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PEARSON: 'Frontline' report reveals 'Rendition' isn't fiction

Mike Pearson, Rocky Mountain News

Published November 6, 2007 at midnight

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United States: Extraordinary Rendition

When and where: 9 tonight, Rocky Mountain PBS-Channel 6

If the title of this Frontline: World season-opener sounds familiar, perhaps it's because of the feature film Rendition currently in theaters, a fictional account of the U.S. government- as-bogeyman, kidnapping terror suspects and flying them to a third-world country to be tortured for information.

But Extraordinary Rendition is the real thing, a damning documentary about the U.S. practice of holding suspects in secret prisons for months on end, only to eventually transfer them to Guantanamo Bay or release them without charge.

Based on British journalist Stephen Grey's controversial book Ghost Plane (so named for the airplanes used to fly the captives to their various detainment destinations), the show follows Grey as he treks the globe to interview freed suspects. Their stories are chilling, as are the documented flights Grey uncovers and the cavalier attitude of government officials in Egypt and elsewhere, who have abetted the U.S. in its quest to gather information.

The secret U.S. prisons (or "black sites") are used for what the government calls "high value" targets; two of the known locales documented here are in Poland and Romania.

"There wasn't a bed, just a mattress, and a bucket to urinate and defecate in," recalls Mohammed Bashmillah, one of the detainees whom Grey tracked down a year after his release without being charged.

Bashmillah and others recount their torture, including "water boarding" (simulated drowning) and being beaten on their genitals.

"We were chained by our legs for a period of about a month after our arrival," he says. "When they called us for interrogation, they bound us by the hands and legs and covered our heads."

To Grey's credit, he interviews not only former detainees, but government officials such as Jack Cloonan, a veteran FBI officer, and Tyler Drumheller, the former head of CIA operations in Europe. Neither man addresses whether the abductions are legal (although the White House got the Justice Department to declare them so), but stress the need to extract valuable information by whatever means possible.

What about the U.S. government's policy against torture? There's plausible deniability, apparently, if someone other than the U.S. is doing the torturing.

Some of the footage in Extraordinary Rendition is grainy, and the program lacks the relentless darkness of Grey's book. Still, you come away thinking that if the government can do these things to people who aren't U.S. citizens, what might it do to us? A second story in this hour of Frontline: World has a Denver connection.

India: A Second Opinion, follows Denver- based Washington Post correspondent T.R. Reid as he travels to a health spa in India to be treated through a method known as Ayurveda - meditation, herbal medicines, massages.

Reid has had a bothersome shoulder for years. U.S. doctors suggest he have an artificial joint installed, but there's always the risk of permanent nerve damage and paralysis. Reid opts to check out the Ayurveda treatment in India, which has been around for 3,000 years. The doctor who treats him chides U.S. health care for knowing "how to cure, but it does not know how to heal."

Does it work? The viewer will have to decide, but there's something fascinating about India's holistic approach to medicine, as opposed to the U.S. tendency to just throw money at a problem.

At the very least this segment makes you wonder how much of what ails us can be healed by the power of our own minds.

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