By Alex Kane: Inside the Bush Administration's Lawless

global torture regime, and how Obama remains complicit. You may not have heard of Mohammed al Asad, but the torture he suffered was carried out in your name, and his story is one of 136 such ordeals that were perpetrated by the Central Intelligence Agency. Those stories are told in a comprehensive report issued by the Open Society Foundations (OSF) this month. Titled "Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition," the report is the fullest accounting yet, of the Bush administration's global torture ring. The document aims to fully fill in the gaps of what people know about the Bush administration's torture program, which enlisted the help of 54 countries around the world. Al Asad is a Yemeni national, who was detained in Tanzania in 2003, by security forces in that country. He was then shipped off to Djibouti, where he was held incommunicado, before being transferred to a US "rendition team", which consisted of five people, all of whom wore black, with their faces covered. Then al Assad was shipped off to a third country, Afghanistan, where he was held in isolation, subjected to loud music, faced by harsh lights 24 hours a day, and had his diet manipulated. Finally, al Assad, by this time damaged by intense CIA led torture, was handed off to Yemen, his home country, and a repressive ally of the US, where he was imprisoned for using forged travel documents. He was finally released in 2006, without ever being charged with terrorism, the ostensible reason the CIA picked him up, and tortured him in the first place. Mohammed al Assad's ordeal was by no means unique. He was caught up in the dragnet of the CIA's global program of "extraordinary rendition," which liberally used torture on alleged terrorist suspects, though some were undoubtedly innocent. In total, 136 people were subject to either the CIA's "black sites" or "extraordinary rendition" operations. Authored by Amrit Singh, senior legal officer for national security and counter terrorism at the Open Society Foundations, the report fully exposes the shocking breadth of the CIA's lawlessness in the age of the war on terror. "There was a need for a comprehensive public record on the scale and scope of the CIA's secret detention, and extraordinary rendition operations, both in terms of the victims of these operations, and the associated human rights abuses, as well as the government's that were complicit," Singh told AlterNet.