America's Covert War in East Africa: Surveillance, Rendition, Assassination.

• Author: Hajdarmataj, Flora

America's Covert War in East Africa: Surveillance, Rendition, Assassination

By Clara Usiskin

London: Hurst & Company, 2019, 295 pages, $24.36, ISBN: 9781849044547

America's Covert War in East Africa discloses the hidden face of security policy violations in the dark prisons of the CIA, and how much "War on Terror" complexity exists not only in the region but also in the world. War on Terror issues in regions like East Africa and around the world share some common themes across territories, although these themes manifest in different ways.

Clara Usiskin's book explores research in a 'national security zone' dominated by the discourse of counterterrorism, where there is no space for justice and human rights. In America's Covert War in East Africa: Surveillance, Rendition, Assassination, Usiskin elaborates upon topics that are rarely discussed in the context of the fight against terrorism, such as "attacks on human rights defenders and constraints on civil society" (p. 141). The book presents detailed research on the War on Terror, specifically its causes and effects in East Africa and the Horn of Africa, by documenting hundreds of cases of the U.S. 'rendition system,' through which the CIA and its military affiliates ferry prisoners around the world for detention under suspicion of terrorism in extraterritorial U.S. military prisons, and carry out secret, targeted killings. Usiskin describes the unimaginable torture occurring in dark CIA prisons, inflicted on prisoners held in incommunicado conditions by the United States as part of its counterterrorism actions. One of these prisoners was Suleiman, an involuntary participant in an experiment based on the theories of two CIA contractor psychologists, James Elmer Mitchell and John 'Bruce' Jessen. According to the torture program of the CIA, after the 'psychic demolition' job of exposure to their techniques, the victim would become a tabula rasa, a blank slate devoid of resistance and ready to comply with the will of the interrogators (p. 15).

The later chapters of the book describe a prison known as "Darkness" which was a prison notorious amongst U.S. detainees, so called because prisoners were held in constant, pitch black. The location of this prison has never been conclusively established, partly due to the fact that there have been successive prisons in Afghanistan with similar names. According to Usiskin, other locations of prisons on the CIA spider's web have been confirmed by U.S. Senate...