Zimbabwe caught in CIA web

WASHINGTON — As many as 54 countries, including Zimbabwe, participated in the overseas detention and rendition programmes overseen by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the years following the September 11 attacks, according to a new report from a human rights watchdog group.

The report from the Open Society Justice Initiative is an extensive look at a programme that has remained largely unreported in its size and scale despite official acknowledgement from former President George W Bush and other US officials.

According to the report, 136 people have been subjected to the process of rendition — the transfer of a terrorism suspect by the United States to a third country for interrogation — or have been held in one of the so-called “black site” prisons in third countries run by the CIA.

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