From BBC Online

Germany has ordered the arrest of 13 suspected CIA agents over the alleged kidnapping of one of its citizens. Munich prosecutors confirmed that the warrants were linked to the case of Khaled al-Masri, a German national of Lebanese descent.

Mr Masri says he was seized in Macedonia, flown to a secret prison in Afghanistan and mistreated there. He says he was released in Albania five months later when the Americans realised they had the wrong man. Mr Masri says his case is an example of the US policy of “extraordinary rendition” – a practice whereby the US government flies foreign terror suspects to third countries without judicial process for interrogation or detention.

Code names

Prosecutors in Munich said in a statement that the city’s court had issued the warrants on suspicion of abduction and grievous bodily harm. The information on which the warrants were based came from Mr Masri’s lawyers and a journalist and officials in Spain, where the flight carrying Mr Masri is thought to have originated. The names and nationalities concerned were not released but prosecutors said the names identified were thought to be the code names of CIA agents.

“The investigation will now focus on learning the actual names of the suspects,” they said.

Speaking at a news conference, Mr Masri’s lawyer, Manfred Gnjidic, said the arrest warrants were “a very important step in the rehabilitation of Masri”.

“It shows us that we were right in putting our trust in the German authorities and the German prosecutors,” he said. German arrest warrants are not valid in the US but if the suspects were to travel to the European Union they could be arrested.

Italian case

Mr Masri says he was abducted by US agents in the Macedonian capital, Skopje, on 31 December 2003. He is seeking to sue the US government over his detention, but in May a judge dismissed a lawsuit he filed against the CIA, citing national security considerations. The US government is not assisting the German authorities with the case.

Meanwhile in the Italian city of Milan, court hearings to decide whether to indict 25 alleged CIA agents and several Italians accused of kidnapping a Muslim cleric in 2003 are under way. Osama Mustafa Hassan, or Abu Omar, says he was abducted from the streets of Milan and then tortured in Egypt. If the case proceeds to trial, it would be the first criminal prosecution over America’s rendition policy.

The practice has drawn widespread criticism from human rights groups, legal experts and the international community. But last week a European Parliament committee approved a report saying EU states knew about secret CIA flights over Europe, the abduction of terror suspects by US agents and the existence of clandestine detention camps.

The Temporary Committee on the alleged use of European countries by the CIA for the transport and illegal detention of prisoners issued the following press release yesterday.

European Parliament: Committee deplores Member States’ passivity in the face of illegal CIA operations

Over a thousand CIA-operated flights used European airspace in 2001-05 and temporary secret detention facilities “may have been located at US military bases” in Europe, says Parliament’s temporary committee on CIA activities in Europe. Its final report deplores the passivity of some Member States in the face of illegal CIA operations, and a lack of co-operation from the EU Council of Ministers. It calls for a formal investigation under EU Treaty Article 7 on breaches of fundamental rights.

The report, adopted on Tuesday with 28 votes in favour, 17 against and 3 abstentions, and now due for debate and vote at the February plenary in Strasbourg, says European countries have been “turning a blind eye” to flights operated by the CIA which, “on some occasions, were being used for extraordinary rendition or the illegal transportation of detainees.” In some cases, says the report, “temporary secret detention facilities in European countries may have been located at US military bases” and ‘there may have been a lack of control’ over such bases by European host countries. ‘Secret detention facilities’, it explains, can also include places where somebody is held incommunicado, such as hotel rooms, as in the case of Khaled El-Masri in Skopje in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

The Temporary Committee therefore “expects the Council to start hearings and commission an independent investigation without delay, as foreseen in EU Treaty Article 7”, and, “where necessary, to impose sanctions on Member States in case of a serious and persistent breach of Article 6”.

(more…)

Published back in May 2006, this transcript of an International Rule of Law Lecture looks at Extraordinary Rendition: Complicity and its consequences

Given by Professor Philippe Sands QC, Director, Centre of International Courts and Tribunals, UCL, it provides a legal perspective on rendition and responsibility. With the European Parliament committee on involvement in rendition meeting on the 23rd January to consider their draft report, this area could shortly become yet another problem for the Prime Minister and associated ministers of state.

From Amnesty International UK

For more striking pictures of the protest at the US embassy in London today go here

European governments are under increasing pressure to reveal the extent of the assistance provided to the US for the operation of their extraordinary rendition programmes and covert detention and interrogation centres. The extent of the concern is revealed in a draft report on extraordinary rendition from the European Parliament that we posted previously. Now the BBC have produced a radio documentary that looks at growing suspicions about locations that may have been used illegally by the Americans in Poland and Morocco.

Click here to listen or go here for further details.

By Nick Hawton from BBC Online

I stood at the end of the frozen runway, peering through the mist, trying to make out the terminal building in the distance. It was exactly at this spot, and under the cover of darkness, that the CIA planes did their business.

“They always followed the same procedure,” says Mariola Przewlocka, the manager at the remote Szymany airport in north-east Poland when the strange flights arrived during 2003.

“We were always told to keep away. The planes would stay at the end of the runway, often with their engines running. A couple of military vans from the nearby intelligence base would go up to them, stay a while and then drive off, out of the airport.

‘Cash payments’

“I saw several of these flights but never saw inside the vans because they had tinted windows and they never stopped at the terminal building.

“Payment was always made in cash. The invoices were made out to American companies but they were probably fake,” says Mrs Przewlocka.

In September 2006, President Bush admitted what had been suspected for a long time – that the CIA had been running a special programme to transport and interrogate leading members of al-Qaeda, away from the public spotlight.

Human rights groups have expressed concerns that the prisoners may have been tortured. The hunt has been on ever since to locate the secret prisons, or “black sites” as they are known. Poland and Romania have been named by investigators as hosting such sites.

The claims are denied by both governments.

CIA landings

After a week of meetings in smoky Warsaw restaurants and coffee bars with Polish intelligence sources, airport workers and journalists, I obtained what I had been looking for, and something that nobody in authority wanted to reveal, the flight log of planes landing at Szymany airport.

They confirmed my eyewitness’s account – that a well-known CIA Gulfstream plane, the N379P, had made several landings at the airport in 2003. The plane has been strongly linked to the transportation of al-Qaeda terrorists. Another plane, a Boeing 737, had flown direct from Kabul to this remote Polish airport.

“There is no particular reason for a Gulfstream to stop there. So there has to be a reason why the plane is stopping there and the fact that everyone is trying to conceal this reason makes it all the more interesting to try to find out what it is,” says Anne Fitzgerald from Amnesty International.

I followed the route of the military vans from the airport to the nearby secret Polish intelligence base at the village of Stare Kiejkuty. Surrounded by double-lined fences, security cameras and thick pine forest, visitors are not welcome.

‘Secret prison’

Within five minutes of stopping the car I was approached by a man in a military uniform who made it clear he wanted me to leave. Was this where a CIA secret prison had been located? A committee of European parliamentarians who investigated the CIA secret prison programme subsequently concluded in a report:

“In the light of… serious circumstantial evidence, a temporary secret detention facility may have been located at the intelligence training centre at Stare Kiejkuty.”

I think it’s quite probable there was a kind of transfer site, a black site, in Poland.

Jozef Pinior, Polish politician

Others go further. Marc Garlasco is a senior military analyst with Human Rights Watch.

He says: “It’s almost a foregone conclusion that Poland hosted a CIA Black Site.” But the authorities in Poland do not want to talk about it.

All requests for interviews with government ministers were rejected. The European parliamentarians met a similar wall of silence. One civil servant from the prime minister’s office claimed a secret, internal inquiry had concluded there had been no “black site” in Poland.

Others disagree.

“I think it’s quite probable there was a kind of transfer site, a black site, in Poland. There is a Kafka-like mood in Warsaw. No one from the government has the will to answer our questions,” says Jozef Pinior, a senior Polish politician, who has called for a commission to investigate the claims.

With Polish troops serving in Afghanistan and Iraq, and with the United States as the country’s key ally, there is no desire to delve into the secret deals made in the secret war against international terrorism. The US state department has said it always complies with its laws and treaty obligations and respects the sovereignty of other countries.

But the truth of Poland’s role may soon emerge.

The new Democratic-controlled US Congress may begin its own investigation into the CIA secret prisons programme in the next few months.