The death of Zarqawi
With the killing of the leader of Al Queda in Iraq, what will the implications be for the war against the US/UK presence?
LFCM speculates on the likely effects.
andrew
‘Rendition’ hypocrisy
“…selling our souls for dross”
From the Financial Times
Europe’s foremost guardian of human rights yesterday painted a chilling picture of how more than a dozen European countries became part of a global “spider’s web” spun by the US to kidnap and transport outside the reach of the law suspects in the “war on terror”. Such lawless practices, including the outsourcing of torture to friendly despots, are spreading like a lethal virus.
They amount to a moral capitulation by liberal societies and a surrender of the rule of law in the face of jihadi totalitarianism. If we behave like this, what exactly are we defending?
The Council of Europe report, while not definitive, is devastating. Dick Marty, the Swiss legislator who led the inquiry, lacked the investigatory powers to compel and compile legally watertight evidence. But his dossier leaves no doubt about the archipelago of clandestine “black sites” run by the Central Intelligence Agency, of “enhanced” interrogation techniques, and of collusion by countries including the UK and Germany, Poland and Spain, Sweden, Turkey and much of the Balkans.
Many of the cases in the Marty report were known. But their presentation as a pattern called forth a storm of bluster and obfuscation from those implicated. The Bush administration is investigating how The Washington Post obtained classified information about clandestine CIA sites in eastern Europe last November. The Swiss are investigating the leak of an intercepted Egyptian government fax about the sites.
But rather than shooting the messenger they should look at the message the west is sending by betraying the values it urges on others, a hypocrisy in no way disguised by recourse to Orwellian legalisms such as “rendition”.
The purpose of this practice, the Marty report is careful to underline, is not to transport suspects across borders within a recognised legal process but “to place captured terrorist suspects outside the reach of any justice system and keep them there”.
The “ghost prisoners” of the “black sites” are now a grievance to be added to Guant’namo, Abu Ghraib and Bagram. All this comes hard on the heels of news of a cover-up of an alleged US Marines massacre at Haditha in Iraq, and Pentagon attempts to excise Geneva Conventions protections for prisoners under interrogation from US army rules. It is getting hard to think of what more we can do to empower al-Qaeda.
We should not need to make the case against torture. It is morally depraved. It corrodes the society that condones it. It elicits largely worthless information. As Craig Murray, the UK envoy to Uzbekistan fired for denouncing Britain’s use of CIA-supplied information extracted in Uzbek jails, put it: “We are selling our souls for dross.”
Sandra Day O’Connor, the retired US Supreme Court justice, summed it up well when she said we “must not wield the tools of tyrants even to resist an assault by the forces of tyranny”.
See also: We need to act against rendition
Council of Europe Reports on Extraordinary Rendition
“Rendition is a degrading and dehumanising practice; certainly for its victims, but also for those who perform the operations. This simple realisation has become clear to me and my team as we have met with various people whose lives have been indelibly changed by rendition.”
Dick Marty has released his report on Alleged secret detentions and unlawful inter-state transfers involving Council of Europe member states. Extracts are given below. The report is scheduled for debate during the plenary session of the 630-member PACE in Strasbourg on Tuesday 27 June 2006.
On the US response to terrorism:
“While the states of the Old World have dealt with these threats primarily by means of existing institutions and legal systems, the United States appears to have made a fundamentally different choice: considering that neither conventional judicial instruments nor those established under the framework of the laws of war could effectively counter the new forms of international terrorism, it decided to develop new legal concepts. The latter are based primarily on the Military Order on the Detention, Treatment, and Trial of Certain Non-Citizens in the War against Terrorism signed by President Bush on 13 November 20013. It is significant that, to date, only one person has been summoned before the courts to answer for the 11 September attacks: a person, moreover, who was already in prison on that day, and had been in the hands of the justice system for several months4. By contrast, hundreds of other people are still deprived of their liberty, under American authority but outside the national territory, within an unclear normative framework. Their detention is, in any event, altogether contrary to the principles enshrined in all the international legal instruments dealing with respect for fundamental rights, including the domestic law of the United States (which explains the existence of such detention centres outside the country). The following headline appears to be an accurate summary of the current administration’s approach: No Trials for Key Players: Government prefers to interrogate bigger fish in terrorism cases rather than charge them.
This legal approach is utterly alien to the European tradition and sensibility, and is clearly contrary to the European Convention on Human Rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”
On Guantanamo Bay:
“At Guantanamo Bay, on the island of Cuba, several hundred people are being detained without enjoying any of the guarantees provided for in the criminal procedure of a state governed by the rule of law or in the Geneva Conventions on the law of war. These people have been arrested in unknown circumstances, handed over by foreign authorities without any extradition procedure being followed, or illegally abducted in various countries by United States special services. They are considered enemy combatants, according to a new definition introduced by the American administration.
The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) has strongly criticised this state of affairs: on 26 April 2005, with no votes against and just five abstentions, it adopted a resolution (1433/2005) and recommendation (1699/2005) in which it urges the United States Government to put a stop to this situation and to ensure respect for the principles of the rule of law and human rights.”
On Secret CIA prisons in Europe:
“This was the news item circulated in early November 2005 by the American NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW), the Washington Post and the ABC television channel. Whereas the Washington Post did not name specific countries hosting, or having allegedly hosted, such detention centres, simply referring generically to ‘eastern European democracies’, HRW reported that the countries in question are Poland and Romania. On 5 December 2005, ABC News in turn reported the existence of secret detention centres in Poland and Romania, which had apparently been closed following the Washington Post’s revelations. According to ABC, 11 suspects detained in these centres had been subjected to the harshest interrogation techniques (so-called ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’) before being transferred to CIA facilities in North Africa.
It is interesting to recall that this ABC report, confirming the use of secret detention camps in Poland and Romania by the CIA, was available on the Internet for only a very short time before being withdrawn following the intervention of lawyers on behalf of the network’s owners. The Washington Post subsequently admitted that it had been in possession of the names of the countries, but had refrained from naming them further to an agreement entered into with the authorities. It is thus established that considerable pressure was brought to bear to ensure that these countries were not named. It is unclear what arguments prevailed on the media outlets in question to convince them to comply. What is certain is that these are troubling developments that throw into question the principles of freedom and independence of the press. In this light, it is worth noting that just before the publication of the original revelations by the reporter Dana Priest in early November 2005, the Executive Editor of the Washington Post was invited for an audience at the White House with President Bush.”
On the US rendition programme:
“Rendition operations have escalated in scale and changed in focus. The central effect of the post-9/11 rendition programme has been to place captured terrorist suspects outside the reach of any justice system and keep them there. The absence of human rights guarantees and the introduction of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ have led, in several cases examined, as we shall see, to detainees being subjected to torture.
The reasons behind the transformation in the character of rendition are both political and operational. First, it is clear that the United States Government has set out to combat terrorism in an aggressive and urgent fashion. The executive has applied massive political pressure on all its agencies, particularly the CIA, to step up the intensity of their counter-terrorist activities. According to Scheuer, ‘after 9/11, we had nothing ready to go ‘ the military had no plans, they had no response; so the Agency felt the brunt of the executive branch’s desire to show the American people victories’33.
Second, and more importantly, the key operational change has been the mandate given to the CIA to administer its own detention facilities. When it takes terrorist suspects into its custody, the CIA no longer uses rendition to transport them into the custody of countries where they are wanted. Instead, for the high-level suspects at least, rendition now leads to secret detention at the CIA’s so-called ‘black sites’34 in unspecified locations around the world. Rather than face any form of justice, suspects become entrapped in the spider’s web.
In compiling this report, members of my team and I have met directly with several victims of renditions and secret detentions, or with their families. In addition, we have obtained access to further first-hand accounts from victims who remain detained, in the form of their letters or diaries, unclassified notes from their discussions with lawyers, and official accounts of visits from Embassy officials.
Personal accounts of this type of human rights abuse speak of utter demoralisation. Of course, the despair is greatest in cases where the abuse persists ‘ where a person remains in secret detention, without knowing the basis on which he is being held, and where nobody apart from his captors knows about his exact whereabouts or wellbeing. The uncertainty that defines rendition and secret detention is torturous, both for those detained and those for whom they are ‘disappeared’.
…it must be stated that to date, the following member States could be held responsible, at varying degrees, which are not always settled definitively, for violations of the rights of specific persons identified below (respecting the chronological order as far as possible):
– Sweden, in the cases of Ahmed Agiza and Mohamed Alzery ;
– Bosnia-Herzegovina, in the cases of Lakhdar Boumediene, Mohamed Nechle, Hadj Boudella, Belkacem Bensayah, Mustafa Ait Idir and Saber Lahmar ( the ‘Algerian six’) ;
– The United Kingdom in the cases of Bisher Al-Rawi, Jamil El-Banna and Binyam Mohamed ;
– Italy, in the cases of Abu Omar and Maher Arar ;
– ‘The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia’, in the case of Khaled El-Masri ;
– Germany, in the cases of Abu Omar, of the ‘Algerian six’, and Khaled El-Masri ;
– Turkey, in the case of the ‘Algerian six’.”
Not In Our Name Statement of Conscience
From Scoop (Wednesday, 7 June 2006)
Scope of Bush Crimes Shocking
Over the last two months, teams from the Bush Crimes Commission have fanned out across the country, speaking to audiences on 16 campuses, including Harvard, Berkeley, Stanford, M.I.T., U. of Chicago, and U.C.L.A.* We now have plans for major events in the fall, that will, with your help, continue to spread the testimony from the Commission and its findings.
In city after city, students, faculty, and community members were all moved by first-hand accounts of the crimes being committed in our name. Some of the key witnesses who testified had themselves been participants or eye-witnesses to these events who could no longer be silent. These included Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, former commander of all prison facilities in Iraq; Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan; Ray McGovern, the former CIA analyst who recently took on Donald Rumsfeld at a public program in Atlanta; Ann Wright, former U.S. diplomat in Kabul; Daniel Ellsberg; and many more.**
These programs gave students a sense of the scope of the shocking crimes being committed by this regime, and called them to action: to change the terms of debate on their campus and society as a whole. For once people grasp the enormity of these crimes, they cannot but feel an obligation to make them stop and to ensure that they never happen again.
Coucil of Europe report on extraordinary rendition out today
From the Coucil of Europe
Strasbourg, 02.06.2006 – Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) rapporteur Dick Marty (Switzerland, ALDE) will present his report on alleged secret detentions and unlawful inter-state transfers involving Council of Europe member states to the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights in Paris on Wednesday 7 June.
The report is scheduled for debate during the plenary session of the 630-members-strong PACE in Strasbourg on Tuesday 27 June 2006.
Press conference
Rapporteur Dick Marty and PACE President Ren’ van der Linden will give a press conference on Wednesday 7 June at 1 pm at the Council of Europe office in Paris (55, avenue Kl’ber, M’tro Boissi’re).
A video of the press conference will be available at http://assembly.coe.int at approximately 4pm.
Met chief could face charge over Menezes
From The Observer
The Crown Prosecution Service is considering legal charges against Britain’s most senior police officer over the fatal shooting of Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes, mistakenly taken to be a terrorist. The Observer can reveal that the Metropolitan Police commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, and two senior commanders in control of the operation that culminated in de Menezes’s death are the focus of the final legal analysis of the shooting by Crown prosecutors.
If the CPS goes ahead with the dramatic move, the decision would pile further pressure on the already beleaguered head of Scotland Yard.
Legal sources close to the CPS case have revealed that, following a four-month review of a report by the Independent Police Complaints Commission, prosecutors are considering whether the command team are ultimately responsible, a decision that could give rise to a charge of gross negligence manslaughter against Blair and two other senior figures.
Is Haditha just the tip of the mass grave
From The Independent
Robert Fisk: On the shocking truth about the American occupation of Iraq
Could Haditha be just the tip of the mass grave? The corpses we have glimpsed, the grainy footage of the cadavers and the dead children; could these be just a few of many? Does the handiwork of America’s army of the slums go further?
I remember clearly the first suspicions I had that murder most foul might be taking place in our name in Iraq. I was in the Baghdad mortuary, counting corpses, when one of the city’s senior medical officials – an old friend – told me of his fears. “Everyone brings bodies here,” he said. “But when the Americans bring bodies in, we are instructed that under no circumstances are we ever to do post-mortems. We were given to understand that this had already been done. Sometimes we’d get a piece of paper like this one with a body.” And here the man handed me an American military document showing the hand-drawn outline of a man’s body and the words “trauma wounds”.
What kind of trauma? Indeed, what kind of trauma is now being experienced in Iraq? Who is doing the mass killing? Who is dumping so many bodies on garbage heaps? After Haditha, we are going to reshape our suspicions.
See also Iraqi Condemns Probe Clearing U.S. Troops
Update 07.06.06: Sunni party makes new allegations against US forces in Iraq
Linking hands across the steppes
From The Economist print edition
Turning a Turkic ideal into reality involves hard decisions
SOON after the Soviet empire collapsed, Turkey’s then president Suleyman Demirel had a dream. He spoke of a revived Turkic commonwealth which would stretch from the Adriatic to China. Underpinning this vision was at least one hard fact: five of the new states which emerged from the Soviet wreckage speak languages related to Turkish. But as Turkey has discovered, turning fantasies of post-Soviet brotherhood into reality can involve tough choices’economic, diplomatic or even moral.
This week, at least, one very substantial link with Turkey’s closest linguistic cousin’Azerbaijan’was finally established, after a decade of hard slog by world leaders and captains of the oil industry. On May 28th, the first drop of oil from fields in the Caspian Sea was pumped through a new pipeline running from Baku, via Georgia, to the Turkish port of Ceyhan. The moment was a rare victory for American policy in this part of the world. It clinches Turkey’s role as an energy conduit between east and west and thereby weakens Russia’s hitherto tight grip on exports of gas and oil from the former Soviet south.
Activists Rally Around ‘Torture Awareness Month’
By Susan Jones in CNSNews.com
June is “Torture Awareness Month,” by declaration of various human rights, civil liberties and (anti-war) faith organizations.
The coalition’s Torture Awareness website says it is responding to “the growing evidence that the United States government is engaging systematically in the use of torture and inhuman treatment as part of the ‘war on terror.'”
Anti-war activists’ have long complained about the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay and the activities of some U.S. troops at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison.
More recently, press reports about the alleged massacre of unarmed Iraqi civilians in Haditha appear to have further inflamed anti-war and anti-Bush sentiment in the United States.
“We believe that the use of torture and inhuman treatment must end immediately and everyone involved in committing these abuses or fostering the environment in which they occurred be held accountable,” the Torture Awareness website says.
The coalition said its “month of action and education” in June is intended to “raise awareness in your community about the US government’s use of torture and inhuman treatment.”
The campaign will culminate in Washington on June 26, when activists plan to lobby Members of Congress to pass legislation stopping the use of extraordinary rendition, which it describes as the “outsourcing” of torture.
Extraordinary rendition refers to the practice of detaining terrorism suspects in foreign countries and sending them to countries known to engage in torture.
The Bush administration has rejected criticism that it flouts the Geneva Convention or the laws of the United States. Two years ago, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld complained about the way some people were defining “torture.”
Group sponsoring Torture Awareness month include the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International USA, Bill of Rights Defense Committee, Center for Constitutional Rights, Center for Victims of Torture, Council on American Islamic Relations, Human Rights First, Human Rights Watch, No2Torture, The Presbyterian Initiative Against Torture, Physicians for Human Rights, and the Torture Abolition Support and Survivors Coalition.
The Professor of Repression
From Harpers Magazine
S. Frederick Starr, Uzbekistan’s friend in Washington (May 24, 2006).
A year ago this month, security forces in Uzbekistan killed hundreds of protesters in the town of Andijan. Human rights groups and journalists reported that the crowd was overwhelmingly unarmed and had come out to protest corruption and poor economic conditions. ‘The scale of this killing was so extensive, and its nature was so indiscriminate and disproportionate, that it can best be described as a massacre,’ Human Rights Watch said in a study of the events at Andijan.
The regime of Islam Karimov sought to justify the carnage by saying that the demonstration was organized by Islamic militants seeking to overthrow the government (an argument the Uzbek government knows is music to the ears of the Bush Administration). Last week the Karimov regime sought to prove its case by staging the U.S. debut of a short video on the Andijan crackdown. The event was sponsored by the Hudson Institute and the Central Asia Caucasus Institute (CACI) at Johns Hopkins University, and co-hosted by CACI director Professor S. Frederick Starr. An account at EurasiaNet.org said that Starr ‘sought to undermine the credibility of several independent news accounts . . . alleging journalists deliberately falsified their stories. ‘I think they were lying . . . of course they had an anti-government agenda,” he said.
It was all in a day’s work for Starr, who is perhaps the Karimov regime’s most outspoken advocate in Washington’a regime that once tortured a political prisoner to death with methods that included the use of boiling water and then arrested his elderly mother when she complained. He also speaks fondly of several other despotic governments in central Asia, a region he views almost exclusively through the prism of American geopolitical interests and with little interest in issues like human rights and corruption.
Another massacre of civillians by US troops
The dam appears to now have burst as, following on the heels of the Haditha massacre, stories of more US atrocities start to flood out from Iraq and the mainstream media becomes willing to give them air time. This one is from the town of Ishaqi in March of this year.
US probes new Iraq massacre claim
From BBC Online
New footage is included by the BBC in their video report
The US military has told the BBC it is investigating an incident in which 11 Iraqi civilians may have been deliberately killed by US troops. Video footage obtained by the BBC appears to challenge the US account of events in the town of Ishaqi in March.
The US said at the time that four people died during a raid, but Iraqi police said 11 were shot by US troops.
The video evidence comes in the wake of the alleged massacre by US marines of up to 24 Iraqi civilians in Haditha. The troops are also suspected of covering up the deaths in November 2005. The Haditha incident and several others are being investigated by the Pentagon, according to US military sources.
The US army has also announced that coalition troops in Iraq are to have ethical training following the alleged incident in Haditha.
However, the BBC’s Ian Pannell in Baghdad says the move is likely to be greeted with cynicism by many Iraqis, as the troops have long been accused of deliberately targeting civilians.
‘Massacre’ video
The video pictures obtained by the BBC appear to contradict the US account of the events in Ishaqi, about 100km (60 miles) north of Baghdad, on 15 March 2006.
The US authorities said they were involved in a firefight after a tip-off that an al-Qaeda supporter was visiting the house.
According to the Americans, the building collapsed under heavy fire killing four people – a suspect, two women and a child. But a report filed by Iraqi police accused US troops of rounding up and deliberately shooting 11 people in the house, including five children and four women, before blowing up the building.
The video tape obtained by the BBC shows a number of dead adults and children at the site with what our world affairs editor John Simpson says were clearly gunshot wounds. The pictures came from a hardline Sunni group opposed to coalition forces.
It has been cross-checked with other images taken at the time of events and is believed to be genuine.
Germany admits rendition gaffe
From Aljazeera.net
Germany’s foreign spy agency has admitted that one of its staff knew that a German had been arrested abroad and given to the US as a terrorist suspect, but did not report it.
The Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) said on Thursday that the employee was told in Macedonia in January 2004 that authorities there had arrested Khaled el-Masri, and handed him over to American authorities. The German government has previously said it learnt only in May 2004 about the case.
Masri says he was held by the United States for months in an Afghan jail before being released without charge and dumped in Albania. He is seeking compensation for alleged abduction and torture. His case provoked criticism of the secret transfer of terrorist suspects between countries used by the US known as “extraordinary rendition”.
The office of Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, said in a statement it “regretted” that the information had not previously come to light and would pass it on to prosecutors in Munich who are investigating Masri’s alleged abduction.
“We are clearly in a rather embarrassing situation now… It is highly regrettable but it can’t be changed”
A chronology of the Haditha massacre
With the US marines apparently about to undergo ethics training on core warrior values, a useful chronolgy of events surrounding the massacre in Haditha has been pulled together on Reuters Alertnet.
Haditha massacre investigation
An investigation into the Haditha Massacre is about to report its findings.
Further comment from Dahr Jamail
‘Worst war crime’ committed by US in Iraq
From The Telegraph
A US military investigation is expected to conclude that a unit of marines killed 24 civilians, among them women and children, in retaliation for the death of a comrade, reports published in America yesterday said.
If confirmed when the official findings are published next week the incident would be the worst war crime committed by US forces in Iraq.
Though on a smaller scale, it will inevitably spark comparisons with the massacre of up to 500 Vietnamese villagers at My Lai in 1968. Citing Congressional, military and Pentagon officials, the reports in US newspapers said investigators had unearthed a catalogue of abuses so serious it is likely an as yet unspecified number of marines will be charged with murder.
John Kline, the Republican Congressmen for Minnesota who is a retired marine colonel, was briefed on the findings. “This was not an accident. This was direct fire by marines at civilians,” he told the New York Times. “This was not an immediate response to an attack. This would be an atrocity.”
A new investigation is also to be launched to determine if any of the men’s superior officers tried to cover up the killings after it was first reported that the deaths were the result of a roadside bomb or a crossfire.
Enron, Bush and Uzbekistan
From Democracy Now
We turn now to the connections between President Bush and Enron. Enron founder Ken Lay and his family rank among President Bush’s biggest financial backers of his political career. The family donated about $140,000 to Bush’s political campaigns in Texas and for the White House. The president personally nicknamed Ken Lay “Kenny Boy.”
Overall Enron employees gave Bush some $600,000 in political donations. According to the Center for Public Integrity this made Enron Bush’s top career donor – a distinction the company maintained until 2004. Shortly after Bush took office in 2001, Vice President Cheney met with Enron officials while he was developing the administration’s energy policies. Our guest Greg Palast examined the connections between Enron and the Bush administration in his documentary “Bush Family Fortunes.”
Enron’s influence reached as far as Uzbekistan. In January, we interviewed the former ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray. He spoke about the relationship between President Bush and the Uzbek regime of President Karimov.
Go here for the full interview and audio and video options.
Torture Flights: The Shocking Facts
By Gordon Thomas in Canada Free press
(To prepare this exclusive report, the award-winning intelligence expert GORDON THOMAS spoke to a range of sources in Britain, the Middle East, Eastern Europe and the United States.)
Despite the Bush administration’s insistence it neither participates nor condones ‘ “in any form” ‘ torture, the CIA continues to fly high-value al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects to interrogation centres which are beyond US jurisdiction ‘ and where torture is routine.
Investigations by the European Union and human rights activists like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have done nothing to end the secret flights that weekly cross the globe with their human cargoes destined for torture chambers.
What happens on some of the flights has been graphically described by a senior British intelligence officer who spoke under a guarantee of anonymity.
“I have personal knowledge of two flights on which the prisoners were shackled in their seats and drugged for the flight. CIA officers were on board to conduct preliminary interrogations. The heavy duty stuff is left until after landing”.
UK government fails to investigate renditions and tries to undermine ban on torture
UK attacked over terror flights
From BBC Online
Ministers are failing to meet their legal duties to investigate claims that the CIA is flying terror suspects through the UK, say MPs and peers. Parliament’s joint committee on human rights says the government should take “active steps” to find out more details about certain flights.
The appeal comes in a damning report which also accused the UK of trying to undermine the absolute ban on torture. The government insists there is no evidence of secret prisoner flights. But allegations about the so-called “renditions” have continued.
And the committee says it should require chartered civil aircraft to provide staff and passenger lists when they use UK airports or fly through British airspace.
Such steps are not only allowed under UK law but also needed to ensure the government complies with the convention on torture, it said.
Torture challenge
A committee spokesman said the report concluded that the “government has not adequately demonstrated that it has satisfied the obligation under domestic and international human rights law to investigate credible allegations of renditions”.
European governments cover up illegal CIA abductions
By Martin Kreickenbaum via San Francisco Indy Media
Alleged terror suspects have been kidnapped in the European Union (EU) by the CIA and taken to third countries where they have been subjected to torture. The European governments knew of these illegal actions and were even involved in them.
This is the conclusion reached in the first interim report of the subcommittee of the European parliament examining the illegal activities of the CIA within Europe. Dick Marty, the special investigator of the Council of Europe, reached a similar conclusion in February. Forty-six European states belong to the Council of Europe; the European parliament includes representatives of the EU’s 25 member states.
The European parliament has been examining the extent of possible CIA abductions and transportation to secret prisons for four months and now has evidence of more than a thousand unregistered flights that the CIA has carried out in Europe since 2001.
The interim report arrives at the conclusion, ‘In several cases, the CIA was clearly responsible for the illegal abduction and imprisonment of supposed terrorists within the territory of the member states, as well as extraordinary transfers, and that in some cases this involved European citizens.’
These extraordinary transfers, or ‘renditions,’ are characterised as clearly breaching international law. As the report notes, they are aimed at ensuring ‘that suspects are not submitted to legal proceedings.’ The CIA has ‘secretly kidnapped, imprisoned and transferred terror suspects,’ the report finds. They were despatched to other countries (including Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Afghanistan), ‘which, as the government of the United States admits, practice torture.’
Sovereign Nations
The number of members of the United Nations has increased
exponentially since the end of the Cold War but could we ever reach
saturation point? BBC Radio 4 speaks to Alex Hartley, the artist who has tried to set up his own mini state in Antarctica and the former ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray.
Click to listen to the interview
(link updated 15/12/06)