From BBC Online

The first criminal trial over the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” of terror suspects has opened in Italy. Twenty-six Americans and six Italians are accused of kidnapping an Egyptian terror suspect and sending him to Egypt, where he was allegedly tortured.

The Americans – most believed to be CIA agents – will be tried in absentia. Italy has not announced if it will seek their extradition to the Milan trial. US President George W Bush will arrive in Italy hours after the trial opens.

Meanwhile, the head of a European investigation into the rendition process is due to present more findings on Friday.

Surprise witness

Italy’s government has asked the country’s highest court to set aside the rendition trial, saying prosecution documents will break state secrecy laws and damage relations with the CIA. The Constitutional Court is due to rule on that appeal by September, and defence lawyers are expected to ask that the trial be adjourned until the high court makes its ruling.

Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr – also known as Abu Omar – was snatched from a Milan street in February 2003. Italian prosecutors say Nasr was taken to US bases in Italy and Germany before being taken to the Egyptian capital of Cairo. Nasr says he was tortured during his four-year imprisonment in Cairo.

At the time of his arrest he was suspected of recruiting fighters for Islamic groups but had not been charged. He was released by Egypt earlier this year, his lawyer said.

A senior US official has said that the 26 Americans accused of Nasr’s kidnapping would not be sent to Italy even if Rome made an extradition request.

One of the surprise witnesses in the case will be Philip Morse – one of the minority owners of the US baseball team the Boston Red Sox, says the BBC’s Christian Fraser in Rome. It is alleged that his Gulfstream jet was used by the CIA to fly Abu Omar out of Italy, says our correspondent.

‘Web of abuse’

Also on Friday, Swiss senator Dick Marty, leading an inquiry on behalf of the Council of Europe, is due to release more of his findings. Last year, he accused 14 European nations of colluding with US intelligence in a “spider’s web” of human rights abuses, and specified Romania and Poland as suspected locations for CIA “black sites”, where terror suspects are secretly held.

President Bush acknowledged the existence of such centres last year, but did not say where they were. Mr Bush will arrive on Friday for talks with Pope Benedict XVI and Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi.

Mr Prodi has already said that the extraordinary rendition case will not be on the agenda.

The United Nations has held that “disappearance” of persons is in itself a form of torture, because of the mental anguish heaped both on the “disappeared”, and on their family. Yet the US continues to do it.

As Reuters reports, human rights groups have named 39 people “disappeared” while in US custody. Stephen Grey, author of the brilliant Ghost Plane, believes that the numbers disappeared by the USA might reach the hundreds. As Uzbekistan is one of the torture destinations for extraordinary rendition, experience would indicate that many of these will have been murdered and the bodies dumped or cremated.

Groups list 39 ‘disappeared’ in U.S. war on terror

Thu Jun 7, 2007

By Claudia Parsons

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Six human rights groups urged the U.S. government on Thursday to name and explain the whereabouts of 39 people they said were believed to have been held in U.S. custody and “disappeared.”

The groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, said they filed a U.S. federal lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act seeking information about the 39 people it terms “ghost prisoners” in the U.S. “war on terror.”

“Since the end of Latin America’s dirty wars, the world has rejected the use of ‘disappearances’ as a fundamental violation of international law,” professor Meg Satterthwaite of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University’s School of Law said in a statement.

The report said suspects’ relatives, including children as young as seven, had been held in secret detention on occasion.

CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano dismissed the report, saying the CIA acts in “strict accord with American law” and its counter-terrorist initiatives are “subject to careful review and oversight.” “The United States does not conduct or condone torture,” he said.

In September, U.S. President George W. Bush acknowledged the CIA had interrogated dozens of suspects at secret overseas locations and said 14 of those held had been sent to the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Bush strongly defended the secret detention and questioning of terrorism suspects and said the CIA treated them humanely. The program has drawn international outcry and questions about the cooperation of European governments.

Tens of thousands of people “disappeared” during Latin America’s so-called dirty wars in Chile, Argentina and several other countries where right-wing dictators used extra-judicial detentions to crush armed Marxist opposition.

The list of 39 people said to have been held in U.S. custody at some point was compiled using information from six rights groups, including London-based groups Cageprisoners and Reprieve and the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York. The detentions began shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks and include people said to be captured in locations including Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Somalia.

EVIDENCE OF DETENTIONS

The United States has acknowledged detaining three of the 39. The groups said, however, there was strong evidence, including witness testimony, of secret detention in 18 more cases and some evidence of secret detention in the remaining 18 cases.

Joanne Mariner of Human Rights Watch said it was unknown if the suspects were now in U.S. or foreign custody, or even alive or dead. “We have families who have not seen their loved ones for years. They’ve literally disappeared,” Mariner told Reuters.

Among the cases detailed in the report is the detention in September 2002 of two children, then aged seven and nine, of confessed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was later detained and is now held at Guantanamo. “According to eyewitnesses, the two were held in an adult detention center for at least four months while U.S. agents questioned the children about their father’s whereabouts,” the report said. The groups said the lack of information about the prisoners “prevents scrutiny by the public or the courts, and leaves detainees vulnerable to abuses that include torture.”

Bush said in September there were no prisoners remaining in custody in U.S. secret facilities at that time. But the report said the transfer of Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi from CIA custody to Guantanamo in April showed the system was still operating.

“Interviews with prisoners who have been released from secret CIA prisons indicate that low-level detainees have frequently been arrested far from any battlefield, and held in isolation for years without legal recourse or contact with their families or outside agencies,” the report said.

The groups urged the U.S. government to cease use of secret detention, provide information on those in custody, give access by the International Committee of the Red Cross to all detainees and either bring charges or release all prisoners.

(Additional reporting by Carol Giacomo)

The danger is we get so used to the idea of Guantanamo that we stop being shocked. This is another excellent article by the indefatigable Marjorie Cohn, which reminds us of the continuing horrors, both of brutality and of Kafkaesque procedure:

No Unlawful Enemy Combatants at Guant’namo

By Marjorie Cohn

June 6, 2007

http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/forumy/2007/06/no-unlawful-enemy-combatants-at.php

In 2002, Donald Rumsfeld famously called the detainees at Guant’namo “the worst of the worst.” General Richard B. Myers, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned they were “very dangerous people who would gnaw hydraulic lines in the back of a C-17 to bring it down.” These claims were designed to justify locking up hundreds of men and boys for years in small cages like animals.

George W. Bush lost no time establishing military commissions to try the very “worst of the worst” for war crimes. But four and a half years later, the Supreme Court decided in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that those commissions violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Geneva Conventions. So Bush dusted them off, made a few changes, and rammed his new improved military commissions through the Republican Congress last fall.

Only three detainees have been brought before the new commissions. One would expect the people Bush & Co. singled out for war crimes prosecutions would be high-level al-Qaeda leaders. But they weren’t. The first was David Hicks, who was evidently not so dangerous. The U.S. military made a deal that garnered Hicks a misdemeanor sentence and sent him back to Australia.

Salem Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni who used to be Osama bin Laden’s chauffeur, was the second. Hamdan, whose case had been overturned by the Supreme Court, was finally brought before a military commission Monday for arraignment on charges of conspiracy and material support for terrorism.

The third defendant was Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen, who appeared for arraignment the same day as Hamdan. Khadr was 15 years old when he arrived at Guant’namo. He faced charges of conspiracy, murder, attempted murder, spying, and supporting terrorism.

On Monday, much to Bush’s dismay, two different military judges dismissed both Hamdan’s and Khadr’s cases on procedural grounds.

The Military Commissions Act that Congress passed last year says the military commissions have jurisdiction to try offenses committed by alien unlawful enemy combatants. Unlawful enemy combatants are defined as (1) people who have engaged in hostilities or purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States or its allies; or (2) people who have been determined to be unlawful enemy combatants by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) or another competent tribunal. The Act says that a determination of unlawful enemy combatant status by a CSRT or another competent tribunal is dispositive.

But there are no “unlawful” enemy combatants at Guant’namo. There are only men who have been determined to be “enemy combatants” by the CSRTs. The Act declares that military commissions “shall not have jurisdiction over lawful enemy combatants.” In its haste to launch post-Hamdan military commissions, Bush’s legal eagles didn’t notice this discrepancy. That is why the charges were dismissed.

The Bush administration may try to fix the procedural problem and retry Khadr and Hamdan. But regardless of whether Guant’namo detainees are lawful or unlawful enemy combatants, the Bush administration’s treatment of them violates the Geneva Conventions. Lawful enemy combatants are protected against inhumane treatment by the Third Geneva Convention on prisoners of war. Unlawful enemy combatants are protected against inhumane treatment by Common Article Three.

Omar Khadr was captured in Afghanistan and brought to Guant’namo when he was 15 years old. In both places, he has been repeatedly tortured and subjected to inhumane treatment. At Bagram Air Base, Khadr was denied pain medication for his serious head and eye shrapnel wounds. At Guant’namo, his hands and feet were shackled together, he was bolted to the floor and left there for hours at a time. After he urinated on himself and on the floor, U.S. military guards mopped the floor with his skinny little body. Khadr was beaten in the head, dogs lunged at him, and he was threatened with rape and the removal of his body parts.

Khadr cried frequently. He has nightmares, sweats and hyperventilates, and is hypervigilant, hearing sounds that he can’t identify. When Khadr’s lawyer saw him for the first time in 2004, he thought, “He’s just a little kid.”

Why was Khadr treated this way? He comes from a family allegedly active in al-Qaeda. His charges stem from an incident where the U.S. sent Afghans into a compound where Khadr and others were located. The people inside the compound killed the Afghans and began firing at the U.S. soldiers. The Americans dropped two 500-pound bombs on the compound, killing everyone inside except Khadr. After Khadr threw a hand grenade which killed an American, the soldiers shot Khadr, blinding and seriously wounding him. Khadr begged them in English to finish him off. He was then taken to Baghram and later to Guant’namo.

According to Donald Rehkopf, Jr., co-chair of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers Military Law Committee, “The government has steadfastly refused to allow hearings on this alleged [unlawful enemy combatant] status because there are so many prisoners at GTMO that were not even combatants, much less ‘unlawful’ ones. Khadr is in an unusual situation because he has a viable ‘self-defense’ claim – we attacked the compound that he and his family were living in, and the fact that he was only 15 at the time.”

If Khadr were a U.S. citizen, he would not even be subject to trial by court-martial because of his age. When the Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that children under 18 at the time of their crimes could not be executed, it said that youths display a “lack of maturity and an underdeveloped sense of responsibility” that “often results in impetuous and ill-considered actions and decisions.” A juvenile, the Court found, is more vulnerable or susceptible to negative influences and his character is not as well-formed as that of an adult. “From a moral standpoint,” Justice Kennedy wrote for the majority, “it would be misguided to equate the failings of a minor with those of an adult, for a greater possibility exists that a minor’s character deficiencies will be reformed.” The Bush administration’s treatment of Omar Khadr flies in the face of the Court’s reasoning.

The United States may be able to retry Khadr and Hamdan. They have a few days to file an appeal. But the Court of Military Commissions Review hasn’t even been established yet, so it’s unclear where the appeals would be brought.

The Military Commissions Act, which denies basic due process protections, including the right to habeas corpus, is a disgrace. But an even bigger disgrace is the concentration camp the United States maintains at Guant’namo Bay, Cuba. The Act should be repealed and the Guant’namo prison should be shut down immediately.

Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, president of the National Lawyers Guild, and the U.S. representative to the executive committee of the American Associaiton of Jurists. Her new book, Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law, will be published in July. See http://www.marjoriecohn.com.

Last night BBC 2 showed “This World: Mystery Flights“, which did a good job of bringing together much of the available evidence on the illegal activites of the CIA extraordinary rendition programme. It included some brief but priceless footage of Jack Straw attempting to obfuscate before a parliamentary select committee. In constrast, Dick Marty cooly laid out the case against European government denials of culpability, an ex CIA boss passed the buck up the chain to the very top, and Clive Stafford Smith stated his intention to sue into the next generation until responsibility is accepted.

From BBC Online

“This World: Mystery Flights” pieces together the jigsaw of “extraordinary rendition”, the alleged illegal CIA transfer of terror suspects to secret prisons in Europe.

In far eastern Poland in 2002 and 2003 strange planes landed on an old disused runway in a secluded forest – nine times. The airport was closed but Mariola Przewlocka, the airport facilities manager, was told to accept the planes or “heads would roll”.

Airport staff were told to stay away while the passengers were unloaded out of sight. Mini-vans with blacked-out windows drove them away to a former Soviet military intelligence base, where it is believed the CIA has its own zone.

Extraordinary rendition

Was Poland a staging point in the network of secret prisons established by the United States in their “extraordinary rendition” programme? Did these mystery flights bring al-Qaeda suspects to Poland?

“It didn’t occur to anyone then that it might have something to do with transporting prisoners,” says Mariola Przewlocka. “All the rigmarole surrounding the flights – now I think it may have been possible.”

“Extraordinary rendition” is the CIA term for taking prisoners abroad for interrogation, a policy the US administration defends as a necessary tool in the “war on terror”. It denies that prisoners are taken to be tortured. But it offers no explanation for transporting them around the world to countries that are known to use torture, such as Uzbekistan, Morocco, Egypt and Syria.

Torture denials

Binyam Mohammed, a British resident from Ethiopia was “rendered” to Morocco in a Gulfstream N379P after he was arrested in Pakistan.

He says he was tortured there until he agreed to sign a statement his captors had prepared. The statement said that he was a member of al-Qaeda; that he had met Osama bin Laden and that he was part of a plot to explode a radioactive bomb in America. His lawyer Clive Stafford Smith believes US denials on torture cannot be true.

“He was taken by the Americans to Morocco,” he said. “He’s not Moroccan so there’s only one purpose and that’s for him to go through a little bit of extraordinary interrogation.”

Another rendition flight – this time a Boeing 737 – which stopped in Mallorca on its way to Afghanistan, was photographed by plane-spotters. When human rights organisations, journalists, lawyers and plane-spotters compared notes, and when the dates were matched with flight logs and other prisoners’ testimonies, the extent of the rendition programme began to be revealed.

It is alleged that the CIA flew their planes to 29 different countries and that there were 300 CIA landings in Europe alone, 80 in Britain. How many prisoners were rendered is still not known. Nor is it known whether many were subjected to torture.

Damaging

European governments continue to deny they were involved. Joseph Manchado, the plane-spotter who photographed the Boeing in Mallorca, is sceptical.

“I think the Spanish authorities knew that there were flights from Palma to Guantanamo. Clearly businessmen don’t fly to Guantanamo. I don’t suppose the authorities investigated – they just prefer to keep quiet and turn a blind eye to what was going on right under their noses”.

Few people in America or Europe have cried for the fate of these Muslim men who may or may not be guilty, but who have never been tried or given a chance to defend themselves in court. Some will think they deserve no mercy, in revenge for al-Qaeda’s crimes committed in their religion’s name.

But the former head of the CIA in Europe Tyler Drumheller admits the policy has been damaging. In an exclusive interview with the BBC he says: “It’s a mess, and it’s going to get worse. A lot of things were done after 9/11 that are going to be looked at for years to come. There are going to be commissions, inquiries, court cases.”

Mr Drumheller was head of clandestine operations between 2001 and his resignation in 2005. He cannot speak of the secret prisons, for fear of prosecution himself, but he believes the buck stops with the US President.

ANTI- RENDITION ACTION

Germany: Parliamentary investigation; arrest warrants issued by Munich court for 13 suspected CIA agents

Italy: Judge to decide on whether to try suspects in case of kidnapped imam

Portugal: Investigation opened in January by public prosecutor

Romania: Parliamentary investigation into secret prison claims

Spain: Judge investigating whether CIA flight stopovers violated human rights law

Switzerland: Criminal probe into use of Swiss airspace to fly kidnapped imam from Italy to Germany

By September 2006, the White House was forced to admit that “a small number of suspected terrorist leaders and operatives captured during the war had been held and questioned outside the United States in a separate programme operated by the Central Intelligence Agency”. But the president would not say where detainees had been held, or divulge details of their confinement.

Slowly Europe’s democracies are cranking into action in a belated attempt to hold their own governments to account. In Italy, a former chief of military intelligence is in court. Warrants are out for the arrest of CIA agents formerly based there and the government is being accused of a cover-up.

The former President of Poland, Aleksander Kwasniewski, and the former Polish Defence Minister, Radoslaw Sirkorski, have denied that Poland and the military airbase in question were involved.

The UK Government has said it does not know and has no way of finding out who was aboard the 80 CIA flights that landed on British soil.

This World: “Mystery Flights” was broadcast on Thursday 24 May 2007 at 2100 BST on BBC Two.

From The Guardian

Ethiopia Secret Prisons Under Scrutiny

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) – Ethiopia was under pressure Thursday to release details on detainees from 19 countries held at secret prisons in the country where U.S. agents have carried out interrogations in the hunt for al-Qaida in the Horn of Africa.

Canada, Eritrea and Sweden were lobbying for information about their citizens. Human rights groups say hundreds of prisoners, including women and children, have been transferred secretly and illegally to the prisons in Ethiopia. An investigation by The Associated Press found that CIA and FBI agents have been interrogating the detainees.

Officials from Ethiopia were not immediately available for comment, but in the past have refused to acknowledge the existence of the prisons.

Ethiopia has a long history of human rights abuses. In recent years, it has also been a key U.S. ally in the fight against al-Qaida, which has been trying to sink roots among Muslims in the Horn of Africa.

The full article can be read here

From Amnesty International

In a new report published today (5 April), Amnesty International says that 80% of detainees at the US military prison at Guant’namo Bay in Cuba are being held in solitary confinement, often in harsh and inhumane conditions.

The report, published days after UK resident Bisher al-Rawi was returned from Guant’namo after over four years in detention – some of it in solitary confinement, calls for an end to the routine use of extended solitary confinement by the US authorities and for independent medical experts to be allowed to examine the prisoners.

Amnesty International has long called for the entire camp to be closed, with plans for unfair ‘military commission’ trials to be abandoned. Last month the organisation published a 103-page report condemning the military commissions as a ‘travesty of justice’.

Amnesty International UK Director Kate Allen said: ‘The entire process at Guant’namo is a travesty of justice, but we have particular concerns over the widespread use of solitary confinement in harsh conditions at the camp.

‘With many prisoners already in despair at being held in indefinite detention on a remote island prison, some are dangerously close to full-blown mental and physical breakdown after years of solitary confinement.

‘The US authorities should immediately stop pushing people to the edge with extreme isolation techniques and allow proper access for independent medical experts and human rights groups.’

There are approximately 385 men held at Guant’namo Bay and, after an apparent hardening of US operational detention policy in January, around 300 of these are now being held in three units with minimal contact with other prisoners or even prison guards. These units – known as Camp 5, Camp 6 and Camp Echo – are comparable to so-called ‘super-max’ high security units in the United States.

Unlike mainland super-max prisoners, however, Guant’namo detainees are held indefinitely as ‘enemy combatants’, face either no trial at all or an unfair one, have no family visits and no independent expert examinations.

The Red Cross, the only independent monitoring organisation allowed to inspect the detention facilities at Guant’namo, has described conditions at Camp Echo as ‘extremely harsh’. Prisoners are kept in their windowless cells for 23 or 24 hours a day, and – in the absence of any natural light whatsoever – fluorescent lighting is kept on 24 hours a day. Meanwhile, Camp 6 has been described by one detainee as a ‘dungeon above the ground’…

The full press release is available here and the report (pdf) can be downloaded here

The AI petition calling for the return of all the British residents held at Gauntanamo can be signed here

RawStory claim to have knowledge of a British intelligence memo demonstrating that the UK both: had knowledge of CIA illegal detention sites in Poland; and urged that sources in Poland keep information on CIA activities quiet.

POLAND – The CIA operated an interrogation and short-term detention facility for suspected terrorists within a Polish intelligence training school with the explicit approval of British and US authorities, according to British and Polish intelligence officials familiar with the arrangements.

Intelligence officials identify the site as a component of a Polish intelligence training school outside the northern Polish village of Stare Kiejkuty. While previously suspected, the facility has never been conclusively identified as being part of the CIA’s secret rendition and detention program.

Only the Polish prime minister and top Polish intelligence brass were told of the plan, in which agents of the United States quietly shuttled detainees from other holding facilities around the globe for stopovers and short-term interrogation in Poland between late 2002 and 2004.

According to a confidential British intelligence memo shown to RAW STORY, Prime Minister Tony Blair told Poland’s then-Prime Minister Leszek Miller to keep the information secret, even from his own government…

For the full article go here

Blairwatch provides additional analysis and comment.

The following further thoughts on confession under torture are from my good friend and fellow Ambassadorial refusenik Ann Wright.

The Sheikh and The Torture Senator

By US Army Reserve Colonel (Retired) Ann Wright

Last week senior al-Qaeda operative Khalid Sheikh Mohammed reportedly confessed during his Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) at the US prison in the US Naval Station, Guantanamo, Cuba to having planned virtually every al-Qaeda attack on the United States. But during the military tribunal proceedings, he also said he was tortured during his four year confinement in CIA secret prisons. Senators Levin and Graham viewed the Guantanamo proceedings over a special video link into the US Senate. Afterwards, Senator Levin said that Sheikh Mohammed’s allegations of torture by US officials must be investigated.

Senator Levin, you don’t have to go far to find someone who knows about Sheikh Mohammed’s torture.

I was in the audience February 12, 2007 during the Washington, DC screening of the new HBO documentary ‘The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib.’ After watching the documentary, panelists Senators Lindsey Graham and Ted Kennedy discussed prisoner abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib.

To the amazement of the audience, Graham said, with a twinkle in his eye, that ‘Americans don’t mind torture, they really don’t.’ Then he smiled broadly, almost gleefully, and said that the US had used certain interrogation techniques on ‘Shaikh Mohammed, one of the “high value” targets,’ techniques that “you really don’t want to know about, but they got really good results.”

I firmly believe that Graham’s statement acknowledged that US officials have tortured prisoners, and he, as a Senator, knew what was done and agrees with the torture because ‘it got results.’

Except you don’t know what the results are. In the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, it appears that with torture you can get someone to confess to masterminding the entire al-Qaeda attack on the United States. Senior FBI officials are questioning some of Sheikh Mohammed’s assertions of guilt and remind us of the FBI’s concern about torture techniques used by both the CIA and the US military on prisoners in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo, techniques that can elicit confessions just to get the torturers to stop.

In January, 2007, I was in the city of Guantanamo, Cuba with human rights activists calling for the closure of the US military prison on the fifth anniversary of the first prisoners being sent there. With us was former prisoner, Asif Iqbal, a 23-year old who told us that he had been beaten by US interrogators until he confessed to helping plan the 9/11 attacks. In reality, he was a completely innocent young man who happened to be in Afghanistan when the U.S. attack began and was swept up with hundreds of other local people. He told us how prisoners in Afghanistan and in Guantanamo confessed to anything the interrogators wanted to prevent further torture.

As a 29 year US Army/Reserves Colonel and a 16 year former US diplomat, I am horrified that US Senators have been complicit in knowing of criminal acts of our intelligence agencies and doing nothing to stop them. Graham told 400 of us in the audience on February 22 he knew of the torture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Graham is a military lawyer and a civilian lawyer. He knew that the torture of Sheikh Mohammed was a criminal act and did nothing to stop it.

Senator Levin, if you want to know about torture committed by US government officials, please put under oath your colleague Senator Lindsey Graham and ask him ‘what he knew and when he knew it.’

PS, HBO filmed the Senator’s remarks. Please watch the HBO video and see his comments for yourself.

About the author: Ann Wright is a 29 year retired US Army Reserve Colonel

And a 16 year US diplomat who served in Nicaragua, Grenada, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia and Mongolia. She was on the team that reopened the US Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan in December, 2001. She resigned from the US diplomatic corps in March, 2003 in opposition to the war on Iraq.

Thanks to Reprieve for this valuable information on yet another batch of US prisoners being carted around to torture by the CIA.

http://www.reprieve.org.uk/documents/070321HOArenditionreportfinal.pdf

Mohammed Sheikh Khalid has now, voluntarily and of his own free will, admitted he masterminded every significant event from the Norman Invasion through the bubonic plague, fall of Constantinople, and Great Fire of London, to the Battle of Little Big Horn, assassination of JFK and the Oklahoma bombing.

Or he might as well have. The extraordinarily comprehensive list of terrorist outrages for which he claims responsibility would be beyond the capacity of any but the most brilliant and inspired mortal; Khalid, I fear, is a more run of the mill thug.

But in truth, we have absolutely no idea what, if anything, he has confessed at all. The BBC brazenly reported all of yesterday that while Khalid did allege he had been tortured during his four years of secret detention by the CIA in various locations around the globe, he is now freely confessing under no duress and does not retract any of his confession.

Who says? The proceedings being held in Guantanamo Bay, and which the BBC report so uncritically, are held behind barbed wire, machine guns, gun emplacements, reinforced steel and concrete and combination locks, before an exclusively military panel. Khalid does not even have a lawyer present. For all we know, his confession could be an entire fabrication. The blandness of the BBC reporting in these circumstances is one of the worst examples of the appalling desertion of the principles of that once worthwhile institution.

The readiness of the rest of the media to push the “instil fear” button on behalf of the Orwellian government is predictable. They report as fact that Khalid also planned to blow up Heathrow, Canary Wharf, Big Ben, Buckingham Palace and any other British building the Pentagon had heard of.

If Khalid really is freely and openly confessing all of this stuff, then what possible reason can there be to deny him a lawyer, and not allow public and media access to his trial? The atrocities he allegedly confesses – the Twin Towers, Madrid, Bali – left thousands of bereaved families. They have a right to see justice done, rather than this elaborate propaganda set-up, with its total lack of proper legal process or intellectual credibility.

Did Khalid really do all of this? Two facts must be considered. He has been through years of vicious torture and of solitary confinement. If the experience of others who survived extraordinary rendition is typical, he has been kept in total isolation, in darkness, beaten, cut, suffocated and drowned, suffered white noise and sensory deprivation. He will have been moved around, often not even knowing which country he is in. One good contact has told me that the CIA gave the Uzbek torturers their turn with him. I do not know that for certain, but who can contradict me?

After years of this, a person can be so psychologically damaged that they believe the narrative of their torturers to be the truth. It is perfectly possible that he now in fact believes he did all that stuff on the list, when he did not.

Alternatively, he may have decided to exaggerate his own role and achievements for the personal glory it brings. We can get the appalling situation where both the sides which benefit from and wish to promote the War on Terror – Al Qaida and the CIA – indulge in what becomes a grim mutual cooperation in exaggeration as each seeks to glorify their role. Thus do those on both sides who actually desire a “Clash of Civilisations”, promote one.

What is happening now in Guanatanamo Bay is a disgrace. We cannot in present circumstances accept anything that comes out of it as other than a completely unsubstantiated claim by the Pentagon. Some of it is quite possibly true. But this is no way to make the case.

From Time

The CIA probably doesn’t mind the occasional bitter valentine. But on Feb. 14, the European Union sent a humdinger when its Parliament approved a controversial report castigating Britain, Germany, Italy and 11 other European countries for their alleged complicity in the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program. With critics calling the U.S. practice of secretly transferring terrorism suspects from one country to another the equivalent of outsourcing torture, the E.U.’s final report alleges that the CIA operated more than 1,245 flights in European airspace between 2001 and 2005 and accuses several countries of “turning a blind eye” to those flights, which “on some occasions” were used for rendition. The 76-page communiqu’, which caps a yearlong investigation of flight data from the E.U.’s air-traffic agency, doesn’t confirm the existence of secret detention facilities but says those temporary prisons “may” have been located on U.S. military bases in European countries.

While the European Parliament doesn’t have the legal power to impose sanctions against E.U. countries found to have violated human rights by cooperating with the U.S. secret detention program, it can try to prod more member nations into starting criminal investigations. As one of the authors, European Parliament member Giovanni Fava, put it, “This is a report that doesn’t allow anyone to look the other way.”

HOW CRIMINAL PROBES OF CIA ACTIVITY ARE PROCEEDING IN E.U. COUNTRIES

Italy On Feb. 17, an Italian court indicted 26 Americans, most of them CIA agents, on charges of kidnapping Egyptian imam Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, who was seized in Milan in 2003 and taken to Cairo, where he was allegedly tortured. The first criminal trial involving rendition is set to begin in June, but Italy has already said it will not seek extraditions.

Germany German prosecutors on Jan. 31 issued arrest warrants for 13 CIA agents alleged to have abducted Khaled al-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent, while he was on vacation in Macedonia in 2003. Al-Masri was flown to Afghanistan, where he was allegedly held for five months in a secret prison and then released in a remote part of Albania.

Sweden The E.U. report, which alleges the Swedish government was in cahoots with the CIA, could rekindle a 2005 parliamentary investigation that concluded U.S. agents broke Swedish laws in 2001 by subjecting two Egyptians–who were secretly flown from Stockholm to Cairo–to “degrading and inhuman treatment” and by exercising police powers on Swedish soil.

Portugal On Feb. 5, after a European Parliament deputy presented Portugal’s Attorney General Fernando Pinto Monteiro with evidence that dozens of CIA planes had made stopovers in his country, he opened a criminal investigation into CIA-operated flights allegedly using Portuguese airports to illegally transport terrorism suspects.

See also:

Rendition cases test trans-Atlantic relations

European Parliament publishes draft report on Government involvement in extraordinary rendition

From BBC Online

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

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

Code names

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

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

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

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

Italian case

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Amnesty International UK

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

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

Click here to listen or go here for further details.

By Nick Hawton from BBC Online

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

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

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

‘Cash payments’

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

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

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

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

The claims are denied by both governments.

CIA landings

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

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

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

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

‘Secret prison’

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

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

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

Jozef Pinior, Polish politician

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

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

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

Others disagree.

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

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

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

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

From Witness

“Outlawed: Extraordinary Rendition, Torture and Disappearances in the ‘War on Terror'” tells the stories of Khaled El-Masri and Binyam Mohamed, two men who have survived extraordinary rendition, secret detention, and torture by the U.S. government working with various other governments worldwide. “Outlawed” features relevant commentary from Louise Arbour, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, U.S. President George W. Bush, Michael Scheuer, the chief architect of the rendition program and former head of the Osama Bin Laden unit at the CIA, and Condoleezza Rice, the U.S. Secretary of State.

“Outlawed” places the post-9/11 phenomenon of renditions and the “war on terror” in a human rights context and calls for action end these human rights abuses.

NB Witness was founded in 1992 by musician and activist Peter Gabriel and the Reebok Human Rights Foundation as a project of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights (now Human Rights First). It aims to use the power of video to open the eyes of the world to human rights abuses.

By Matt O’Connor in SanLuisObispo.com

CHICAGO – A Chicago man who worked for an Iraqi contractor alleged Monday he was imprisoned in a U.S. military compound in Baghdad, held incommunicado for more than three months and subjected to interrogation techniques “tantamount to torture.”

In a federal lawsuit filed in Chicago, Donald Vance, 29, a Navy veteran, charged that his constitutional rights were trampled by American military interrogators even though they knew he was a U.S. citizen.

“I couldn’t believe they did this to any human being,” said Vance in a telephone interview.

Vance was taken into custody without charges in April. While imprisoned at Camp Cropper near Baghdad International Airport, Vance said, he was held in solitary confinement in a continuously lit, windowless and extremely cold cell as loud heavy metal and country music blared nonstop.

The lawsuit charged that Vance, a security consultant for a private Iraqi firm at the time, was denied basic constitutional rights to due process as if he were a suspected terrorist or enemy combatant.

“That’s why they did it to him – because they could,” said Jon Loevy, one of Vance’s lawyers. “If they could do it to Mr. Vance, they could do it to anybody.”

The suit sought unspecified damages and named Donald Rumsfeld, who stepped down last week as U.S. secretary of defense, as its lone defendant for his role in overseeing the military prison system in Iraq.

For the full article go here

By David Usborne in The Independent

Kofi Annan, the outgoing UN secretary general, has delivered a barely disguised broadside against President George Bush in his last major speech before leaving office at the end of the month.

He suggested that in the “war on terror”, President Bush had ridden roughshod over the international community and compromised America’s respect for human rights. Mr Annan made plain his concern that the United States had allowed its status as the world’s sole superpower, coupled with its desire to protect itself against terrorists, to undermine its historical commitment to multilateralism.

For the full article go here