Growing evidence U.S. sending prisoners to torture capital / Despite bad record on human rights, Uzbekistan is ally

Growing evidence U.S. sending prisoners to torture capital / Despite bad record on human rights, Uzbekistan is ally: "- Don Van Natta Jr., New York Times | Sunday, May 1, 2005

Seven months before Sept. 11, 2001, the State Department issued a human rights report on Uzbekistan. It was a litany of horrors.

The police repeatedly tortured prisoners, State Department officials wrote, noting that the most common techniques were "beating, often with blunt weapons, and asphyxiation with a gas mask." Separately, international human rights groups had reported that torture in Uzbek jails included boiling of body parts, using electroshock on genitals and plucking off fingernails and toenails with pliers. Two prisoners were boiled to death, the groups reported. The February 2001 State Department report stated bluntly: "Uzbekistan is an authoritarian state with limited civil rights."
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Now there is increasing evidence that the United States has sent terror suspects to Uzbekistan for detention and interrogation, even as Uzbekistan's treatment of its own prisoners continues to earn it admonishments from around the world, including from the State Department.

The so-called rendition program, under which the CIA transfers terror suspects to foreign countries to be held and interrogated, has linked the United States to other countries with poor human rights records. But the turnabout in relations with Uzbekistan is particularly sharp. Before the Sept. 11 attacks, there was little high-level contact between Washington and Tashkent, the Uzbek capital, beyond the United States' criticism of Uzbekistan.

Uzbekistan's role as a surrogate jailer for the United States has been confirmed by a half-dozen current and former intelligence officials working in Europe, the Middle East and the United States. The CIA declined to comment on the prisoner transfer program, but an intelligence official estimated that the number of terrorism suspects sent by the United States to Tashkent is in the dozens.

There is other evidence of the United States' reliance on Uzbekistan in the program. On Sept. 21, 2003, two American-registered airplanes -- a Gulfstream jet and a Boeing 737 -- landed at the international airport in Tashkent, according to flight logs obtained by the New York Times.
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"If you talk to anyone there, Uzbeks know that torture is used -- it's common even in run-of-the-mill criminal cases," said Allison Gill, a researcher for Human Rights Watch who is currently working inside Uzbekistan. "Anyone in the United States or Europe who does not know the extent of the torture problem in Uzbekistan is being willfully ignorant."

The relationship between Washington and Tashkent was formalized at a March 2002 Oval Office meeting between Bush and Karimov. Muhammad Salih, the leader of Uzbekistan's pro-democracy Erk Democratic Party, who is living in exile in Germany, said the relationship had strengthened Karimov's hand.

"It's been a great opportunity for Karimov," Salih said. "But President Bush has to also think about human rights, and democracy. If he wants to have a collaboration on anti-terror matters, he should not close his eyes on other things that Uzbekistan is doing, like torture."

At a news conference last month, Bush was asked what Uzbekistan could do in interrogating a suspect that the United States could not.

"We seek assurances that nobody will be tortured when we render a person back to their home country," Bush said. ...