up as they travelled through airports, others snatched as they slept in their beds — but all endured endless days of physical and psychological torture in secret prisons around the world.

All were rendered to dark cells, shadowy jails, illegal torture chambers in the most brutal regimes run by governments with scant regard for human rights — all to assist the US in its war on terror following the attacks of 9/11.

The dark work of the Central Intelligence Agency was abetted by the dirty deeds of 54 countries around the world, including Arab states, who helped move at least 136 people through a network of police and security forces, airport and transport officials, shady private jet companies, national governments and US and foreign captors willing and ready to use torture to exact intelligence.

The details of the global network are contained in a report prepared by the Open Society Justice Initiative, a New York-based rights advocacy group and released earlier this week.

The 216-page report “Globalising Torture” details the extent of international collusion in allowing the CIA to operate its secret and dark programme, sanctioned by the administration of President George W. Bush and his vice-president, Dick Cheney.

Sadly, the opening waterboarding scenes from Zero Dark Thirty isn’t the stuff of Hollywood — it’s a reality that was facilitated from governments around the world..

At least nine were sent to Al Assad’s prisons

Amrit Singh, the author of the Open Society report and the daughter of the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, said she found evidence that 25 countries in Europe, 14 in Asia and 13 in Africa lent some sort of assistance to the CIA, in addition to Canada and Australia. They include Thailand, Romania, Poland and Lithuania, where prisoners were held, but also Denmark, which facilitated CIA air operations, and Gambia, which arrested and turned over a prisoner to the Agency

“The moral cost of these programmes was borne not just by the US, but by the 54 other countries it recruited to help,” Singh said.

read more HERE ON GULF NEWS:

http://gulfnews.com/news/world/usa/54-countries-aided-cia-in-renditions-1.1143244