By Maria Jesus Prades at ABC News

MADRID, Spain Nov 14, 2005 ‘ European probes of the CIA’s alleged covert transfers of Islamic terror suspects have spread to Spain, where a court said Monday it has received a prosecutor’s report on allegations that the agency used a Spanish airport on the island of Mallorca.

The document stemmed from a four-month investigation prompted by reports from a Mallorca newspaper on the arrivals of suspicious aircraft.

The newspaper, Diario de Mallorca, said a CIA plane that took off from the Mediterranean island was involved in the alleged kidnapping of a Lebanese-born German national, who says he was transported to Afghanistan, questioned as an al-Qaida suspect and tortured.

Bartomeu Barcelo, the chief prosecutor for the Balearic Islands, which include Mallorca, submitted the investigative report to the National Court in July, court officials said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because court rules bar them from giving their names.

Diario de Mallorca also reported this month that Spanish police have identified three planes a Boeing 737 and two Gulfstream jets as having been used by the CIA at the airport in Mallorca’s capital, Palma, in its “extraordinary rendition” program.

The U.S. government has been criticized by human rights groups for practicing “extraordinary rendition” sending suspected terrorists to foreign countries, where they are detained, interrogated and subjected to possible ill-treatment.

The prosecutor’s office declined to comment on the report on Monday, as did police in Mallorca. The Spanish court officials said it was not clear if the National Court had begun to or agreed to undertake its own probe.

In a series of articles that began in March, Diario de Mallorca said more than a dozen CIA flights had used Palma airport. It said that in one case, a CIA plane involved in the alleged kidnapping of Khaled al-Masri in Macedonia early last year had taken off from Palma airport en route to the Balkan country.

Al-Masri says he was abducted, flown to Afghanistan and interrogated for suspected ties to al-Qaida.

By ALESSANDRA RIZZO in Gainsville

ROME ‘ Italian prosecutors have requested the extradition of 22 purported CIA operatives in the alleged kidnapping of an Egyptian cleric in 2003, prosecutors said Friday. The request was sent to Italy’s Justice Ministry in Rome, which will decide whether to pass it on to the United States.

Justice Minister Roberto Castelli returned Friday from Washington, where he held talks with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on “cross-border investigations and extradition cases of mutual interest for the two countries,” a ministry statement said. It did not specify whether they took up the CIA case, which has strained relations between the two allies.

A U.S. Justice Department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said the United States had not received a formal extradition request but that the subject had come up during the meeting between Castelli and Gonzales.

The purported CIA operatives were allegedly involved in the kidnapping of Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, a cleric who was thought to belong to an Islamic terror group. He was allegedly abducted on a Milan street Feb. 17, 2003, before being flown to Egypt, where he was reportedly tortured.

Prosecutors claimed Nasr’s abduction violated Italian sovereignty and hindered Italian terrorism investigations. The Justice Ministry is not obligated to pursue a prosecutor’s extradition request. A judge in Milan has issued an arrest warrant for Nasr ‘ a step that could lead to Italy’s requesting his extradition from authorities in Egypt, Italian news agencies reported.

The extradition request threatens a new jolt to relations between Italy and the United States, which also were strained by the March killing of an Italian intelligence agent by U.S. troops in Baghdad. Premier Silvio Berlusconi’s government denied months ago it had prior knowledge of the alleged kidnapping.

It summoned the U.S. ambassador to explain the operation, which was purportedly part of the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program in which terrorism suspects are transferred to third countries, subjecting them to possible ill-treatment.

Excerpts from a speech by the Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, in which he considers alternatives to current US and UK policy and the ” global war on terror”.

From DNA Opinion

What is the relevance of Gandhian values in the world today? The aspect of Gandhian values that tend to receive most attention, not surprisingly, is the practice of non-violence. The violence that is endemic in the contemporary world makes the commitment to non-violence particularly challenging and difficult, but it also makes that priority especially important and urgent.

However, in this context it is extremely important to appreciate that non-violence is promoted not only by rejecting and spurning violent courses of action, but also by trying to build societies in which violence would not be cultivated and nurtured. Gandhiji was concerned with the morality of personal behaviour, but not just with that, and we would undervalue the wide reach of his political thinking if we try to see non-violence simply as a code of behaviour.

Consider the problem of terrorism in the world today. In fighting terrorism, the Gandhian response cannot be seen as taking primarily the form of pleading with the would-be terrorists to desist from doing dastardly things. Gandhiji’s ideas about preventing violence went far beyond that, and involved social institutions and public priorities, as well as individual beliefs and commitments. Bearing this in mind, and pursuing the general theme of the relevance of Gandhian values outside India, I ask the question: Is there something that America and Britain in particular can profitably learn today from Gandhiji’s political analysis?

Some of the lessons of a Gandhian approach to violence and terrorism in the world are clear enough. Perhaps the simplest ‘ is the importance of education in cultivating peace rather than discord. The implications include the need to discourage, and if possible to eliminate altogether, schools in which hatred of other communities, or other groups of people in general, is encouraged and noursished. There is more to be done on this in India. But happily the country seems to have stepped back from what seemed at one stage to be a relentless departure from secular toleration and non-sectarian respect, which were so important to Gandhiji.

It might be thought that Gandhiji’s lessons are widely understood in Britain and America, and at one level they certainly are. For example, many centres of hateful preaching and teaching are being restrained, or closed in contemporary Britain. But the full force of Gandhiji’s understanding of this subject has not yet been seized in British public policy. One of the great messages of Gandhiji is that you cannot defeat nastiness, including violent nastiness, unless you yourself shun similar nastiness altogether. This has much immediate relevance today.

There are many holders of high American positions who approve of, and actively support, the proceodure of what is called ‘extraordinary rendition’. The point that emerges from Gandhiji’s arguments is not only that this is a thoroughly unethical practice, but also that this is no way of winning a war against terrorism and nastiness.

I cannot fail to have considerable misgivings about the official move in the United Kingdom towards extension of state-supported, faith-based schools. The move in Britain reflects, in fact, a more general ‘ and deeply problematic ‘ vision of Britain as ‘a federation of communities’, rather than a collectivity of human beings resident in Britain, with their diverse differences, of which religious and community-based distinctions constitute only one part.

Much has been written on the fact that India, with more Muslim people than almost every Muslim-majority country in the world, has produced extremely few home-grown terrorists acting in the name of Islam, and almost none linked with the Al Qaeda. There are many casual influences here. But some credit must also go to the nature of Indian democratic politics, and to the wide acceptance in India of the idea, championed by Mahatma Gandhi, that there are many identities other than religious ethnicity that are also relevant for a person’s self-understanding and for the relations between citizens of diverse background within the country.

The disastrous consequences of defining people by their religious ethnicity, and giving priority to the community-based perspective, which Gandhiji thought was receiving support from India’s British rulers, may well have come, alas, to haunt the country of the rulers themselves. At the Round-table Conference in 1931, Gandhiji did not get his way, and his dissenting opinions were only briefly recorded.

In a gentle complaint addressed to the British prime minister, Gandhiji said at the meeting, ‘in most of these reports you will find that there is a dissenting opinion, and in most of the cases that dissent unfortunately happens to belong to me.’ Those statements certainly did belong only to him, but the wisdom behind Gandhiji’s far-sighted refusal to see a nation as a federation of religions and communities belongs, I must assert, to the entire world.

It is fitting that Gandhiji’s dissenting views from the 1931 meetings are preserved in the records located exactly in London. I fear London has need for them now. One does not have to be an Indian chauvinist to make that claim. For Gandhiji and his ideas belonged to the world, not just to us in this country.

One view of a recent debate at Trinity College, Dublin from Clifford May, a somewhat neo-conservative character…

From The News Tribune

We had gathered at the venerable University Philosophical Society of Trinity College in Dublin to debate the resolution: “This house believes that George W. Bush is a danger to world stability.”

But those tasked with defending the resolution were disinclined even to discuss what they clearly considered gross understatement. Instead, Patrick Cockburn, a British journalist, began by angrily accusing the United States of embarking on an “old-fashioned imperial war” in Iraq and beyond. As for terrorism, that he dismissed as “something people believe in like they believe in witchcraft. What does it mean?”

Though he was unsure of terrorism’s definition, he harbored no doubts about who was responsible for it. President Bush, he said, “is not fighting terrorism, he is provoking it.” This brought vigorous applause from the students assembled in the stately hall.

Richard Downes, an Irish journalist, recited Humpty Dumpty. His point was that Iraq had been broken by Bush, whom he called a “maniacal egg killer.” This evoked gales of laughter. He called the U.S. military “astonishingly incompetent.”

Craig J. Murray, formerly British ambassador to Uzbekistan, asserted that the crimes committed by that country’s rulers are “subsidized by the government of George W. Bush.” Bush has done this, he said, for the benefit of Enron. The goal of Americans, he instructed the students, is to “get at the oil and gas so they can guzzle it.”

He added: “George Bush talks directly to God. He is the most dangerous religiously inspired fanatic in the world.” This, too, brought an enthusiastic ovation.

Tim Llewellyn, a former BBC Middle East bureau chief, began by charging that in Iraq there have been “more casualties of civilians by Americans than by insurgents.” He announced: “George Bush is a threat to world peace on so many levels we can’t begin to discuss it.”

So he didn’t try. Instead, he turned to the topic that really fires him up: Israel. Yasser Arafat, he said, had been correct to reject the offer of Palestinian statehood made at Camp David in 2000 because it was “a pro-Zionist type of approach.” In other words, it would have allowed the Jewish state to survive. He clearly found that a distasteful prospect.

I was not surprised. At dinner before the debate, he’d noted that he had heard a BBC host cut off a caller who wanted to discuss Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s threat to “wipe Israel off the map.” The caller didn’t see what was so terrible about this idea and didn’t understand why British Prime Minister Tony Blair had felt obliged to denounce it. Llewellyn lamented that there now seems to be a taboo against expressing such opinions.

In addition to these invited speakers, a number of students took the lectern. Among them was Chris, an American, who pleaded that “the current regime in America is not my America. Bush doesn’t represent my America. … We’ve lost our way.” On a personal note, he confessed that he had watched Fox News. “I know I shouldn’t be doing that,” he said.

On the other side of this debate, there were just two: myself and Charlie Wolf, an American-born, London-based radio-talk-show host. Wolf was so flabbergasted by the attacks on America and Israel that he threw away his notes on global stability and attempted to improvise rebuttals.

As for me, I did address the resolution. I had given it some thought and I hate it when my thoughts – rare as they are – go to waste. I then went on to challenge a little of what I had been hearing.

I criticized Cockburn and others in the media for having failed to report extensively on Saddam Hussein’s mass murders and routine use of rape, torture and ethnic cleansing. Cockburn got so angry that he approached the podium and for a few moments it appeared he might take a swing at me.

I told Llewellyn – politely, but to his face – that he was an anti-Semite. That term, I explained, used to mean those who wanted a Europe with no Jewish population; today, it means those who want a world with no Jewish state.

The moderator of the debate, Charlie Bird, an Irish TV reporter, made no effort to disguise his sympathies – they were not with anyone who would defend Bush. But he effusively praised the apologetic American student – perhaps he thought that would help bridge geographic and political divides.

Finally, Bird noted that next week the Society would debate whether militant Islamism is a legitimate form of resistance to American hegemony. While I’ll be sorry to miss that event, I have a hunch how it will turn out.

Ken Sanders considers the ease with which the Bush adminstration misleads the American public.

The full article is posted at OpEdNews

“Take, for instance, the Bush administration’s ongoing insistence that the U.S. does not engage in torture. As recently as November 7, 2005, despite the administration’s vehement and open opposition to a Senate bill that would outlaw torture, Bush nonetheless declared (straight-faced and with all the appearances of sincerity), ‘We do not torture.’ Apparently, the administration believes that the word of our ‘straight-shooting’ President is enough for most Americans.

Sadly, they’re right. Most Americans are far more willing to believe what the Bush administration says than what it does. If that were not the case, the nation would collectively shout, ‘LIARS!,’ descend upon Washington, and throw the bastards out of office. Instead, most of us, like the gullible dolts we are, take the administration at its word and blithely ignore the facts staring us in the face….”

From Editor and Publisher (Nov 8th)

NEW YORK At today’s White House press briefing, Scott McClellan was hit with a number of questions about the “ethics classes” the president’s staffers are now attending. But much of the briefing featured efforts by Helen Thomas, at the start, and then other reporters to get McClellan to explain the apparent contradiction between his claims that the U.S. does not torture anyone and Vice President Cheney’s request for an exemption in this matter.

Here are the exchanges from the transcript:

Q I’d like you to clear up, once and for all, the ambiguity about torture. Can we get a straight answer? The President says we don’t do torture, but Cheney —

MR. McCLELLAN: That’s about as straight as it can be.

Q Yes, but Cheney has gone to the Senate and asked for an exemption on —

MR. McCLELLAN: No, he has not. Are you claiming he’s asked for an exemption on torture? No, that’s —

Q He did not ask for that?

MR. McCLELLAN: — that is inaccurate.

Q Are you denying everything that came from the Hill, in terms of torture?

MR. McCLELLAN: No, you’re mischaracterizing things. And I’m not going to get into discussions we have —

Q Can you give me a straight answer for once?

MR. McCLELLAN: Let me give it to you, just like the President has. We do not torture. He does not condone torture and he would never —

Q I’m asking about exemptions.

MR. McCLELLAN: Let me respond. And he would never authorize the use of torture. We have an obligation to do all that we can to protect the American people. We are engaged —

Q That’s not the answer I’m asking for —

MR. McCLELLAN: It is an answer — because the American people want to know that we are doing all within our power to prevent terrorist attacks from happening. There are people in this world who want to spread a hateful ideology that is based on killing innocent men, women and children. We saw what they can do on September 11th —

Q He didn’t ask for an exemption —

MR. McCLELLAN: — and we are going to —

Q — answer that one question. I’m asking, is the administration asking for an exemption?

MR. McCLELLAN: I am answering your question. The President has made it very clear that we are going to do —

Q You’re not answering — yes or no?

MR. McCLELLAN: No, you don’t want the American people to hear what the facts are, Helen, and I’m going to tell them the facts.

Q — the American people every day. I’m asking you, yes or no, did we ask for an exemption?

MR. McCLELLAN: And let me respond. You’ve had your opportunity to ask the question. Now I’m going to respond to it.

Q If you could answer in a straight way.

MR. McCLELLAN: And I’m going to answer it, just like the President — I just did, and the President has answered it numerous times.

Q — yes or no —

MR. McCLELLAN: Our most important responsibility is to protect the American people. We are engaged in a global war against Islamic radicals who are intent on spreading a hateful ideology, and intent on killing innocent men, women and children.

Q Did we ask for an exemption?

MR. McCLELLAN: We are going to do what is necessary to protect the American people.

Q Is that the answer?

MR. McCLELLAN: We are also going to do so in a way that adheres to our laws and to our values. We have made that very clear. The President directed everybody within this government that we do not engage in torture. We will not torture. He made that very clear.

Q Are you denying we asked for an exemption?

MR. McCLELLAN: Helen, we will continue to work with the Congress on the issue that you brought up. The way you characterize it, that we’re asking for exemption from torture, is just flat-out false, because there are laws that are on the books that prohibit the use of torture. And we adhere to those laws.

Q We did ask for an exemption; is that right? I mean, be simple — this is a very simple question.

MR. McCLELLAN: I just answered your question. The President answered it last week.

Q What are we asking for?

Q Would you characterize what we’re asking for?

MR. McCLELLAN: We’re asking to do what is necessary to protect the American people in a way that is consistent with our laws and our treaty obligations. And that’s what we —

Q Why does the CIA need an exemption from the military?

MR. McCLELLAN: David, let’s talk about people that you’re talking about who have been brought to justice and captured. You’re talking about people like Khalid Shaykh Muhammad; people like Abu Zubaydah.

Q I’m asking you —

MR. McCLELLAN: No, this is facts about what you’re talking about.

Q Why does the CIA need an exemption from rules that would govern the conduct of our military in interrogation practices?

MR. McCLELLAN: There are already laws and rules that are on the books, and we follow those laws and rules. What we need to make sure is that we are able to carry out the war on terrorism as effectively as possible, not only —

Q What does that mean —

MR. McCLELLAN: What I’m telling you right now — not only to protect Americans from an attack, but to prevent an attack from happening in the first place. And, you bet, when we capture terrorist leaders, we are going to seek to find out information that will protect — that prevent attacks from happening in the first place. But we have an obligation to do so. Our military knows this; all people within the United States government know this. We have an obligation to do so in a way that is consistent with our laws and values.

Now, the people that you are bringing up — you’re talking about in the context, and I think it’s important for the American people to know, are people like Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, Abu Zubaydah, Ramzi Binalshibh — these are — these are dangerous killers.

Q So they’re all killers —

Q Did you ask for an exemption on torture? That’s a simple question, yes or no.

MR. McCLELLAN: No. And we have not. That’s what I told you at the beginning.

Q You want to reserve the ability to use tougher tactics with those individuals who you mentioned.

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, obviously, you have a different view from the American people. I think the American people understand the importance of doing everything within our power and within our laws to protect the American people.

Q Scott, are you saying that Cheney did not ask —

Q What is it that you want the — what is it that you want the CIA to be able to do that the U.S. Armed Forces are not allowed to do?

MR. McCLELLAN: I’m not going to get into talking about national security matters, Bill. I don’t do that, because this involves —

Q This would be the exemption, in other words.

MR. McCLELLAN: This involves information that relates to doing all we can to protect the American people. And if you have a different view — obviously, some of you on this room — in this room have a different view, some of you on the front row have a different view.

Q We simply are asking a question.

Q What is the Vice President — what is the Vice President asking for?

MR. McCLELLAN: It’s spelled out in our statement of administration policy in terms of what our views are. That’s very public information. In terms of our discussions with members of Congress —

Q — no, it’s not —

MR. McCLELLAN: In terms of our members — like I said, there are already laws on the books that we have to adhere to and abide by, and we do. And we believe that those laws and those obligations address these issues.

Q So then why is the Vice President continuing to lobby on this issue? If you’re very happy with the laws on the books, what needs change?

MR. McCLELLAN: Again, you asked me — you want to ask questions of the Vice President’s office, feel free to do that. We’ve made our position very clear, and it’s spelled out on our website for everybody to see.

Q We don’t need a website, we need you from the podium.

MR. McCLELLAN: And what I just told you is what our view is.

Q But Scott, do you see the contradiction —

MR. McCLELLAN: Jessica, go ahead.

From The Crimson

A dramatist could not have hoped to conjure a better contrast. On one hand, Senator John McCain, R-Ariz., a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War, publicly champions a categorical ban on the torture of prisoners. On the other hand, Vice President Dick Cheney, who did not serve in Vietnam, makes closed-door appeals to senators for an exception clause to torture in circumstances of eminent danger.

In one of the best-supported congressional revolts in President George W Bush’s five years in office, the Senate voted 90-9 last month in favor of McCain’s ban. But the bill’s fate still depends on negotiations in the Conference Committee of the Senate as well as the House of Representatives. And not only is the House more loyal to the administration, but three of the nine senators who voted against the measure are on the Conference Committee.

However, McCain’s absolute ban on torture ought to be adopted by the House and signed by the president if the Congress and administration are to maintain any semblance of an ethical position on this matter.

According to the November 2005 New Yorker, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) can be implicated in four deaths of detainees in United States’ detention facilities abroad’among them Abu Ghraib in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, in Cuba, and Bagram Air Base, in Afghanistan. Yet, due to Justice Department memos that argued that Iraqi insurgents were not protected by international law and that lesser forms of torture were legal, these CIA officers will not be facing charges. McCain’s ban would close such loopholes, returning the U.S. to the ethical position it had taken for five decades. According to human rights groups, the bill would give protection to some ten thousand foreign suspects.

Supporters of torture often point to the ‘ticking bomb’ scenario’in which torturing one suspect could potentially save thousands of lives’as a justifiable reason to consider torture as a last resort. But to think primarily in terms of such TV scenarios is unrealistic given that we never have all the important pieces of information to make such judgments. In the experience of Army Col. Stuart Herrington, a military intelligence specialist who conducted interrogations in Vietnam, Panama, and Iraq during Desert Storm, torture is ‘simply not a good way to get information.’ According to Herrington, nine out of 10 people can be persuaded to talk with no ‘stress methods’ at all. And even if the remaining person is the correct suspect, he will ‘just tell you anything to get you to stop.’

In 1999, the Supreme Court of Israel’arguably the most experienced democratic court in dealing with such ‘imminent danger’ scenarios’outlawed any use of torture. Were the U.S. to make such a decision, it would reflect preexisting domestic laws, such as the Army Field Manual and bring the country in accordance with international law, Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.

Moreover, the use of torture undermines the morale of U.S. troops due to the prospect of reciprocation of such methods by their enemies. It is also likely to outrage any international actor, who cannot understand why the U.S. refuses to treat others by the same standards of humane treatment required at home by the U.S. Constitution.

No better are U.S. practices of ‘extraordinary rendition,’ the outsourcing of torture practices to Syria, Morocco, Jordan and Egypt’all of which have been cited for human-rights violations by the State Department. A corollary to this practice is CIA operated secret prisons in Thailand and Eastern Europe, as recently reported by Dana Priest in The Washington Post. Such forays into ethically murky territory’to say the least’do no small harm to U.S. credibility abroad.

On Jan. 27, President Bush assured us that ‘torture is never acceptable, nor do we hand over people to countries that do torture.’ Yesterday in Panama, he repeated those categorical words, yet he continues to support the Vice President in his opposition to 90 senators, Colin Powell, the advice of the 9/11 Commission Report, domestic law, and international law. It is such inconsistencies that have led more than half of Americans to doubt Bush’s integrity for the first time ever according to an ABC News and Washington Post poll. Rarely does a case divide itself on such clear moral lines. A moral president would not disagree.

From Amnesty International

“They came to take our father at night, like thieves'”

Fatima al-Assad, age 12, daughter of Muhammad al-Assad,

who “disappeared” after his arrest in 2003

“Brother, what is your name, what village are you from?” It was distinctive Yemeni Arabic that greeted Muhammad al-Assad as he stumbled, still hooded and shackled, from the plane at Sana’a. For the first time in nearly 18 months he knew what country he was in. He heard the question repeated twice more, as Salah Nasser Salim ‘Ali and Muhammad Faraj Ahmed Bashmilah emerged onto the hot tarmac. He still could not see them, and had not known they were on the plane with him, but he could hear one of them shouting over and over again: “I am Bashmilah, I am Bashmilah, I am from Aden”.

The three, all Yemeni nationals, had “disappeared” in 2003, and had been kept in complete isolation ‘ even from each other ‘ in a series of secret detention centres apparently run by US agents. Senior Yemeni officials have told Amnesty International that they first heard of the men in May 2005, when the US Embassy in Yemen informed them that the three would be flown to Sana’a and transferred to Yemeni custody the following day. No further information or evidence against the men was provided, but the Yemenis say they were instructed by the US to keep them in custody. All three continue to be held in a kind of extralegal limbo; they have not been charged with any offence, given any sentence, or brought before any court or judge. The only improvement in their situation, they say, is that their families now know that they are alive.

Muhammad al-Assad’s odyssey began on the night of 26 December 2003, in Dar-es Salaam, Tanzania, where he had lived since 1985. As he told Amnesty International, he had just sat down to dinner with his Tanzanian wife, Zahra Salloum, and her brother and uncle. An immigration officer and two men from the state security forces came to the door, and ordered Muhammad al-Assad to surrender his passport and mobile phone. As he crossed over to his office to get the passport, he was grabbed from behind, a hood was forced over his head, and his hands were cuffed behind his back. He was thrown into the back of a car, which sped away. “I was very frightened,” he said, “very frightened, and kept asking what was happening to me.”

His captors did not reply. They took him to a flat, and questioned him for some four hours about his passport. He was then taken directly to a waiting airplane. Still hooded, he could see nothing, but heard the roar of the engines. As he was pushed up the stairs he asked where he was going. The guard told him: “we don’t know, we are just following orders, there are high-ranking ones who are responsible”.

Muhammad al-Assad thought it was probably a small plane, his head was pushed down as he went through the door. He told Amnesty International he was too frightened to ask any further questions, instead he prayed to have patience, until the authorities discovered their mistake and let him go home. He is still waiting.

(more…)

By ALAN FREEMAN in Globe and Mail.com

WASHINGTON – European officials have vowed to investigate reports that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency set up a network of “ghost prisons” in Poland, Romania and elsewhere in Eastern Europe to interrogate al-Qaeda suspects, far away from the peering eyes of human-rights activists, the press and the courts.

“We have to find out exactly what is happening,” said Friso Roscam Abbing, a spokesman for the European Union in Brussels, who said the 25 EU governments would be questioned about the reports. He pointed out that the existence of these prisons could violate EU human-rights rules and the International Convention Against Torture.

Officials in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and other former Soviet-bloc nations have all denied that their territory had been used to host the secret jails.

“There have been official statements from ex-ministers and they are all officially denying that any such operations took place on the territory of Poland,” a spokesman for the Polish embassy in Washington said, adding that Warsaw’s newly appointed defence and interior ministers also have denied the allegations.

“I repeat. We do not have CIA bases in Romania,” Romanian Prime Minister Popescu Tariceanu said. But in the Czech Republic, Interior Minister Frantisek Bublan is reported to have said that his government recently turned down a U.S. request to build a prison for al-Qaeda captives.

The governments were reacting to a report on Wednesday in The Washington Post that the CIA has been imprisoning and interrogating some of its top al-Qaeda suspects at the network of prisons, which were set up after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States.

The newspaper declined to publish the names of the Eastern European countries involved at the request of U.S. officials, who argued that the disclosure could disrupt efforts to combat terrorism. But Human Rights Watch corroborated the story and named Poland and Romania as sites for the clandestine prisons.

“They did it so they could abuse these people without anybody knowing,” said Marc Garlasco, a senior military analyst at Human Rights Watch, who is concerned that the CIA is using unconventional interrogation methods at these facilities at a time when there is increasing oversight of the main prisons for terrorist suspects near Kabul, Afghanistan, and at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

Mr. Garlasco said that researchers at Human Rights Watch had been tracking the movements of aircraft chartered by the CIA for “extraordinary renditions,” the practice of extraditing suspects across international boundaries without following normal court procedures.

A prime example of such a rendition was the arrest of Canadian Maher Arar in 2002 at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, his transfer to Jordan and eventually to his birthplace of Syria, where he was imprisoned and tortured for a year.

Mr. Garlasco cited the movement of a Boeing 737 aircraft that departed from Washington on Sept. 20, 2003, and stopped at the Ruzyne airport outside Prague, Czech Republic, on Sept. 21 before flying on the same day to a U.S. base outside of Tashkent in Uzbekistan.

On Sept. 22, the same plane flew to Kabul, and then to Szymany airport near Szczytno in Poland, Mikhail Kogalniceanu airport in Constanta, Romania and Sal’ airport in Rabat, Morocco.

On Sept. 23, the plane flew from Morocco to its ultimate destination in Guantanamo Bay. “It’s the torture shuttle,” said Mr. Garlasco, who added quickly that he had no proof torture had taken place.

Mr. Garlasco believes the CIA was using a Soviet-era prison outside Szymany, in northern Poland, to hold and interrogate prisoners. But he added that the flight logs he has inspected only go through 2004, and it is possible some of the prisons may have been shut down. One such prison, located in Thailand, was closed in 2003, according to the Post.

Stephen Hadley, U.S. President George W. Bush’s national security adviser, told reporters on Wednesday that he would not discuss intelligence operations, but he added that even though the government would do “what is necessary” to defend the United States against terrorism, “we’re going to do that in a way that is consistent with our values.”

Despite the assurances, CIA interrogators are allowed to use what are known as “enhanced interrogation techniques” in these overseas locations, even though the methods are banned by U.S. military law. Among the techniques that can be used is “waterboarding,” where prisoners are strapped to boards and their heads held underwater until they believe they will drown.

Legislation recently approved by a large majority in the U.S. Senate would ban the use of cruel and degrading treatment of anyone in U.S. custody but Vice-President Dick Cheney has pleaded with the senators to allow the CIA to be exempted from the proposed law.

Covert prisons

The United States is believed to have been using a network of covert prison camps called ‘black sites’ in foreign countries to detain suspected terrorists since 2001. Run by the CIA, and known as ‘extraordinary rendition’ captives are flown to countries where torture is suspected of being used in interrogation.

Main prisons: Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,

Black site locations: Poland, Czech Republic, Jordan, Egypt, Iraq, Pakistan, Thailand, Indian Ocean: Diego Garcia, U.S. ships USS Bataam, USS Peleliu

Transfer of suspects to foreign country: Jordan, Morocco, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Oman, Qatar, Yemen, Thailand

From CNews

SZCZYTNO, Poland (AP) – At midnight on an autumn night two years ago, a Boeing passenger plane with seven people carrying U.S. passports touched down at a little-used airport deep in the pine forests of northeastern Poland, officials said.

Confirmation of the mysterious arrival came after a human rights group said evidence pointed to Szczytno-Szymany airport as a CIA transfer site for al-Qaida prisoners.

Airport officials and border guards said the plane landed at the former military base Sept. 22, 2003 – the date Human Rights Watch said a Boeing 737 that was part of the prisoner-transfer scheme was at the airport. But authorities – including the airport’s former director – denied any knowledge of prisoner transfers.

New York City-based Human Rights Watch said the U.S. government may have used Sczytno-Szymany airport for secret transfers of terror suspects captured in Afghanistan, citing flight logs and unnamed sources. Polish government officials dismiss the report and U.S. officials have refused to confirm or deny the claims.

Polish border guards spokesman Maj. Roman Krzeminski said records show on Sept. 22, 2003 a plane landed at the airport carrying seven people with U.S. passports and took on board five other people with U.S. passports who were waiting at the airport and whose documents said they came to Poland on business. He said the plane spent about an hour at the airport before taking off.

Former airport director Mariola Przewloczka described the plane as a Boeing and said border guards drove out to meet the plane on the runway, instead of having the occupants enter the airport terminal.

“After the plane landed two vans drove out to meet it with border control officials,” said Przewloczka.

“The whole thing lasted a little over a half an hour.” But she and other officials said they did not know where the plane came from or where it went.

Several local residents said they had not noticed any unusual flights. “I didn’t see anything, nothing,” said Marek Wyrzykowski, a farm labourer who lives in a village next to the airport. “Taliban? There’s no Taliban here.”

Human Rights Watch said Thursday it has evidence indicating the CIA transported suspected terrorists captured in Afghanistan to Poland and Romania. The conclusion is based on an analysis of flight logs of CIA aircraft from 2001 to 2004 obtained by the group, said Mark Garlasco, a senior military analyst with the organization.

The U.S. government has been criticized by human rights groups for practising “extraordinary rendition” – sending suspected terrorists to foreign countries, where they are detained, interrogated and allegedly tortured.

Allegations the United States has operated secret prisons in Eastern Europe and elsewhere were published this week in the Washington Post newspaper, prompting a string of denials from governments in the former Soviet sphere. European Union officials, the Council of Europe – the continent’s top human rights organization – and the international Red Cross all said they would look into the issue.

European officials said such prisons would violate the continent’s human rights principles.

In Romania, aviation officials and the military denied Human Rights Watch allegations the Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Base may have been used by the CIA as a detention facility as well. The Kogalniceanu base, near the Black Sea port city Constanta, was used by the United States for troops and equipment during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. The U.S. military evacuated its remaining forces in June 2003.

“When the Americans were here there were so many civilians working there, people would have found out about it,” Dan Buciuman, the base commander, said. Garlasco said one of the CIA flights was a Boeing 737 that in September 2003 flew from Washington to Kabul, Afghanistan, via Ruzyne in the Czech Republic and Tashkent, Uzbekistan, he said.

He said that plane then departed Afghanistan for Szczytno-Szymany Airport on Sept. 22, continued to Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Base and Sale, Morocco, and finally landed at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo, Cuba.

The Szczytno-Szymany Airport is in extensive forests outside the town Sczytno near Poland’s Masurian Lakes in northeastern Poland. It’s not an operating airport but planes can land if prior arrangement is made; only one small single-engined plane was parked there Friday and there were no takeoffs or landings.

By Robert Stevens, posted at the Asian Tribune

The Blair government and Britain’s security agencies are seeking to legitimize the use of evidence obtained by torture overseas against terror suspects.

On August 11, 2004 the Court of Appeals had ruled such evidence admissible in UK law and, on this basis, upheld the continued detention of 10 foreign nationals imprisoned without charge for more than two years.

Lawyers acting for the 10 had argued that their imprisonment was ‘morally repugnant,’ given that the evidence against them may have been extracted through torture at the US military concentration camp at Guant’namo Bay, Cuba. But in a two-to-one ruling, the Law Lords ruled that evidence obtained through torture could be used in British courts so long as Britain was not directly involved in extracting it.

Lawyers representing the detainees challenged the verdict, arguing that it breached Article Three of the European Convention on Human Rights prohibiting torture or degrading treatment.

On October 17 the government requested the Law Lords to rule on the issue. The hearings ended on October 22 and a final ruling may take weeks or even months.

Appearing before a panel of seven Law Lords last month, Ben Emmerson, QC, representing the detainees, said that allowing the use of such evidence gave an incentive to the torturer ‘by making the act of torture worthwhile.’

In opposition, Ian Burnett, QC, for the home secretary, maintained that there was no rule of law preventing a court from relying on statements of a third party obtained by agents of a foreign state through torture.

The Home Office has so far refused to comment on the case. Last week the Lord Chancellor, Lord Falconer, the secretary of state for constitutional affairs, said the government faced ‘difficult practical decisions.’

‘In facing the dangers posed by international terrorism, we have to ensure that those charged with protecting our security have all the tools they legitimately require,’ he said.

Lord Falconer claimed, ‘In adapting our legal tools to face new threats, we will ensure that we do so in a way that reflects our values for democracy and tolerance and ensures our continued support for the rule of law.’ But a seven-page statement to the Law Lords from the head of Britain’s secret service M15, Eliza Manningham-Buller’which was leaked to Channel 4 News’made clear where the security agencies stand on democratic rights.

Whilst careful not to use the word ‘torture,’ Manningham-Buller praised the uncovering of the so-called ‘ricin terror plot.’ In January 2003 police had raided a London flat, seizing what was described as a ‘poisons laboratory.’ The apparent find, of what was described as a major Al Qaeda cell planning a terror campaign in Britain, played a central role in government efforts to justify the war against Iraq and its accompanying ‘war on terror.’

The raid followed allegations by one Mohmammad Meguerba to security agencies in Algeria that he had been part of the terror plot. Manningham-Buller said Meguerba’s ‘evidence’ had been vital and ‘In those circumstances, no inquiries were made of Algerian liaison about the precise circumstances that attended their questioning of Meguerba. In any event, questioning of Algerian liaison about their methods of questioning detainees would almost certainly have been rebuffed and at the same time would have damaged the relationship to the detriment of our ability to counter international terrorism.’

In fact, Meguerba’s statement was widely believed to have been obtained through torture and when British investigators went to Algeria to question him further he withdrew most of his allegations. The subsequent trial of nine people accused of involvement in the supposed poison plot in April this year heard that no ricin had in fact been found in the flat and the case against eight of them collapsed. The remaining suspect, Kamel Bourgass, was eventually jailed for killing a police officer during his arrest and for ‘conspiracy to cause a public nuisance.’

Referring to the case before the Law Lords, Kate Allen, director of Amnesty International, said:

‘Let us be clear what we are talking about. This is not about whether evidence is useful. This is about whether the UK will turn a blind eye to someone being thrown in a cell and having pain and terror inflicted upon them. The UK authorities must of course do their utmost to protect the public from terrorism’but going soft on torture is not the answer.’

Torture in Uzbekistan

Further evidence is emerging regarding the tacit support that the British government has given to those regimes routinely engaged in the torture of those held in captivity.

On October 27, the Independent newspaper published an article by Craig Murray, a former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, opposing the contradictions, omissions and deceits contained in Manningham-Buller’s submission to the Law Lords.

Murray described in graphic detail how Uzbekistan agencies used extreme torture methods to obtain ‘evidence’ and how this ‘intelligence’ was then passed on for use by Britain’s security forces.

Murray wrote that Manningham-Buller’s statement to the Law Lords ‘argues, in effect, that we need to get intelligence from foreign security services, to fight terrorism. And if they torture, so what? Her chief falsehood is our pretence that we don’t know what happens in their dungeons. We do. And it is a dreadful story.

‘Manningham-Buller also fails to mention that a large number of people have been tortured abroad to provide us with intelligence’because we sent them there to be tortured. The CIA’s ‘extraordinary rendition’ programme has become notorious. Under it, detainees have been sent around the world to key torture destinations. There is evidence of British complicity’not only do these CIA flights regularly operate from UK airbases, but detainees have spoken of British intelligence personnel working with their tormentors.’

Murray added that the ‘UK receives this intelligence material not occasionally, not fortuitously, but in connection with a regular programme of torture with which we are intimately associated. Uzbekistan is one of those security services from whose ‘friendly liaison’ services we obtained information.’

The torture methods employed included a woman ‘who was raped with a broken bottle in both vagina and anus, and who died after ten days of agony’ and an old man who was ‘suspended by wrist shackles from the ceiling while his children were beaten to a pulp before his eyes.’ According to Murray, another male ‘had his fingernails pulled before his face was beaten and he was immersed to his armpits in boiling liquid.’

Another victim of torture was an ’18-year-old whose knees and elbows were smashed, his hand immersed in boiling liquid until the skin came away and the flesh started to peel from the bone, before the back of his skull was stove in.’

None of these victims were terrorists, Murray continued, and the ‘great majority of those who suffer torture at the hands of these regimes are not terrorists, but political opponents. And the scale of this torture is vast. In Uzbekistan alone thousands, not hundreds, of innocent men, women and children suffer torture every year.’

Murray states in his article that he protested to the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office at torture in Uzbek and was informed ‘that [Foreign Secretary] Jack Straw and the head of MI6 had considered my objections, but had come to the conclusion that torture intelligence was important to the War on Terror, and the practice should continue. One day, the law must bring them to account.’

Referring to Manningham-Buller’s statement that the evidence obtained in the case of Mohammed Meguerba was justified as it prevented the development of a terrorist plot, Murray states, ‘If that argument is accepted, then in logic there is no reason to rely on foreign intermediaries. Why don’t we do our own torturing at home? James VI and I abolished torture’New Labour is making the first attempt in English courts to justify government use of torture information. Why stop there? Why can’t the agencies work over terrorist suspects?’

According to another article by Dana Priest published in the Washington Post, November 2, ‘Parliaments in Canada, Italy, France, Sweden and the Netherlands have opened inquiries into alleged CIA operations that secretly captured their citizens or legal residents and transferred them to the agency’s prisons.’

Priest reported that ‘a covert prison system’ was ‘set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small centre at the Guant’namo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.’

Letters to the Independent

Sir: I really wish I hadn’t read the article by Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan (“The reality of Britain’s reliance on torture”, 27 October). I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that such vile things can happen in our name, but I am: when it has been spelt out so clearly one cannot but face the scarcely believable truth.

The really appalling thing is that ordinary people are powerless to stop this hideous trade. We can protest until we are blue in the face, to no avail. I wept when I read that article: is there really nothing we can do to put and end to this evil?

EVANGELINE EVANS,

JORDANS, BUCKINGHAMSHIRE

Sir: Former Ambassador Craig Murray’s article was a salutory warning about what happens when human rights principles are overlooked by the exigencies of political pragmatism in the so-called “War on terror”.

DR DAVID LOWRY

STONELEIGH, SURREY

By Dan Robinson writing in VOA

Members of Congress are reacting to a newspaper report that the CIA has been running a network of secret prisons since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to hold and interrogate terrorist suspects. There was criticism from congressional Democrats.

In its reporting on what it described as a covert prison system run by the CIA, the Washington Post newspaper said funding for the secret sites was provided through the regular intelligence budget approved by Congress each year.

That budget has been estimated at about $40 billion, but the exact figure is not known because it is classified. But for lawmakers responsible for funding the U.S. intelligence system, and who approved legislation to reorganize that system after months of tense debate, the Washington Post report is certain to cause more anxiety.

Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer Wednesday described the newspaper report as startling, adding she intends to inquire with members of the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee if they knew about the details mentioned in the newspaper article.

On the floor of the House of Representatives, the Washington Post report brought this comment from (Democratic) Congressman Jim McGovern of Massachusetts. “This is not what America stands for. This is more like Chile under [former dictator Augusto] Pinochet, or Argentina under the [former] junta,” he said.

The Washington Post report also comes at a time when debate is raging over U.S. military operations in Iraq, the CIA leak case in which an aide to Vice President Dick Cheney was indicted, and the issue of treatment of prisoners and detainees.

The Senate version of a defense spending bill includes an amendment, approved by a vote of 90 to 9 last month, to ban the cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of any detainee in U.S. custody. However, the Bush administration, with Vice President Dick Cheney taking the lead, says such provision, sponsored by Republican Senator John McCain, would harm counter-terrorism efforts, and proposed that employees of the CIA should be exempted.

In the House, Congressman Ed Markey is proposing to prohibit the practice of extraordinary rendition under which terrorist suspects have been transported to other countries for interrogation.

Asked about the Washington Post report Wednesday, presidential spokesman Scott McClellan declined to discuss specific intelligence activities, adding only that President Bush has an important responsibility to protect the American people.

National Security Adviser, Stephen Hadley, had this comment when asked about the newspaper report during a briefing on President Bush’s upcoming trip to South America:

“The fact that they are secret, assuming there are such sites, does not mean that, simply because something is, you know when some people say that the test of your principles are what you do when no one is looking. And the president has insisted that whether it is in the public or is in the private, the same principles will apply and the same principles will be respected, and to the extent that people do not measure up to those principles, there will be accountability and responsibility,” he said.

The Washington Post report also comes as congressional Democrats step up pressure on Republicans on the issue of pre-Iraq war intelligence and the CIA leak case. Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid and House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, wrote to the president Wednesday criticizing what they call categorically false statements by presidential spokesman Scott McClellan.

On Tuesday, Senator Reid used a special rule to shut down the Senate to underscore dissatisfaction with what he calls foot-dragging by Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Republicans responded angrily, calling the move a stunt by Democrats, but agreed to issue a report later this month on the status of the Intelligence Committee probe of intelligence used to justify the Iraq war.

From EU Observer

A media report alleging the CIA runs a secret camp in eastern Europe where it interrogates al Qaeda suspects has caused strong concern in Europe, with MEPs calling for an EU investigation into the matter.

According to an article in leading US newspaper the Washington Post on Wednesday (2 November), the US intelligence branch, the CIA, has detained top Al Qaeda suspects at a compound dating back to the Soviet era and located somewhere in eastern Europe.

The newspaper does not say if the camp is located on existing EU territory or in Romania or Bulgaria, for example. It is also unclear if there is more than one camp, with the paper sometimes referring to the “eastern European countries” concerned in the plural, adding that US officials advised against publication of the countries’ names for fear of terrorist reprisals.

Senior intelligence sources told the Washington Post that the al Qaeda prisoners are held in complete isolation from the outside world, have no recognised legal rights, and are probably subject to the CIA’s controversial “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques”.

European Commission and EU diplomats on Wednesday (2 November) declined to comment on the report. “This is an issue between the US and any member states concerned”, a commission spokeswoman said. The spokeswoman for EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana indicated that “this has nothing to do with the European Union”.

MEPs want Brussels to take action

But MEPs have called for an urgent EU investigation into the matter.

UK liberal MEP and member of the parliament’s civil liberties committee baroness Sarah Ludford said “I will be asking commissioner Frattini to check out urgently this suggestion that EU member states may be implicated in the most barbaric practices of the misguided US ‘war on terror'”.

She added that if EU member states were involved “this has the most devastating implications for the EU’s credibility in upholding human rights and the rule of law”.

Dutch green MEP Kathalijne Buitenweg, also a member of the civil liberties committee as well as of the EU-US parliamentary delegation said that “Mr Solana should clarify with the Americans what exactly is going on”.

“If human rights are violated in an EU country, or in a candidate member state, than this is an EU issue”, she added.

Ms Buitenweg indicated the parliament’s civil liberties and foreign affairs committees should discuss ways for the European Parliament to further research the issue itself.

The member announced she would personally raise the question at an EU-US parliamentary meeting in December.

Trauma from Soviet times

The matter looks set to cause outrage in eastern Europe, which is traditionally strongly allied with the US but which also experienced grave human rights violations in the past by former communist secret services.

Slovak centre-right MEP Miroslav Mikolasik said these memories made him “convinced” that the CIA camp cannot possibly be located in his own country.

“We had too painful experiences from the Soviet time with the conditions under which political prisoners were held”, he said, adding “We hate these kinds of procedures”.

The Wahington Post notes that CIA interrogators abroad are permitted to use the CIA’s “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques”.

The techniques, prohibited under the US’ own military law as well as under UN rules, include tactics such as “waterboarding,” in which a prisoner is made to believe he or she is drowning.

Debate Is Growing Within Agency About Legality and Morality of Overseas System Set Up After 9/11

By Dana Priest writing in the Washington Post

The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.

The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.

The hidden global internment network is a central element in the CIA’s unconventional war on terrorism. It depends on the cooperation of foreign intelligence services, and on keeping even basic information about the system secret from the public, foreign officials and nearly all members of Congress charged with overseeing the CIA’s covert actions.

The existence and locations of the facilities — referred to as “black sites” in classified White House, CIA, Justice Department and congressional documents — are known to only a handful of officials in the United States and, usually, only to the president and a few top intelligence officers in each host country.

The CIA and the White House, citing national security concerns and the value of the program, have dissuaded Congress from demanding that the agency answer questions in open testimony about the conditions under which captives are held. Virtually nothing is known about who is kept in the facilities, what interrogation methods are employed with them, or how decisions are made about whether they should be detained or for how long.

While the Defense Department has produced volumes of public reports and testimony about its detention practices and rules after the abuse scandals at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison and at Guantanamo Bay, the CIA has not even acknowledged the existence of its black sites. To do so, say officials familiar with the program, could open the U.S. government to legal challenges, particularly in foreign courts, and increase the risk of political condemnation at home and abroad.

But the revelations of widespread prisoner abuse in Afghanistan and Iraq by the U.S. military — which operates under published rules and transparent oversight of Congress — have increased concern among lawmakers, foreign governments and human rights groups about the opaque CIA system. Those concerns escalated last month, when Vice President Cheney and CIA Director Porter J. Goss asked Congress to exempt CIA employees from legislation already endorsed by 90 senators that would bar cruel and degrading treatment of any prisoner in U.S. custody.

Although the CIA will not acknowledge details of its system, intelligence officials defend the agency’s approach, arguing that the successful defense of the country requires that the agency be empowered to hold and interrogate suspected terrorists for as long as necessary and without restrictions imposed by the U.S. legal system or even by the military tribunals established for prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay.

The Washington Post is not publishing the names of the Eastern European countries involved in the covert program, at the request of senior U.S. officials. They argued that the disclosure might disrupt counterterrorism efforts in those countries and elsewhere and could make them targets of possible terrorist retaliation.

The secret detention system was conceived in the chaotic and anxious first months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when the working assumption was that a second strike was imminent.

Since then, the arrangement has been increasingly debated within the CIA, where considerable concern lingers about the legality, morality and practicality of holding even unrepentant terrorists in such isolation and secrecy, perhaps for the duration of their lives. Mid-level and senior CIA officers began arguing two years ago that the system was unsustainable and diverted the agency from its unique espionage mission.

“We never sat down, as far as I know, and came up with a grand strategy,” said one former senior intelligence officer who is familiar with the program but not the location of the prisons. “Everything was very reactive. That’s how you get to a situation where you pick people up, send them into a netherworld and don’t say, ‘What are we going to do with them afterwards?’ ”

(more…)

From the Washington Post

Scottish police have launched an investigation of so-called CIA “torture flights” that allegedly transport captured terrorism suspects to undisclosed locations for interrogation, according to the Glasgow Sunday Herald. The investigation is the latest sign of growing European unease with U.S. policy of “extraordinary rendition.”

The probe was triggered by a Sunday Herald series last month that reported that CIA planes had stopped at two Scottish airports 149 times for refueling and logistical support.

“The program,” the SH said, “targets suspected Islamic terrorists, captures and delivers them to US-friendly nations which are quite happy to use torture to get the information the US wants for the war on terror.”

Former CIA counterterrorism officer Michael Scheuer defended the practice of rendition, but said he favored classifying the terror suspects as prisoners of war and questioning them in the United States under the terms of the Geneva Convention. That proposal, he says, was rejected by both the Clinton and Bush administrations

“We shot ourselves in both feet,” Scheuer told the SH.

Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, said the British government ignored his reports that terror suspects sent there were routinely tortured.

“I warned ministers it was illegal,” he said. “But the politicians were very keen to just keep going ahead.”

The CIA declined to comment. “One CIA official merely laughed when told that Scottish police were to investigate,” the SH reported.

As The Post’s Dana Priest reports today, “Parliaments in Canada, Italy, France, Sweden and the Netherlands have opened inquiries into alleged CIA operations that secretly captured their citizens or legal residents and transferred them to the agency’s prisons.”

By Howard Williams writing in CNSNews.com (28th October)

Ottawa (CNSNews.com) – A Canadian citizen, deported by the United States to Syria even though no charges had been filed against him, was tortured while in Syrian custody, according to testimony at a judicial inquiry Thursday.

The case of Maher Arar, a Syrian-born engineer who lives with his family in Ottawa, sparked a diplomatic row between Canada and the United States after it was revealed that the U.S. deported him to Syria without informing Canadian authorities and despite the fact that Arar was traveling on a Canadian passport.

The United States claimed that Arar had links with the al Qaeda terrorist network but never charged him.

After a year of intensive diplomatic efforts, Arar was eventually released by Syria and returned to Canada. After months of trying to dodge the issue, the Canadian government agreed to set up a judicial inquiry.

Officially, the inquiry is to discover what role — if any — Canadian officials had in Arar’s arrest and deportation by the United States. However, many are hoping that the inquiry will also cast some light on why the United States chose to deport a Canadian citizen to a country — Syria — known for allegedly harsh interrogation methods.

Those interrogation methods, the inquiry was told Thursday, included physical and psychological torture.

Stephen Toope, a former dean of McGill University’s law school in Montreal, who was appointed to carry out an independent investigation by Ontario Associate Chief Justice Dennis O’Connor, reported that “Arar’s psychological state was seriously damaged and he remains fragile … Economically, the family has been devastated.”

Toope interviewed Arar about his claims that he was tortured, claims originally denied by Canadian authorities, and other Syrian-Canadians who claim to have been tortured while in custody in their native country.

“I am convinced that [Arar’s] description of his treatment in Syria is accurate,” Toope said in his report which was made public Thursday. “I conclude that the stories they tell are credible. I believe that they suffered severe physical and psychological trauma while in detention in Syria.

Toope concluded that “the treatment of Mr. Arar in Far Falestin constituted torture as understood in international law … In addition, the techniques of humiliation and the creation of intense fear were forms of psychological torture.”

American authorities detained Arar in New York when he was returning from a family vacation in Tunisia in September 2002, accusing him of having terrorist connections.

Canadian consular officials said they were not told of Arar’s deportation until after he had been flown out of the United States and despite assurances from U.S. authorities that he would not be deported without prior consultation with Canada.

Washington has refused to allow State Department or FBI officials to testify at the inquiry, which has already discovered that The Royal Canadian Mounted Police supplied information to U.S. law enforcement officials about Arar.

Canada’s Defense Minister, Bill Graham, who was foreign minister at the time Arar was arrested and deported, claimed at the inquiry that he had no reason to believe Arar was being tortured in Syria.

Dan Livermore, director general of Canada’s Foreign Affairs Department’s security and intelligence bureau, said the United States used a process called extraordinary rendition to deport Arar to Syria.

“I find troubling the entire course of activity the American government has embarked upon since about 2001 with respect to what they call extraordinary rendition, a practice which we knew absolutely nothing about,” Livermore claimed.

O’Connor is expected to wrap up his inquiry soon and could produce his final report before the end of the year.

Although not technically part of his mandate, O’Connor could urge Ottawa to seek greater assurances from Washington about the treatment of Canadian citizens taken into custody while in the United States.

Arar, now 35, has consistently denied any links to any terrorist organization and has never been charged in Canada or in the United States with any criminal offense. He obtained his engineering degree in Ottawa and during his one-man campaign for a public inquiry has impressed many Canadians with his fluency in both English and French.

By Martin Bright writing in The New Statesman

In Committee Room 1 in the Commons, the future of our democracy is in the balance. Here the law lords are being asked to sweep aside 250 years of legal precedent, writes Martin Bright

From the scrum of journalists, backbenchers and researchers in the committee corridor of the Commons, you would be forgiven for thinking great matters of state were at issue. But the mob outside Committee Room 14, where the Tories were holding the first ballots in their interminable leadership contest, were jostling for elbow room at a sideshow.

At the same time, a hundred paces along the corridor in Committee Room 1, the future of our democracy was being decided. Here the law lords were meeting to hear an appeal against a high court ruling last August that evidence obtained under torture in other countries could be used in courts in England and Wales.

When I attended, the rest of the media pack was nowhere to be seen and not a single front-bench MP from any party was present. In this small room, with just enough public seats to hold the lawyers, interested parties and a handful of spectators, their lordships were being asked to overturn a decision that sweeps aside 250 years of legal precedent. If last summer’s decision stands, evidence extracted by torture will be admissible in terrorist cases as long as no British official has connived in the abuses.

The form of torture last sanctioned in Britain, peine forte et dure, was abolished in 1772. In this bizarre judicial ordeal, defendants who refused to enter a plea would have heavier and heavier stones placed on their chests until they pleaded guilty or not guilty – or suffocated to death. But even this crude punishment was not designed to extract confessions to be used in evidence. At the time of its use, peine forte et dure was considered an insurance against the abuse of the jury system by defendants who “stood mute” – in other words, asserted their right to silence.

Although convicted criminals were still hanged, drawn and quartered well into the 19th century, there has been a gradual shift away from judicial cruelty since the Bill of Rights outlawed “cruel and unusual punishments” in 1689. The “war against terror” has changed that. Ministers are now persuaded that, in some circumstances, torture is tolerable – as long as it is carried out by foreigners on our behalf. The issue first emerged during hearings for ten Arab terror suspects held without trial under the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001, when an MI5 officer conceded that some of the evidence used to detain the men might have been obtained under torture.

Ranged against the government are lawyers for groups such as Amnesty International, the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture and Doctors for Human Rights. They argue that the prohibition of torture in law is absolute and that admission of evidence in a British court would act as a green light to regimes with a poor human rights record.

It is an established principle that international agreements on the prohibition of torture are breached not only in the perpetration but in the tolerance of such acts. Article 15 of the UN Convention Against Torture is clear on this.

In 1992 the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture found that courts accepting evidence obtained by inflicting pain were responsible for “the flourishing of torture”. Even in exceptional circumstances, such as at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, evidence obtained in this way was specifically excluded. Just last year the UN General Assembly restated its plea to states not to use evidence obtained under torture in court.

Although most UN conventions were signed straight after the Second World War, the Convention Against Torture came into force only in 1987. That it exists at all is a tribute to the work of the campaigning organisations that now oppose the government on the use of torture evidence. Signatory governments have a right to be proud of the high principles the document expresses.

What a contrast to the shabby little agreement the British government has just signed with Libya in which Tripoli agrees not to mistreat terror suspects deported from the UK. The spectacle of a British prime minister accepting such assurances from Colonel Gaddafi, in the week that Saddam Hussein went on trial in Baghdad, provided a stark reminder of the inconsistencies of British foreign policy.

Next month marks the 400th anniversary of our most celebrated victim of torture, Guy Fawkes. James I had to make an executive order because torture was, even then, frowned on in common law: “The gentler tortours are to be first used unto him, et sic per gradus ad mia tenditur [and so by degrees proceeding to the worst], and so God speed your goode worke.”

The law lords should perhaps visit the “Gunpowder Plot” exhibition in parliament’s Westminster Hall, a short walk from Committee Room 1, where they can see the crushed, barely legible signature of the tortured Fawkes, before they make their decision on reintroducing this barbaric practice to our courts.

Craig Murray writes today in The Independent on the reality of Britain’s reliance on torture

“Torture means the woman who was raped with a broken bottle, and died after 10 days of agony”

The Government has been arguing before the House of Lords for the right to act on intelligence obtained by torture abroad. It wants to be able to use such material to detain people without trial in the UK, and as evidence in the courts. Key to its case is a statement to the Law Lords by the head of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller. In effect she argues that torture works. It foiled the famous ricin plot.

She omits to mention that no more ricin was found than is the naturally occurring base level in your house or mine – or indeed that no poison of any kind was found. But let us leave that for now. She argues, in effect, that we need to get intelligence from foreign security services, to fight terrorism. And if they torture, so what? Her chief falsehood is our pretence that we don’t know what happens in their dungeons. We do. And it is a dreadful story. Manningham-Buller is so fastidious she even avoids using the word “torture” in her evidence. Let alone the reality to which she turns such a carefully blind eye.

Manningham Buller also fails to mention that a large number of people have been tortured abroad to provide us with intelligence – because we sent them there to be tortured. The CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” programme has become notorious. Under it, detainees have been sent around the world to key torture destinations. There is evidence of British complicity – not only do these CIA flights regularly operate from UK airbases, but detainees have spoken of British intelligence personnel working with their tormentors.

So the UK receives this intelligence material not occasionally, not fortuitously, but in connection with a regular programme of torture with which we are intimately associated. Uzbekistan is one of those security services from whose “friendly liaison” services we obtained information. And I will tell you what torture means.

It means the woman who was raped with a broken bottle in both vagina and anus, and who died after ten days of agony. It means the old man suspended by wrist shackles from the ceiling while his children were beaten to a pulp before his eyes. It means the man whose fingernails were pulled before his face was beaten and he was immersed to his armpits in boiling liquid.

It means the 18-year-old whose knees and elbows were smashed, his hand immersed in boiling liquid until the skin came away and the flesh started to peel from the bone, before the back of his skull was stove in.

These are all real cases from the Uzbek security services which we viewed as friendly liaison, and from which we obtained regular intelligence, in the Uzbek case via the CIA.

A month ago, that liaison relationship was stopped – not by us, but by the Uzbeks. But as Manningham-Buller sets out, we continue to maintain our position as customer to torturers in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Algeria, Jordan, Morocco and many other places. The key point is that none of the these Uzbek victims were terrorists at all.

The great majority of those who suffer torture at the hands of these regimes are not terrorists, but political opponents. And the scale of this torture is vast. In Uzbekistan alone thousands, not hundreds, of innocent men, women and children suffer torture every year.

Across Manningham-Buller’s web of friendly intelligence agencies, the number may reach tens of thousands. Can our security really be based on such widespread inhumanity, or is that not part of the grievance that feeds terrorism?

These other governments know that our security services lap up information from their torture chambers. This practical condoning more than cancels out any weasel words on human rights which the Foreign Office may issue. In fact, the case for the efficacy of torture intelligence is not nearly as clear-cut as Manningham-Buller makes out. Much dross comes out of the torture chambers. History should tell us that under torture people would choke out an admission that they had joined their neighbours in flying on broomsticks with cats.

We do not receive torture intelligence from foreign liaison security services sometimes, or by chance. We receive it on a regular basis, through established channels. That plainly makes us complicit. It is worth considering, in this regard, Article 4 of the UN Convention Against Torture, which requires signatories to make complicity with torture a criminal offence.

When I protested about these practices within the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, I was told bluntly that Jack Straw and the head of MI6 had considered my objections, but had come to the conclusion that torture intelligence was important to the War on Terror, and the practice should continue. One day, the law must bring them to account.

A final thought. Manningham-Buller is arguing about the efficiency of torture in preventing a terrorist plot. If that argument is accepted, then in logic there is no reason to rely on foreign intermediaries. Why don’t we do our own torturing at home? James VI and I abolished torture – New Labour is making the first attempt in English courts to justify government use of torture information. Why stop there? Why can’t the agencies work over terrorist suspects?

The Security Services want us to be able to use information from torture. That should come as no surprise. From Sir Thomas Walsingham on, the profession attracts people not squeamish about the smell of seared flesh from the branding iron. That is why we have a judiciary to protect us. I pray the Law Lords do.

In a follow-up to his previous series of articles Neil Mackay looks at attempts by the Scottish police to confront the CIA…

SCOTTISH police are to launch an investigation into CIA ‘torture flights’ which fly in and out of Glasgow and Prestwick airports, ferrying kidnapped war on terror suspects around the world.

The police action is a result of last week’s disturbing investigation by the Sunday Herald into the so-called ‘extraordinary rendition flights’, which see suspects kidnapped overseas by the CIA, drugged and then flown to ‘friendly states, such as Egypt, Uzbekistan and Morocco, where they are tortured on behalf of British and American intelligence.

Following our reports , the Green Party wrote to the chief constable of Strathclyde Police, Sir William Rae, asking for a full inquiry into the torture flights. A police spokesperson confirmed that the force would now launch an investigation.

Last week, we revealed that the British government was to be sued by human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith for complicity in the torture of his client Benyam Mohammed al-Habashi.

Also exposed was the fact that international human rights experts and lawyers believe the UK is breaking the Geneva Conventions by collaborating with the USA on the transit of the flights through Britain.

Further, the UK allows British airports to be used for refuelling by the CIA’s jets ferrying suspects around the world. Glasgow and Prestwick airports are the two most favoured CIA stop-overs.

Chris Ballance, the Green Party MSP who represents the Prestwick area, said he lodged the complaint with Strathclyde Police after reading the Sunday Herald’s investigation because it appeared that ‘Scotland is complicit in these gross acts of torture’.

Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, said : ‘Once these planes land on British soil, they have no immunity. If they touch down at a civilian airport they are under civilian jurisdiction. This would allow the police to do their job fully and to board the plane and question those on board.’

Beyond saying that an investigation would take place, Strathclyde Police said it could not comment on how the inquiry would proceed.

The CIA refused categorically to comment. One CIA official merely laughed when told that Scottish police were to investigate.