Move over CIA. The FBI tortures, too.

Published on Tuesday, May 01, 2007

Guest Opinion: FBI outsourced dirty work to secret Ethiopian prisons

By NAT HENTOFF

While we have been awash in news stories about the firing of U.S. attorneys, Don Imus and the Virginia Tech horror, how many Americans know that the FBI and, to a lesser extent, the CIA have been interrogating suspected terrorists in secret prisons in Ethiopia? An ally in our combating terrorism, Ethiopia is also notorious for abusing prisoners, including torturing them. Among those held recently there is an American citizen.

On April 5, the Associated Press reported that Ethiopia was under pressure "to release details of detainees from 19 countries ... including women and children (who) have been transferred secretly and illegally. An investigation by the Associated Press found that CIA and FBI agents have been interrogating the detainees."

As John Sifton, a deeply experienced researcher at Human Rights Watch said on the national Democracy Now radio and Internet program (April 5), these suspects would previously have been held as enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay or the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. But "the Bush administration has shifted gears, and now they have the FBI interrogating people ... by local forces, the Ethiopians, the Kenyans ... That's why we call it a sort of outsourced Guantanamo." These interrogations purportedly are to weed out al-Qaida conspirators and cells in the Horn of Africa.

U.S. citizen imprisoned

The American prisoner, Amir Mohamed Meshal of Tinton Falls, N.J., held since late January, was questioned several times by FBI agents - as American officials admit - without being charged and without having a U.S. consular official present, or an attorney. But Meshal has a very active and properly indignant attorney in Jonathan Hafetz of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. On April 2, he wrote to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice demanding she get the Ethiopian government to release his client. Also, writing to Rice was Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., about his constituent, Amir Meshal:

"Our government," Holt told Rice, "cannot allow an American citizen to be held by the Ethiopian government in violation of international law and our own due process." As of this writing, Rice has not replied to the congressman.

Fortunately, Holt is chairman of the House Select Intelligence Oversight Panel. I expect that in addition to finding out why his constituent was outsourced to Ethiopia, the congressman will also ask FBI Director Robert Mueller, CIA Director Michael Hayden and other high-level intelligence officials why they have been directly responsible, in this case of an American citizen, for working with the Ethiopian government to violate international law - and the very basis of our system of justice, due process. (If they are not directly responsible, who's running their shops?)

It also would be very useful - and indeed necessary - if our rule of law is to have credibility at home and in the world - to find out from the president and Dick Cheney how they justify this outsourcing of an American citizen to an Ethiopian dungeon.

Meanwhile, what's happening to American citizen Amir Meshal? In a dispatch from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on April 12, The Washington Post quoted FBI Special Agent Richard Kolko, who "confirmed that there were no charges against Meshal, and State Department officials said the FBI told them that no charges were pending." So, Meshal was set to be released from the secret prison and flown back to the United States where, unlike in Ethiopia, every citizen is guaranteed due process of law.

Not so fast. The same Washington Post story revealed that Meshal is still imprisoned. (As of this writing, he remains in his cell.) Why? "State Department officials booking his flight discovered that his name had been placed on a no-fly list at the request of the FBI and no airline would take him, U.S. officials said."

Secret military tribunal

Then, on Friday, April 13, Amir Meshal did get out of that lockup - to be hauled before an Ethiopian military tribunal. The New York Times on April 14 added: "No news media or members of the public were allowed at the hearing (before the military tribunal), and American officials said that they, too, were barred from attending. Ethiopian officials did not disclose details. Ethiopian Foreign Ministry officials said they were not authorized to talk about it."

Last year, the president said that no one was still being held in CIA secret prisons although they remain open, as permitted by the Military Commissions Act of 2006. On what authority has - as reported by the Washington Post - "the FBI carried out interrogations of dozens of detainees in Ethiopian secret prisons"?

What about American citizen Amir Mohamed Meshal of Tinton Falls, N.J.? Has his citizenship been suspended?

Nat Hentoff, a nationally renowned authority on the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights, wrote this column for Newspaper Enterprise Association.

Copyright © The Billings Gazette, a division of Lee Enterprises.

Bush to Veto Bill Requiring Him to Tell Congress of Secret CIA Prisons

Bush Administration Threatens Veto of Secret Prison Measure

By Jeff Bliss

April 12 (Bloomberg) -- Administration officials will advise President George W. Bush to veto legislation requiring him to provide lawmakers with details of the CIA's secret prisons for terrorism suspects, a White House statement said.

The disclosure provisions are included in proposed Senate legislation that would set new requirements for giving lawmakers access to intelligence reports and set intelligence program funding for the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30.

The Bush administration objected to the disclosure requirements, saying, ``Such matters are appropriately left to sensitive handling in the normal course between the intelligence committee and the executive branch.''

Democrats and Republicans have put increasing pressure on Bush to give them information on intelligence matters after media reports that inmates were being tortured in the secret prisons and that the National Security Agency had a program that conducts surveillance without court warrants.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat, and Senator Christopher Bond, the panel's senior Republican, earlier today said Bush needed to be more forthcoming to Congress about intelligence operations.

``There may be some officials of the executive branch that prefer a lack of oversight,'' Bond, a Missouri lawmaker, said in a speech today in the Senate chamber. ``That's not how the system works.''

The administration also opposed a proposal to reveal annual U.S. spending on intelligence programs, a figure that's now classified, saying it imperils national security.

Sought

Rockefeller long has sought to get the administration to reveal the overall spending on spy programs. In 2005, newspapers reported that Mary Margaret Graham, deputy director of national intelligence for collection, let slip that the budget was $44 billion.

Under the legislation, the maximum prison sentence would increase to 15 years from 10 years for those who disclose the identity of a covert agent, a response to administration officials revealing the secret status of Central Intelligence Agency agent Valerie Plame.

The House last year passed an intelligence spending proposal without the disclosure requirements for funding and secret prisons. The House Intelligence Committee is working on a spending proposal measure for fiscal year 2008, said Kira Maas, a spokeswoman for the panel's chairman, Representative Silvestre Reyes, a Texas Democrat.

To contact the reporters on this story: Jeff Bliss in Washington jbliss@bloomberg.net .

Last Updated: April 12, 2007 18:07 EDT

BUSH SPREADS GUANTANAMO GANGRENE AROUND WORLD; TENS OF THOUSANDS HELD

April 9, 2007

By Sherwood Ross

Jumah Al Dossari has been rotting in Guatanamo for five years now without ever having been charged of an offense. The prisoner believes “he has been condemned to live forever on an island where there is no law,” his lawyer says, adding, “He may well be right.”

Al Dossari is forced to spend virtually the entire day in solid-wall solitary under conditions that make Devil’s Island look like a health spa on the Riviera. He was kidnapped illegally, transported halfway around the world, torn from his family and other living beings, denied sunlight, short-shackled, beaten, and told by his sadistic tormentors he will never get out. On three occasions he has attempted suicide, according to his lawyer Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, who told his story in the April 5 Miami Herald.

Al Dossari cannot believe a human being can be flung in prison with no evidence, but what does he know of how President Bush and Congress have torched our Constitution? Al Dossari’s fate differs little from 400 other Guantanamo captives and of tens of thousands of luckless U.S. prisoners around the world, the bitter harvest of illegal wars by an illegitimate regime.

In a report published April 5th, Amnesty International called for the Guantanamo detainees either to be released from their “super max” high security cells or allowed to stand trial, a modest request under the circumstances. Amnesty said Guantanamo prisoners exist for 22 hours a day in windowless cells never seeing daylight; that they are allowed to exercise only at night; that they suffer from extreme “sensory deprivation”; that they are denied proper access to human rights groups and independent medical doctors. Amnesty’s Kate Kelly branded Guantanamo “a travesty of justice,” substantiating the charges leveled by Colangelo-Bryan and others with first-hand knowledge of this horrific mortuary.

The miseries of Guantanamo are being multiplied by the “compassionate conservative” in the White House. According to the British “Observer” newspaper, the U.S. operates an “invisible” (and hence illegal) network of prisons stretching from Diego Garcia to Iraq to Thailand, and including prison ships on the Indian Ocean. The Washington Post reported that six days after 9/11, Bush gave the CIA “broad authorization to disrupt terrorist activity, including permission to kill, capture and detain members of al Qaeda anywhere in the world.” This order, of course, appropriate for a Roman Emperor, has not the merest shred of legality. By the time of his 2003 State of the Union, though, Bush could crow more than 3,000 suspected terrorists “have been arrested in many countries.”

Soon, tens of thousands of men, mostly from Iraq and Afghanistan, were being detained. The ensuing brutalities and murders at Abu Ghraib, just west of Baghdad, have been well documented. Likewise Bagram prison, north of Kabul, Afghanistan, where prisoners were chained to ceilings for days and repeatedly beaten; where they have been put in cold rooms so long their hands and feet became swollen, inflicting excruciating pain and death. As at Abu Ghraib, some Bagram captives were just beaten to death. John Sifton of Human Rights Watch, reported Iraq detainees were routinely beaten. Torture was “condoned and commonly used,” he said. The U.S., of course, prefers to commit such crimes in secret. Reminiscent of the odious practices of Stalin and Hitler, the CIA illegally denies Red Cross access to its compound in Kabul, known as “The Pit,” and prisoners are illegally kept “off the books,” also illegal. An official of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, Shamsullah Ahmadzai, told The New York Times that the Afghan police, courts, and prosecutors are all limited by law in how long they can hold criminal suspects, “The Americans are detaining people without any legal procedures. Prisoners do not have the opportunity to demonstrate their innocence.”

In Morocco, the “Observer” says, the government has obligingly locked U.S. captives in the Al-Tamara interrogation center near Rabat. In Syria, the U.S. consigns detainees for torture in Damascus. Egypt also gets a flow of alleged militants to be tortured. The U.S. also houses prisoners in Baku, Azerbaijan, at a U.S. airbase in Qatar, and as far away as Thailand. Still other prisoners are alleged to be held in Poland, and some are known to have been tortured in Saudi Arabia and Aman, Jordan.

Many suspects are seized in Europe. Italy has arrest warrants out for a score of CIA agents for nabbing a suspect off the streets in Milan. On January 23 of last year, the Council of Europe put the number of illegally seized men on that continent at about 100. Swiss Senator Dick Marty told the Council: “I believe it is absolutely demonstrated that alleged terrorists or terrorist sympathizers were kidnapped, transported against their will across Europe, detained outside any jurisdiction, deprived of all rights, and sent to countries that, notably, offer no guarantees at all of the respect for fundamental rights.”

Amnesty has denounced the U.S. for its “two-faced strategy to torture,” that is, to deny it in public, as President Bush does, and practice it in secret, all the while seeking ways for the torture goons to elude criminal liability. Amnesty also criticizes the U.S. for its silence “on human rights abuses committed by many of its new-found friends.” Last January, Amnesty cited the case of Baloch National Movement political leader Akhtar Mengel, held incommunicado in solitary confinement in Karachi “without access to needed medical care” and hit America’s failure “to take any effective public action.”

Yet, why should it? The rights of opposition political leaders in his ally Pakistan mean nothing to George Bush. His indifference to their plight, like that of Jumah Al Dossari, is just another aspect of his contempt for human life and law. After all, he is the man who scrapped nuclear and germ warfare treaties, violated the Geneva and Hague Conventions and the Nuremberg Principles, trampled the Charter of the United Nations, ringed the world with military bases, sold billions worth of arms to dictators, killed hundreds of thousands of Iraq civilians, bombarded the Middle East with illegal cluster bombs and uranium shells, threatened a small nation with the “nuclear option,” created a gigantic war machine bent on militarizing space to dominate every crevice of the Earth, and is spending his taxpayers into bankruptcy while offering thousands of their youth as human sacrifices on the altar of his wars of aggression. And that’s just for starters. Nowhere, though, does Mr. Bush reveal the depth of his degenerate character more clearly than by ordering the arbitrary arrest and torture of human beings. Victims should not look for mercy from this man.


Sherwood Ross is a Miami-based columnist. Reach him at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com

US agents visit Ethiopian secret jails

Anthony Mitchell | Nairobi, Kenya

04 April 2007 09:10

CIA and FBI agents hunting for al-Qaeda militants in the Horn of Africa have been interrogating terrorism suspects from 19 countries held at secret prisons in Ethiopia, which is notorious for torture and abuse, according to an investigation by the Associated Press (AP).

Human rights groups, lawyers and several Western diplomats assert hundreds of prisoners, who include women and children, have been transferred secretly and illegally in recent months from Kenya and Somalia to Ethiopia, where they are kept without charge or access to lawyers and families.

The detainees include at least one United States citizen and some are from Canada, Sweden and France, according to a list compiled by a Kenyan Muslim rights group and flight manifests obtained by AP.

Some were swept up by Ethiopian troops that drove a radical Islamist government out of neighbouring Somalia late last year.

Others have been deported from Kenya, where many Somalis have fled the continuing violence in their homeland.

Ethiopia, which denies holding secret prisoners, is a country with a long history of human rights abuses. In recent years, it has also been a key US ally in the fight against al-Qaeda, which has been trying to sink roots among Muslims in the Horn of Africa.

US government officials contacted by AP acknowledged questioning prisoners in Ethiopia. But they said American agents were following the law and were fully justified in their actions because they are investigating past attacks and current threats of terrorism.

The prisoners were never in US custody, said an FBI spokesperson, Richard Kolko, who denied the agency would support or be party to illegal arrests. He said US agents were allowed limited access by governments in the Horn of Africa to question prisoners as part of the FBI's counterterrorism work.

Western security officials, who insisted on anonymity because the issue related to security matters, told AP that among those held were well-known suspects with strong links to al-Qaeda.

But some US allies have expressed consternation at the transfers to the prisons. One Western diplomat in Nairobi, who agreed to speak to AP only if not quoted to avoid angering US officials, said he sees the US as playing a guiding role in the operation.

John Sifton, a Human Rights Watch expert on counterterrorism, went further. He said in an email that the United States has acted as "ringleader" in what he labelled a "decentralised, outsourced Guantánamo."

Details of the arrests, transfers and interrogations slowly emerged as AP and human rights groups investigated the disappearances, diplomats tracked their missing citizens and the first detainees to be released told their stories.

One investigator from an international human rights group, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the person was not authourised to speak to the media, said Ethiopia had secret jails at three locations: Addis Ababa, the capital; an Ethiopian air base 59km east of the capital; and the far eastern desert close to the Somali border.

More than 100 of the detainees were originally arrested in Kenya in January, after almost all of them fled Somalia because of the intervention by Ethiopian troops accompanied by US special forces advisers, according to Kenyan police reports and US military officials.

Those people were then deported in clandestine pre-dawn flights to Somalia, according to the Kenya Muslim Human Rights Forum and airline documents. At least 19 were women and 15 were children.

In Somalia, they were handed over to Ethiopian intelligence officers and secretly flown to Ethiopia, where they are now in detention, the New York-based Human Rights Watch says.

A further 200 people, also captured in Somalia, were mainly Ethiopian rebels who backed the Somali Islamist movement, according to one rights group and a Somali government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he did not want to jeopardise his job. Those prisoners also were taken to Ethiopia, human rights groups say.

Kenya continues to arrest hundreds of people for illegally crossing over from Somalia. But it is not clear if deportations continue.

The Pentagon announced last week that one Kenyan al-Qaeda suspect who fled Somalia, Mohamed Abul Malik, was arrested and flown to the US detention centre at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

When contacted by AP, Ethiopian officials denied that they held secret prisoners or that any detainees were questioned by US officials.

"No such kind of secret prisons exist in Ethiopia," said Bereket Simon, special adviser to Prime Minister Meles Zenawi. He declined to comment further.

A former prisoner and the families of current and former captives tell a different story.

"It was a nightmare from start to finish," Kamilya Mohammedi Tuweni, a 42-year-old mother of three who has a passport from the United Arab Emirates, told AP in her first comments after her release in Addis Ababa on March 24 from what she said was two-and-a-half months months in detention without charge.

She is the only released prisoner who has spoken publicly. She was freed a month after being interviewed, fingerprinted and photographed by a US agent, she said. Tuweni, an Arabic-Swahili translator, said she was arrested while on a business trip to Kenya and had never been to Somalia or had any links to that country.

She said she was arrested January 10. Tuweni said she was beaten in Kenya, then forced to sleep on a stone floor while held in Somalia in a single room with 22 other women and children for 10 days before being flown to Ethiopia on a military plane.

Finally, she said, she was taken blindfolded from prison to a private villa in the Ethiopian capital. There, she said, she was interrogated with other women by a male US intelligence agent. He assured her that she would not be harmed but urged her to cooperate, she said.

In a telephone conversation with AP, Tuweni said the man identified himself as a US official, but not from the FBI. A CIA official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said on Tuesday that the agency had no contact with Tuweni.

"We cried the whole time because we did not know what would happen. The whole thing was very scary," said Tuweni, who flew back to her family in Dubai a day after her release.

Exhausted
Tuweni's version of her transfer out of Kenya is corroborated by the manifest of the African Express Airways flight 5Y AXF. It shows she was taken to Mogadishu, Somalia, with 31 other people on an unscheduled flight chartered by the Kenyan government.

The family of a Swedish detainee, 17-year-old Safia Benaouda, said she was freed from Ethiopia on March 27 and arrived home the following day. Benaouda had travelled to Somalia with her fianc é but fled to Kenya during the Ethiopian military intervention, her mother said.

"She is exhausted, her face is yellow and she's lost about 10kg," her mother, Helena Benaouda, a 47-year-old Muslim convert who heads the Swedish Muslim Council, wrote on a website she set up to help secure her daughter's release.

"She was beaten with a stick when she demanded to go to the toilet."

The mother spoke briefly by telephone with AP, saying any information she had was being posted on the website. She declined to make her daughter available for an interview.

According to the website, a US specialist visited the location where Benaouda was being held and took DNA samples and fingerprints of detainees. It said the teenager was never charged or allowed access to lawyers.

The teen was also concerned about a seven-month-old baby that was in detention with her, the website said.

The transfer from Kenya to Somalia, and eventually to Ethiopia, of a 24-year-old US citizen, Amir Mohamed Meshal, raised disquiet among FBI officers and the State Department. He is the only American known to be among the detainees in Ethiopia.

US diplomats on February 27 formally protested to Kenyan authorities about Meshal's transfer and then spent three weeks trying to gain access to him in Ethiopia, said Tom Casey, deputy spokesperson for the State Department.

He confirmed Meshal was still in Ethiopian custody pending a hearing on his status.

An FBI memo read to AP by a US official in Washington, who insisted on anonymity, quoted an agent who interrogated Meshal as saying the agent was "disgusted" by Meshal's deportation to Somalia by Kenya. The unidentified agent said he was told by US consular staff that the deportation was illegal.

"My personal opinion was that he may have been a jihadi a-hole, but the precedent of 'deporting' US citizens to dangerous situations when there is no reason to do so was a bad one," the official quoted the memo as saying.

Like Benaouda, Meshal was arrested fleeing Somalia. A Kenyan police report of Meshal's arrest obtained by AP says he was carrying an assault rifle and had crossed into Kenyan with armed Arab men who were trying to avoid capture.

Meshal's parents insist he is innocent and called on the US government to win his release.

"My son's only crime is that he's a Muslim, an American Muslim," his father, Mohamed Meshal, said from the family's two-storey home on a cul-de-sac in Tinton Falls, New Jersey, where he lives with his wife, Fifi.

"Clearly the US government interrogated him, and threatened him with torture according to the accounts that we've seen," said Jonathan Hafetz, a lawyer at the Brennan Centre for Justice at the New York University School of Law who has been assisting the family.

Representative Rush Holt, a Democrat from New Jersey, wrote to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Monday to demand Meshal's immediate release. "Our government cannot allow an American citizen to continue to be held by the Ethiopian government in violation of international law and our own due process," he said.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, the guardian of the Geneva Conventions that protect victims of war, is seeking access to the Ethiopian detainees, said a diplomat from a country whose citizens are being held. He insisted on speaking anonymously because he is working for their release.

US officials, who agreed to discuss the detentions only if not quoted by name because of the information's sensitivity, said Ethiopia had allowed access to US agencies, including the CIA and FBI, but the agencies played no role in arrests, transport or deportation.

One official said it would have been irresponsible to pass up an opportunity to learn more about terrorist operations.

Kolko, the FBI spokesperson, also said the detainees were never in FBI or US government custody.

"While in custody of the foreign government, the FBI was granted limited access to interview certain individuals of interest," he told AP.

"We do not support or participate in any system that illegally detains foreign fighters or terror suspects, including women and children."

Paul Gimigliano, a CIA spokesperson, declined to discuss details of any such interviews. He said, however: "To fight terror, CIA acts boldly and lawfully, alone and with partners, just as the American people expect us to."

One of the US officials said the FBI has had access in Ethiopia to several dozen individuals -- fewer than 100 -- as part of its investigations.

The official said the 1998 US Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania that killed hundreds are a major focus of the agents' work. Law enforcement officials have long believed the bombings were carried out by members of Osama bin Laden's terrorist network who were later given safe haven in Somalia.

The official said FBI agents would not be witness or party to any questioning that involved abuse.

It wasn't clear how many people the CIA interviewed or whether the agency's officers were working jointly with the FBI.

The CIA began an aggressive program in 2002 to interrogate suspected terrorists at an unknown number of secret locations from South-East Asia to Europe.

Prisoners were frequently picked up in one country and transferred to a prison in another, where they were held incommunicado by a cooperative intelligence service. But President George Bush announced in September that all the detainees had been moved to military custody at Guantánamo Bay.

One Western diplomat, who refused to be quoted by name for fear of hurting relations with the countries involved, would not rule out that additional suspects in Ethiopia could be sent to Guantánamo.

Kenyan government spokesperson Alfred Mutua insisted no laws were broken and said his government was not aware that anyone would be
transferred from Somalia to Ethiopia.

Lawyers and human rights groups argue the covert transfers to Ethiopia violated international law.

"Each of these governments has played a shameful role in mistreating people fleeing a war zone," said Georgette Gagnon, deputy Africa director of Human Rights Watch. "Kenya has secretly expelled people, the Ethiopians have caused dozens to disappear, and US security agents have routinely interrogated people held incommunicado." – Sapa-AP

Ghost Prisons, Ghost Courtrooms

From CIA secret prisons, 14 "high-level" terror suspects are at Gitmo. Where are all the others? by Nat Hentoff March 25th, 2007 11:21 PM

Women With High Libidos Exist! Savage Love by Dan Savage The New Americanism Give Me Liberty by Nat Hentoff Anderson Cooper Courts Thomas Roberts! La Dolce Musto by Michael Musto DJS Are Not Rock Stars Shake Up Downtown by Tricia Romano A BDSM Court Case Puts Master/Slave Relationships on Trial Pucker Up by Tristan Taormino Shopping with The Secret Frock Star by Lynn Yaeger Bloomberg Floods New York With Global-Warming Happy Talk by Wayne Barrett Women With High Libidos Exist! Savage Love by Dan Savage General Peter Pace Talks Morality Sutton Impact by Ward Sutton To Err Is Human—to Forgive Republicans, Divine! This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow "You need to have a president who understands you can't win this war with legal papers. We've got to use every tool at our disposal." George W. Bush, Nightline, May 13, 2004 "What are we going to do with these people when we're finished . . . with them? Are they going to disappear?" Jack Cloonan, senior FBI agent on the Bin Laden Squad, speaking of the terrorism suspects hidden in CIA secret cells, Nightline, May 13, 2004 "Khalid Sheikh Mohammed [resisting interrogation in a CIA secret prison] was strapped down, forcibly pushed under the water, and made to believe he might drown." The New York Times, May 13, 2004 On September 17, 2001, the president told the National Security Council that, at the advice of then CIA director George Tenet (who was later awarded the Medal of Freedom by the president) he was going to issue a classified Memorandum of Notification that would give the CIA permission to use "special authorities to detain Al Qaeda operatives worldwide." Without consulting Congress or any court, Bush had given the CIA the power to ignore American laws and our international treaty obligations to—among other war crimes under the Geneva Conventions—create its own secret prisons around the world. The CIA could also continue to conduct "renditions" to kidnap terrorism suspects to be interrogated in countries known for torturing their prisoners. Those held in CIA secret prisons had no contact with the outside world: no lawyers, no visits from the Red Cross, and no word to their families. As some former CIA agents have revealed, CIA personnel involved in the "disappearances" feared they might eventually have to face American courts for their crimes against a multitude of laws. These concerns intensified as the existence of these CIA prisons began to be revealed—first by The Washington Post's Dana Priest in 2002, followed by many other reporters, including this one, here and abroad—as well as through investigations by human rights organizations. The names of these vanished prisoners, and what was being done to them, were still unknown, except for some details by a few released former CIA secret prisoners. But the existence of these gulags greatly tarred America's image among our allies and the rest of the world. Damage control by the administration consisted of the president, the secretary of state, and other officials denying there were such prisons, in a pious chorus of assurances that "the United States does not torture." (I offer to any cartoonist the children's story of Pinocchio, whose nose kept lengthening with each lie he told.) On September 6, 2006, the president, at last—as condemnations of these ghost prisons multiplied around the world—admitted their existence and said that 14 "high-value" ghost prisoners would be transferred to Guantánamo to eventually be tried by military commissions. From ghost prisons, the dread Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other purported master terrorists were brought into ghost courtrooms. At Guantánamo, the prisoners have no right to have lawyers present, to call their own witnesses, or to know the names of their accusers. (Instead of lawyers, they have "personal representatives" assigned by the military.) The hearing for KSM marked the first time these Combatant Status Review Tribunals were closed to all reporters. The "blackout" resulted in reporters and the public getting only transcripts of the proceedings heavily redacted (censored) by the Pentagon. We are not even allowed to know the names of the five military officers, the tribunal's official reporter, or the translator in that ghost courtroom. Amid the extensive press coverage of KSM's Gitmo "confessions" of multiple horrific crimes—including the planning of 9/11 and the beheading of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl—the Pentagon's transcript blacked out what he started to say about his treatment (torture) in the four years he was in the secret CIA prison system. Also redacted was his written statement about the abuses. It had already been widely reported that he was "waterboarded" (made to believe he was drowning) soon after his CIA interrogation began; and it is highly probable that his future confessions in that black site were facilitated by additional "coercive interrogations." There is external evidence that KSM did indeed commit some of the atrocities in the admissions he repeated in the Gitmo ghost courtroom, but the Bush administration remains intent on not disclosing the methods used to get him to talk because they are very likely to be "crimes against humanity" in international law. His CIA interrogators, along with all other CIA agents involved in torturing prisoners and in "renditions" by kidnapping, need not worry any longer about being prosecuted for those crimes. The Military Commissions Act of 2006 retroactively spared them any punishment for such acts. But if the details are revealed, the president would be further prosecuted in world opinion. The president, in finally acknowledging the existence of the CIA secret prisons, emphasized that no prisoners remain in those gulags. Even if you trust what he says in these matters, the Military Commissions Act allows these prisons to stay open for future manacled guests—and for the CIA renditions to continue. The National Association of Evangelicals has endorsed, according to the March 16 Washington Post, "An Evangelical Declaration Against Torture: Protecting Human Rights in an Age of Terror." Its Washington policy director, Reverend Rich Cizik, emphasized: "We are the conservatives, let there be no mistake on that . . . who wholeheartedly support the war against terror, but that does not mean by any means necessary." These evangelicals say they want to help Americans "regain our moral clarity." There is no moral clarity in the ghost courtrooms at Guantánamo, the deeply un-American Military Commissions Act, and a host of other covert missions by the most immoral presidency in our history. But as Americans recoiled at the redacted confessions of KSM, Human Rights Watch raised a huge specter of missing moral clarity, of unanswered questions about the CIA secret prisons: their exact locations, the treatment of detainees, and the "complicity of other governments" harboring them in their countries. And most important, what of all the other CIA ghost prisoners? Who are they? Where are they? What was done to them all these years? How have they been disposed of?

CIA AGENT ON THE RUN

SPIEGEL ONLINE - March 19, 2007, 08:34 PM

'I've Got Nothing to Lose'

By Georg Mascolo in Washington

Robert Lady, the former CIA chief in Milan, has gone into hiding. He is the subject of an extradition order from Italian authorities for the role he played in the kidnapping of radical Muslim cleric Abu Omar in Milan. Washington is seeking to derail the trial -- perhaps because Condoleezza Rice may have given the operation the green light.

Robert Seldon Lady has reason for hope again. Maybe he will see farm again -- nestled as it is in the soft hills of Penango, a small town in northern Italy. He's had to leave everything there: his antique furniture, his books, the wine and the family photos. To this day, he continues to pay his $4,000 mortgage.

Lady is CIA's former Milan bureau chief. After 24 years with the agency, he had planned to retire in Penango. But now he's become a bit of a vagabond instead. He was in Florida last, but he reportedly moved on already. The only place the former agent can feel truly safe is the United States, now that an Italian court has issued an arrest warrant for him -- just as it has done for 25 of his colleagues, who are said to have been involved in the Feb. 17, 2003 abduction of radical Muslim cleric Abu Omar along Via Guerzoni in downtown Milan.

The suspects are expected to be tried, in absentia, in June at Milan's Palace of Justice in what will amount to the world's first-ever trial against CIA agents accused of kidnapping. Until very recently, it seemed certain that the case would move ahead. But last week the Italian government asked the country's highest justices at the constitutional court to determine whether the trial could proceed. This has fueled hope for Seldon and, indeed, the entire US administration, that a legal drama might still be prevented.

THE ABU OMAR KIDNAPPING CASE

Abu Omar's Abduction in Milan: "The Only Thing They Cared About Was That I Didn't Die"

"It was a sunny midday on Feb. 17, 2003. I was on the way from my apartment to the mosque, which was only about a kilometer (0.6 miles) away. There was nothing unusual to be seen. I walked through Via Guerzoni as usual, past small stores. The only thing that attracted my attention was a white delivery van by the side of the road, which I had never seen there before. My wife and I had already suspected for some time that we were under surveillance. Cars kept following us, or at least we thought so. Also, the phone often rang at home and in the mosque, and no one could be heard on the other line when we replied. We assumed the Italian intelligence agency was observing us because I often ranted against the Americans and the imminent war against Iraq." mehr...

Abu Omar's Arrival in Cairo: "Work For Us as a Spy -- or Rot in Jail"

"When the jet plane landed, I was still dazed. The flight took seven hours -- but that's just an estimate. My body felt completely stiff. The circulation in my arms and legs had been cut off by the plastic cuffs, but I was still in severe pain. Someone cut through the cuffs around my legs and led me down a set of stairs. I heard a voice from below. A man called out to me in Arabic to come down. I knew from the accent that I was in Egypt." mehr...

The Torture in Egypt: "In the End I Would Have Confessed to Anything"

"After I rejected their offer to work as an informer for them, I was treated like dirt in the prison in Egypt. In the first few months I was locked in a solitary cell and had no contact with lawyers or my family. I was totally shut off from the outside world. Every couple of days I got taken to be interrogated. Egypt's government did what it always does: carry out Washington's orders. The dirty work to get me to talk was to be done here. That's why they tortured me, hooked up electric wires to my genitals, hung me on the wall in a solitary cell for days, subjected me to unbearably loud music through headphones." mehr...

Before the Trial: "Germany is Partly to Blame"

"Germany is also partly to blame. After all, the Germans simply allowed the plane to land in Ramstein and then fly on. I've read that the Germans claim not to have known about the US renditions. I don't believe it. After Sept. 11, everyone knew the United States was doing everything it could, and it has abducted people before. Two people also disappeared from Germany. This practice was known about. I'm sticking to my view: All those who didn't take action against the CIA's secret flights abetted the CIA's activities." mehr...

CIA Activities in Italy: Nothing to Lose

Robert Seldon Lady is the former bureau chief of the CIA in Milan. He wanted to retire to Penango, after 24 years with the agency. But now he's roaming about instead. He was in Florida last, but he's said to already have moved on. His wife has left him. The only place where the former agent can feel truly safe is the United States, now that an Italian court has issued an arrest warrant for him - as it has done for 25 of his colleagues. mehr...

The lawyer representing Marco Mancini, an important behind-the-scenes figure in Italy's SISMI military intelligence agency, argues that state secrets need to be protected. Prior to the operation, the CIA apparently informed SISMI leaders of its plans to kidnap Omar. The lawyer's reference to state secrets implies that the green light for the operation was given not only by Italy's intelligence agencies, but also by members of former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's government.

When the persistent public prosecutor's office began investigating, the entire government in Rome claimed to have known nothing whatsoever about the operation. In the meantime, it has become known that the CIA asked Gianfranco Battelli, then SISMI's director, what he thought of abductions of radical Muslims in Italy just a few days after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Battelli, whose retirement was imminent, didn't even register any form of protest. He simply recommended having a word with his successor.

Threats from Washington

Lady's Italian lawyer already suggested declaring the case a matter of national security, thereby burying it for good. And such a decision would suit the Bush administration perfectly. The White House has used all available diplomatic channels to pressure Rome into preventing a public trial. State Department legal advisor John Bellinger, known for his engaging manner, even admonished the Italians that such legal investigations threatened to seriously damage cooperation between US and European intelligence agencies. Besides, Bellinger added, the accused CIA agents would never be extradited.

But according to recent findings brought to light by American journalist Matthew Cole, writing in the March issue of GQ, it's not just the agents involved in the abduction who need to be protected. Those truly responsible are to be found in the higher echelons of the US administration, according to Cole, who claims that current US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice personally approved the operation when she served as President George W. Bush's National Security Advisor. She apparently OKed Abu Omar's abduction and then, according to Cole's report, "fretted" during her meeting with the CIA over how she would inform Bush about the operation.

No official denial has been issued over Cole's allegations -- perhaps in part because there is much to suggest they are true: All truly sensitive CIA operations conducted in the context of the "war on terror" had to be approved by the White House.

Cole is a persevering investigative reporter, who even succeeded in tracking Lady down and talking to him. They've met outside Miami half a dozen times. But even though he would probably have much to reveal, the former CIA agent is reluctant to come forward with the full story -- despite the fact that Italian prosecutors have apparently offered him a deal in return for reporting the details of the CIA operation.

High-tech from Langley

But Lady has said this much: He didn't beleive in the operation from the outset, because it was simply superfluous. Lady knew how doggedly the Italian authorities were already pursuing Abu Omar, having helped them in their investigations himself. He even arranged for the high-tech microphones used during Abu Omar's surveillance to be shipped from Langley. The Italians were at the same time impressed and grateful.

Both the Italians and the CIA considered Abu Omar to be one of the key figures in the Muslim fundamentalist milieu of northern Italy. The CIA thought of him as a kind of recruiting officer for the battlefields of jihad, agitating people to fight first in Kashmir, then in Chechnya and Afghanistan and later in Iraq.

Lady seems to have bet on the Italians getting a grip on Omar by themselves. The generous technological support from Langley was intended to assure the Italian investigations would progress rapidly. The CIA's Rome bureau chief, Jeff Castelli, is reported to have insisted that Omar should be abducted. In the end, his position won out.

So if Lady really thought the operation was a mistake, then why didn't he protest? "The CIA is the vanguard of democracy," he explained in the GQ interview. "It was the greatest job I ever had." Indeed, he wasn't about to disobey his orders -- especially one that might be his last, coming as it did just one year before his planned retirement.

When the kidnappers seized Abu Omar on his way to noontime prayers in Via Guerzoni, Lady met the director of Italy's anti-terrorism police for coffee. In contrast to the Italian intelligence agency, the police director knew nothing about the operation. Lady's job was that of keeping a watchful eye on him while his colleagues seized Abu Omar -- just to make sure nothing went wrong. Five days after Abu Omar had been flown to Egypt via the US Air Base at Ramstein, Germany, Lady arrived in Cairo, too.

Lady has a lot at stake in this case. If the Italian constitutional court doesn't put a halt on the trial, the state prosecutor could confiscate Lady's beloved farm. "I'll probably be convicted. But I won't go to trial, and I'll never see Italy again," he lamented to journalist Cole. But other plausible scenarios remain, too: Perhaps the former CIA agent will testify after all. He is said to be bitter about the lack of support he has received from the CIA. The only ones protected by Washington these days are the ones who give orders, and not people like him, who do the dirty work, he is said to have complained.

Indeed, Robert Lady's comments to Cole seem as threatening as they do disillusioned, and they were likely meant to sound that way. "No one's called me for support," he said. "No one has helped. I keep thinking, Fuck it, I've got nothing to lose."

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© SPIEGEL ONLINE 2007
All Rights Reserved
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US court throws out CIA torture case

Fri Mar 2, 6:57 PM ET

A US federal appeals court on Friday upheld a refusal to hear the case of a Lebanese-born German man who says he was tortured by the CIA, citing national security reasons.

Khaled el-Masri claims was detained by the CIA for several months in 2004 on suspicion of links to terrorism.

Masri, 43, filed suit in December 2005 saying he had been snatched while on a trip in Macedonia, taken to Afghanistan, jailed, beaten and harassed before being set free without charge after five months.

He demanded an explanation and an apology from the United States for his detention, as well as 75,000 dollars in damages.

The US government had urged the court to reject the appeal saying that for national security reasons it could not confirm or deny any of the allegations because they were related to the activities of the CIA.

The court said that to make his case, el-Masri "would be obliged to produce admissible evidence not only that he was detained and interrogated, but that the defendants were involved in his detention and interrogation in a manner that renders them personally liable to him.

"Such a showing could be made only with evidence that exposes how the CIA organizes, staffs and supervises its most sensitive intelligence operations.

"The defendants could not properly defend themselves without using privileged evidence," the decision said.

American Civil Liberties Union director Anthony Romero said the court was wrong.

"Regrettably, today's decision allows CIA officials to disregard the law with impunity by making it virtually impossible to challenge their actions in court," he said in a statement.

"The state secrets doctrine has become a shield that covers even the most blatant abuses of power," he said.

Masri has also taken his case to the German courts and a court in southern Munich in January ordered the arrest of 13 people, thought to be CIA agents, in connection with his alleged kidnapping.

His is one of the most high-profile cases of the suspected "extraordinary renditions" by the CIA -- flying terror suspects through European states to detention in third countries where they risk being tortured.

After meeting with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in December 2005, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Masri's case "was accepted as a mistake by the US government," but US officials later suggested her remark was the result of a misunderstanding.

Reports have indicated that US agents confused Masri with a terror suspect with a similar name who was linked to the attacks of September 11, 2001.

New Light Shed on CIA's 'Black Site' Prisons

By Dafna Linzer and Julie Tate

Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, February 28, 2007; A01

On his last day in CIA custody, Marwan Jabour, an accused al-Qaeda paymaster, was stripped naked, seated in a chair and videotaped by agency officers. Afterward, he was shackled and blindfolded, headphones were put over his ears, and he was given an injection that made him groggy. Jabour, 30, was laid down in the back of a van, driven to an airstrip and put on a plane with at least one other prisoner.

His release from a secret facility in Afghanistan on June 30, 2006, was a surprise to Jabour -- and came just after the Supreme Court rejected the Bush administration's assertion that the Geneva Conventions do not apply to prisoners like him.

Jabour had spent two years in "black sites" -- a network of secret internment facilities the CIA operated around the world. His account of life in that system, which he described in three interviews with The Washington Post, offers an inside view of a clandestine world that held far more prisoners than the 14 men President Bush acknowledged and had transferred out of CIA custody in September.

"There are now no terrorists in the CIA program," the president said, adding that after the prisoners held were determined to have "little or no additional intelligence value, many of them have been returned to their home countries for prosecution or detention by their governments."

But Jabour's experience -- also chronicled by Human Rights Watch, which yesterday issued a report on the fate of former "black site" detainees -- often does not accord with the portrait the administration has offered of the CIA system, such as the number of people it held and the threat detainees posed. Although 14 detainees were publicly moved from CIA custody to the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, scores more have not been publicly identified by the U.S. government, and their whereabouts remain secret. Nor has the administration acknowledged that detainees such as Jabour, considered so dangerous and valuable that their detentions were kept secret, were freed.

After 28 months of incarceration, Jabour -- who was described by a counterterrorism official in the U.S. government as "a committed jihadist and a hard-core terrorist who was intent on doing harm to innocent people, including Americans" -- was released eight months ago. U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism officials confirmed his incarceration and that he was held in Pakistan and Afghanistan. They would not discuss conditions inside black sites or the treatment of any detainee.

A House in Islamabad

By Jabour's account, and that of U.S. intelligence officials, his entrance into the black-sites program began in May 2004. In interviews, he said he was muscled out of a car as it pulled inside the gates of a secluded villa in the Pakistani capital of Islamabad.

In the week before his arrival, Jabour said, Pakistani intelligence officers had beaten, abused and burned him at a jailhouse in Lahore, where he was arrested. There two female American interrogators also questioned him and told him he would be rich if he cooperated and would vanish for life if he refused. He said he was later blindfolded and driven four hours north to the villa in a wealthy residential neighborhood.

The house in Islamabad, which U.S. intelligence officials say was jointly run by the CIA and Pakistani intelligence, had been outfitted with jail cells. When Jabour arrived, he saw as many as 20 other detainees, including the 16-year-old son of an Egyptian sheik, who had been captured in Pakistan. Dozens of al-Qaeda suspects swept up in the years after Sept. 11, 2001, have been through the house, according to accounts by former prisoners and U.S. intelligence officials with knowledge of the facility.

Jabour spent five weeks there, chained to a wall and prevented from sleeping more than a few hours at a time. He said he was beaten nightly by Pakistani guards after hours of questions from U.S. interrogators. Then he and others were whisked off to CIA-run sites. Some sites were in Eastern Europe; Jabour went to one in Afghanistan. Interrogators -- whom he described as Americans in their late 20s and early 30s -- told Jabour he would never see his three children again.

Human Rights Watch has identified 38 people who may have been held by the CIA and remain unaccounted for. Intelligence officials told The Post that the number of detainees held in such facilities over nearly five years remains classified but is higher than 60. Their whereabouts have not been publicly disclosed.

"The practice of disappearing people -- keeping them in secret detention without any legal process -- is fundamentally illegal under international law," said Joanne Mariner, director of the terrorism program at Human Rights Watch in New York. "The kind of physical mistreatment Jabour described is also illegal." Mariner interviewed Jabour separately as part of the organization's investigation.

The CIA said it would not comment directly on Jabour. "The agency does not, as a rule, publicly discuss specific rendition cases from the war on terror," said Paul Gimigliano, a spokesman for the CIA. But, he said, renditions "are a key, lawful tool in the fight against terror, and have helped save lives by taking terrorists off the street. They are conducted with care, they are closely reviewed, and they have produced valuable intelligence that has allowed the United States and other nations to foil terrorist plots."

John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, plans to investigate the fate of the missing detainees as part of a larger examination into the CIA's operation of secret prisons and its rendition program.

Aiding Al-Qaeda Fighters

In interviews with The Post from his parents' home in the Gaza Strip, Jabour acknowledged helping al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters who fled Afghanistan as the U.S. military hunted for the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Jabour was born to Palestinian parents in Jordan, raised in Saudi Arabia and educated in Pakistan. In 1998, he said, he became drawn to the plight of Muslims in Chechnya living under Russian rule. He crossed the border into Afghanistan so he could train in jihadist camps, then planned to join up with Chechen separatists.

"In Afghanistan, I met other people who believed in the Islamic state, where it was safe to practice Islam the way they wanted," Jabour said in a recent conversation. "I became friends with other Arabs who felt like me, Palestinians and Jordanians, but after three months of training I was told there was no chance to go to Chechnya."

Jabour returned to Pakistan in 1999. Two years later, after the U.S. military offensive in Afghanistan, those he lived and trained with came calling for help.

"Some of their children were injured, some of their women were wounded. From that moment, they came to our home and we helped them," he said.

Using funds from al-Qaeda financiers, Jabour said, he arranged for food, medical treatment and travel documents for several dozen people and arranged for others, including two African men who fought for al-Qaeda, to slip out of Pakistan. He did not return to Afghanistan to fight, and he said he had no interest in attacking Americans.

The U.S. counterterrorism official who discussed aspects of Jabour's classified file did not call him a member of al-Qaeda. But the official said that in Pakistan, Jabour "was in direct touch with top al-Qaeda operations figures," including Hamza Rabia, who briefly served as one of Osama bin Laden's lieutenants before a missile from a CIA predator drone killed him in December 2005. In interviews, Jabour said he met with Rabia on two occasions.

The official said Jabour "provided the money and means for other jihadists to move from Afghanistan to Pakistan" and provided funds that went to an al-Qaeda bioweapons lab. "He's an all-around bad guy," the official said. No charges were brought against Jabour, however, and the official would not say why he is free today.

Taken to Afghanistan

On June 16, 2004, after weeks in the villa, Jabour was drugged, blindfolded and put on a plane. Counterterrorism officials did not dispute that he was taken to a black site in Afghanistan. Jabour said the facility was run by Americans in civilian clothes and guarded by masked men who wore black uniforms and gloves.

He said he does not know where the facility is located, and counterterrorism officials would not say whether Jabour was held at two known detention sites in Afghanistan -- one run by the U.S. military at Bagram air base, the other operated by the CIA outside Kabul.

Jabour said he was often naked during his first three months at the Afghan site, which he spent in a concrete cell furnished with two blankets and a bucket. The lights were kept on 24 hours a day, as were two cameras and a microphone inside the cell. Sometimes loud music blasted through speakers in the cells. The rest of the time, the low buzz of white noise whizzed in the background, possibly to muffle any communication by prisoners through cell walls.

Daily interrogations were conducted by a variety of Americans. Over two years, Jabour said he encountered about 45 interrogators, plus medical staff and psychologists. He was threatened with physical abuse but was never beaten.

Once, he was shown a small wooden crate his interrogators called a "dog box" and was told he would be put in it if he didn't cooperate. He was told that Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the suspected architect of the Sept. 11 attacks who was among the 14 moved to Guantanamo Bay last year, became cooperative after he had been put in the box. But Jabour said he was not subjected to the crate.

He was, however, chained up and left for hours in painful positions more than 20 times and deprived of sleep for long periods. Sometimes he would have one hand chained to a section of his cell wall, making it impossible to stand or sit.

About six weeks into his stay, he was issued a pair of pants. Later he was given a T-shirt, then shoes, a Koran and finally a mattress. Jabour said prison conditions slowly improved: Air conditioning was installed; a library was built and stocked with books in Arabic, Urdu and English. Well-behaved detainees were rewarded with movie nights, in which such Hollywood blockbusters as "Titanic" were screened. A deputy director of the facility taught Jabour how to play chess and gave him pencils and paper. Jabour used to draw pictures of trees and grass, which he hung in his windowless cell.

Jabour recalled with fondness the prison director, a man named Charlie. "He told me, 'Marwan, we need information -- if you cooperate, that is good.' I told him I wasn't hiding anything and was not a dangerous man. He told me that they didn't want to use force but would if they had to. I told him I wouldn't lie to him."

Jabour began to receive better food, including pizza and Snickers and Kit-Kat bars.

Transferred and Released

On Dec. 18, 2004, six months after his arrival, Jabour was transferred to a larger cell. Under the sink he found a small inscription that read: "Majid Khan, 15 December, 2004, American-Pakistani." Khan, whose family lives outside Baltimore, was arrested in March 2003 in Karachi, Pakistan, and was among the group transferred to Guantanamo five months ago. The U.S. government has not divulged where Khan was held during his first 3 1/2 years of incarceration.

Jabour met only one other prisoner during his time there. That was an Algerian named Yassir al-Jazeeri, a suspected high-level al-Qaeda operative who was arrested in Pakistan in March 2003. Their visits were arranged by the facility director, who told Jabour they were rewards for good behavior.

During interrogations, Jabour was often shown hundreds of photographs of wanted or captured suspects. One photo appears to have been that of Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, a British-Pakistani who was arrested in Pakistan in July 2004.

Noor Khan, a suspected al-Qaeda operative, was thought to be involved in the planning of a disrupted 2004 attack on U.S. and British financial institutions. Babar Awan, a Pakistani lawyer hired by Noor Khan's family, said he has "heard nothing from the government authorities or any other authorities about where Noor Khan is."

There is no public U.S. government record available that states the CIA ever held Jabour, al-Jazeeri or Noor Khan.

Last April, John D. Negroponte, who was then director of national intelligence, told Time magazine that he did not know what would be the "endgame for the three dozen or so high-value detainees" in CIA custody at that time.

Jabour's odyssey ended with a secret flight to Amman, Jordan, where he woke to find himself in an office staring at government wall portraits of King Abdullah and his dead father, King Hussein. "I don't know why they released me, but I told them everything I knew . . .," Jabour said. "You have to tell them the truth and that was no problem for me. They are smart people," he said of his American captors.

The Jordanians called the International Committee for the Red Cross, which sent a representative to interview Jabour and to contact his family. He remained in Jordanian custody for six weeks, was interrogated and was then handed over to Israel's security services.

The Israelis treated him better than his other captors, he said. They got Jabour his first lawyer, an Israeli Arab named Nizar Mahajna, who said in an interview that the Israelis had held Jabour in a prison near Haifa for two months. He was not mistreated, blindfolded or shackled, the lawyer said.

Israeli authorities had considered charging Jabour with fighting for an enemy of the Jewish state. But, Mahajna said, Jabour's training in Afghanistan had occurred more than eight years earlier, he was not a member of al-Qaeda and he had never lived in the Palestinian territories.

"The Israelis were given secret information on Marwan, which they got from the Americans. It wasn't shared with me but whatever it says, the central fact remained that the Pakistanis and the Americans had let him go. Why should Israel keep him?" Mahajna said.

The Israeli government dropped the case and transferred Jabour to Gaza. Prison guards drove him to the Erez border crossing between Israel and the Gaza Strip. "Good luck," one of them said to Jabour as he crossed into Gaza, where his parents awaited.

US military planes criss-cross Europe using bogus call sign

February 19, 2006

Jon Swain and Brian Johnson-Thomas in Rome

THE American military have been operating flights across Europe using a call sign assigned to a civilian airline that they have no legal right to use.

Not only is the call sign bogus — according to the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) — so, it appears, are some of the aircraft details the Americans have filed with the air traffic control authorities.

In at least one case, a plane identified with the CIA practice of “extraordinary rendition” — transporting terrorist suspects — left a US air base just after the arrival of an aircraft using the bogus call sign.

The call sign Juliet Golf Oscar (JGO) followed by a flight number belongs, says the ICAO, to a now bankrupt Canadian low-cost airline called Jetsgo of Montreal.

But for several years and as recently as last December it has been used selectively by both the American air force and army to cover the flights of aircraft to and from the Balkans.

These range from Learjet 35 executive jets to C-130 transport planes and MC-130P Combat Shadows, which are specially adapted for clandestine missions in politically sensitive or hostile territory.

A Sunday Times analysis of flight plans and radio logs has placed these aircraft at locations including Tuzla in Bosnia, Pristina in Kosovo, Aviano, the site of a large joint US-Italian military air base in northern Italy, and Ramstein in Germany, the headquarters of the US Air Forces in Europe (USAFE).

On December 11, 2004, USAFE in Ramstein filed a flight plan for a Learjet 35 to fly from Tuzla to Aviano. The flight plan was copied to 15 addressees including Tuzla airport, Aviano airport and a mysterious recipient labelled “xxxxxxxx”.

The aircraft’s identity was given as JGO 80, the flight was a Learjet 35 operated by the Department of Defence and the registration was 99999E.

The status of the flight was given as “humanitarian”. But it was also given as “state”, which means government, and as “protected”, which means diplomatic.

During the time the plane was in the air, USAFE changed some of the flight plan timings and at the same time the registration changed. The aircraft metamorphosed into 40112E but continued to be a Learjet 35 and was still JGO 80 and a humanitarian, government and diplomatic flight.

While the Learjet was on the ground at Tuzla, an Ilyushin 76 was loading a cargo of 45 tons of surplus weapons and ammunition sold off by the Bosnian military and destined for Rwanda in defiance of a UN embargo.

The Ilyushin left Tuzla, flew over Italy and headed south in the direction of Africa. The American Learjet took off 55 minutes later.

In a report exposing arms trafficking to war-torn central Africa, Amnesty International has suggested that “US security authorities were engaged in a covert operation to ferry arms to Rwanda in the face of political opposition from the European Union”.

Another interesting convergence of flights occurred in February 2004. On February 24, an MC-130P Combat Shadow using the call sign JGO 50 took off from Aviano for an unknown destination.

Two days later, on February 26, the aircraft left Pristina for Tuzla. A short while after that, a Gulfstream 5 executive jet, call sign JGO 47, flew from Tuzla to Aviano, arriving at 23.11 GMT. The next day, a Learjet 35 using the call sign SPAR 92 left Aviano for an unknown destination.

SPAR is short for Special Air Resources, an American military airlift service that transports senior military officers and civilian VIPs.

However, SPAR 92 has been identified as the aircraft which was used by the CIA secretly to transport a Muslim preacher who was kidnapped by CIA agents in Milan in 2003.

A USAFE spokesman last week said American aircraft using the JGO call sign were performing “Joint Guard Operations” for the Nato/European peacekeeping mission in the Balkans.

However, inquiries have shown that the military operation called “Joint Guard” ended in 1998. They also show that none of the US aircraft deployed in it match ones using the JGO call sign.

A spokesman for the ICAO said: “Our records indicate that the designator JGO is still assigned to Jetsgo and the ICAO does not assign the same code to two operators.”

Additional reporting: Peter Danssaert

31 to stand trial in CIA kidnapping case

1 hour, 39 minutes ago

An Italian judge on Friday indicted 26 Americans and five Italians in the first criminal trial over the CIA's extraordinary rendition program.

The judge set the trial date for June 8. Prosecutors allege that five Italian intelligence officials worked with the Americans — almost all CIA agents — to abduct terror suspect Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr from a Milan street on Feb. 17, 2003.

Nasr was allegedly transferred by vehicle to the Aviano Air Force base near Venice and then by air to the Ramstein Air Base in Germany and on to Egypt, where critics say he was tortured.

All but one of the American suspects have been identified as CIA agents, including the former station chiefs in Rome and Milan. The other is a U.S. Air Force officer stationed at the time at Aviano.

Even if a request is made for the Americans' extradition — a move bound to irritate U.S.-Italian relations — it was unlikely that the CIA agents would be turned over for trial abroad.

The CIA has refused to comment on the case, while the former Italian chief of military intelligence has insisted that Italian intelligence had no role. The only defendant to appear during the preliminary hearing, Nicolo Pollari, told the judge that he was unable to defend himself properly because documents clarifying his position had been excluded from the proceedings because they contain state secrets.

The case has put an uncomfortable spotlight on intelligence operations as prosecutors press the Italian government to seek the extradition of the U.S. agents. The previous government of Silvio Berlusconi refused, and Premier Romano Prodi's center-left government has yet to make its decision.

All of the U.S. agents have court-appointed lawyers, who have acknowledged having no contact with their clients.

"It's a defense in the dark," said Guido Meroni, who represents six Americans accused of helping organize the abduction. Meroni has argued that the evidence connecting his clients to Nasr's disappearance was circumstantial, based on phone records and their presence in hotels in Italy during the period before the abduction.

Prosecutors say the alleged kidnapping operation was a breach of Italian sovereignty that compromised Italy's own anti-terrorism efforts.

Nasr was under investigation for terrorism-related activities at the time of his abduction, and Milan prosecutors issued a warrant for his arrest more than two years after he disappeared from Milan, while he was in Egyptian custody.

Nasr, who allegedly was tortured during four years' imprisonment in Egypt, was released earlier this week from jail. His lawyer in Egypt said in an interview on Italian state TV that he wants to return to Italy, where he had been granted the status of political refugee.

Prosecutors elsewhere in Europe are moving ahead with cases aimed at the CIA program.

This week, the Swiss government approved prosecutors' plans to investigate the flight that allegedly took Nasr over Swiss air space from Italy to Germany.

And a Munich prosecutor recently issued arrest warrants for 13 people in connection with another alleged CIA-orchestrated kidnapping, this one of a German citizen who says he was abducted in December 2003 at the Serbian-Macedonia border and flown to Afghanistan.

American Torture

by Michael Otterman

George W. Bush calls them an "alternative set of procedures" - forced standing for up to forty hours, sleep deprivation for weeks on end, dousing naked prisoners with ice water in rooms chilled to fifty degrees Fahrenheit, and strapping prisoners to inclined boards then flooding their mouths with water. American Torture examines the origins of this interrogation regime and traces how it was refined, spread, and kept legal. Along the way, American Torture uncovers the effects of state-sponsored torture and deconstructs the myths espoused by its proponents.

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In Europe, pushback against US 'war on terror'

from the February 05, 2007 edition -

German solidarity with the indictment of 13 CIA operatives underscores a shifting tone across Europe.

The Christian Science Monitor

PARIS

Reaction in Germany was hardly neutral when a prosecutor in Munich indicted 13 CIA officials last week for kidnapping a German of Lebanese descent and interrogating him in Afghanistan before apparently realizing they had the wrong man. Germans solidly backed the prosecutor.

Since Christian Schmidt-Sommerfeld took the unprecedented step, both the right and left in Germany have supported the "rule of law" principles he articulated.

The media have been unified as well. Typical is the centrist Süddeutsche Zeitung: "The justice system has stood up for the rule of law. Whether the government will do so is a different matter. Berlin must push for the kidnappers to be extradited, or ... tried in the USA. But it is unlikely to have that much courage."

The solidarity underscores a shifting tone in Europe. As changes of leadership loom in Britain and France, and capitals contemplate relations with a post-Bush US, Uncle Sam may expect stronger "pushbacks" from Europe, experts here say. Public disapproval of the US-led "war on terror" is also growing, spurring the change.

"There is a deep gap between government policy and public opinion in Europe, and that opinion may be shaping the direction here right now," says Frederic Bozo, professor of European Studies at the Sorbonne in Paris. "Europe doesn't want to upset the careful balance with the US. I don't think there is a united opposition against the US at all. But Europe is setting the groundwork for its own identity."

Gordon Brown, who is shortly expected to take over as prime minister in Great Britain, opposed the Iraq war from the start, and has made no secret that he plans to carve out an independent line on the venerable "special relationship" with the US. Many anticipate that British troops will leave Iraq by the end of the year.

In France, even the avidly pro- American Nicolas Sarkozy, current front-runner in the French elections this spring, stated in an interview taped in New York last week that Americans need to "get interested in the world, and the world will learn to love you."

To be sure, European cooperation with the US on a wide range of areas, including counterterrorism, is extremely strong, even in France, where the Chirac government has steadily gone it alone in Europe in opposition to the Iraq campaign.Yet Europeans have steadily refused to accept the concept and phrase, "war on terror," a sentiment that extends to its application to Iraq.

Last week, European Union officials in Brussels sought to reduce the amount of information given to US agencies on air passengers leaving Europe. An official in charge of data protection for the European Central Bank similarly advised that millions of pieces of financial information being sent regularly to the US after Sept. 11 were in violation of EU privacy codes.

The "secret, routine, and massive access" by US agencies to banking SWIFT codes – needed to transfer in and out of European financial institutions – is "unacceptable," stated Peter Hustinx, the Brussels official responsible for EU data oversight.

Boosting this sentiment is Europeans' recognition that the US is also in flux with an election season starting up, and that President Bush's term appears to be winding down with the United States in a vulnerable position overseas.

The US legal basis for conducting interrogation centers at Guantánamo Bay, for example, has long rankled in Europe.

"Most of the French opinion, many of the German people, a large share of the Labor constituency in the UK, the Spanish, and now Italy, don't just oppose the policy, but the basis of US policy," says Georges Le Guelte, of the Institute for International and Strategic Relations in Paris. "You can't have renditions and Guantánamo and talk human rights at the same time. That is more clear to many of us."

In Italy, prosecutors put out warrants several months ago for 25 members of a CIA team that abducted a Muslim cleric in Milan.

Nor is Europe alone in its willingness to speak more pointedly to the White House about its foreign affairs. On page 1 of last Thursday's People's Daily, a newspaper of record in China, a Chinese official criticized Mr. Bush for inflammatory rhetoric that turned the war in Iraq into a "religious war."

The comment was unprecedented in a state where official decorum is rigidly maintained. (For nearly a decade, China has conducted a brutal campaign of summary executions of Muslims in its far-west Xinjiang region, as documented in human rights reports.)

In the case of the Munich renditions, announced Jan. 31, 13 American CIA operatives allegedly apprehended German citizen Khaled el-Masri in Macedonia in 2004 and whisked him to an Afghan prison called "the Salt Pit." Realizing he was the wrong man, they left him on a hillside in Albania five months later, warning him never to talk of his experience. Mr. el-Masri instead filed suit in a Virginia court. Masri's case was dropped in Virginia after arguments that a trial would jeopardize US security operations.

But with help from Spanish police, the Munich prosecutors discovered the identity of the operatives through flight and hotel records in Palma de Mallorca, where they stopped to relax.

On Friday, in Washington, German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier told US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the Munich warrants were only valid in Germany at present, but that Berlin felt the local court might issue an international warrant, according to German papers.

Ms. Rice said the warrants would not harm US-German relations. Justice Department officials have not responded to approaches by the German prosecutors.

By Robert Marquand | Staff writer

Bush and Cheney's dirty secrets

A former top CIA official blows the whistle on bogus intelligence, covert kidnappings and the alleged torture of terror suspects.

By Georg Mascolo and Holger Stark

Feb. 05, 2007 | Tyler Drumheller, 54, had a 25-year career working for the CIA. In 2001, he was promoted to become the intelligence agency's chief of European operations. The controversial kidnappings by CIA agents of suspected al-Qaida terrorists -- including the German-Syrian Mohammed Haydar Zammar and the German-Lebanese Khaled el-Masri -- happened under his watch. Drumheller, who retired in 2005, recently published his memoir, "On the Brink," in the United States. He spoke recently about the CIA's role in international kidnappings and alleged torture (including Europe's cooperation with the U.S. government), Dick Cheney's mandate to go to the "dark side" in the war on terror, and the bogus intelligence that unleashed the nightmare in Iraq.

Arrest warrants have been issued in Europe for a number of your former colleagues. They are suspected of involvement in the illegal kidnappings of suspected terrorists as part of the so-called renditions program. Doesn't this worry you?

No. I'm not worried, but I am not allowed to discuss the issue.

One of the cases is the now-famous kidnapping of Khalid el-Masri, a German-Lebanese who was taken into custody at the end of 2003 in Macedonia and later flown to Afghanistan. How could the CIA allow an innocent person to be arrested?

I'm not allowed by the agency to comment on any of those cases or the so-called secret prisons. I would love to, but I can't. We have a lifelong secrecy agreement, and they are very, very strict about what you can say.

The so-called rendition program saw the kidnapping of suspected Islamist extremists, who were taken to third countries. Were you involved in the program?

I would be lying if I said no. I have very complicated feelings about the whole issue. I do see the purpose of renditions if they are carried out properly. Guys sitting around talking about carrying out attacks as they smoke their pipes in the comfort of a European capital tend to get put off the idea if they learn that a like-minded individual has been plucked out of safety and sent elsewhere to pay for his crimes.

But at the very least, don't you need to be certain that the targets of those renditions aren't innocent people?

It was Vice President Dick Cheney who talked about the "dark side" we have to turn on. When he spoke those words, he was articulating a policy that amounted to "go out and get them." His remarks were evidence of the underlying approach of the administration, which was basically to turn the military and the agency loose and let them pay for the consequences of any unfortunate -- or illegal -- occurrences.

So there was no clear guidance of what is allowed in the so-called war on terrorism?

Every responsible chief in the CIA knows that the more covert the action, the greater the need for a clear policy and a defined target. I once had to brief Condoleezza Rice on a rendition operation, and her chief concern was not whether it was the right thing to do, but what the president would think about it. I would have expected a big meeting, a debate about whether to proceed with the plan, a couple of hours of consideration of the pros and cons. We should have been talking about the value of the target, whether the threat he presented warranted such a potentially controversial intervention.

This was no way to run a covert policy. If the White House wants to take extraordinary measures to win, it can't just let things go through without any discussion about their value and morality.

Perhaps the White House wanted to gloss over its own responsibility?

Let me give you a general thought: From the perspective of the White House, it was smart to blur the lines about what was acceptable and what was not in the war on terrorism. It meant that whenever someone was overzealous in some dark interrogation cell, President Bush and his entourage could blame someone else. The rendition teams are drawn from paramilitary officers who are brave and colorful. They are the men who went into Baghdad before the bombs and into Afghanistan before the army. If they didn't do paramilitary actions for a living, they would probably be robbing banks. Perhaps the Bush administration deliberately created a gray area on renditions.

Investigations by various European officials are trying to ascertain the extent to which European governments cooperated with the CIA after the Sept. 11 terror attacks. How close is the relationship?

On terrorist issues, very close -- we did some very good things with the Europeans. Two weeks after Sept. 11, August Hanning [the head of the German foreign intelligence service, the BND] came with a delegation to discuss how we can make cooperation better. Elements of the Bush administration developed the view that European personal privacy laws were somehow to blame, that the Europeans are too slow. We can be very frustrating to work with. I always said, "Stop preaching to them. The Europeans have been dealing with terrorism for years. We can learn from their successes and failures."

How important is Europe to the CIA?

The only way we will ever be able to protect ourselves properly is if we can get a handle on the threat in Europe, since that is the continent where fanatics can best learn their most crucial lesson: how to disappear in a Western crowd. Europe has become the first line of defense for the United States. It has become a training ground for terrorists, especially since the war in Iraq has heralded an underground railroad for militants to go and fight there. It is being used for young fanatics in Europe to be smuggled into Iraq to fight Americans and, assuming they survive, to return home, where they present a more potent threat than they did before they left. Since the odds against penetrating the top of al-Qaida are phenomenally high, we must pursue the foot soldiers.

But given the public uproar across Europe, will those countries continue fully cooperating with the CIA?

The guys who attacked the World Trade Center didn't fly from Kabul to New York. They came from Hamburg. So the value in befriending the local intelligence services in Europe instead of alienating them is clear: We need to ensure that they are telling us everything they know.

But it was your agency that was coming up with all the wrong information concerning Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction. To what degree is the U.S. intelligence community responsible for the disaster?

The agency is not blameless, and no president on my watch has had a spotless record when it comes to the CIA. But never before have I seen the manipulation of intelligence that has played out since Bush took office. As chief of Europe I had a front-row seat from which to observe the unprecedented drive for intelligence justifying the Iraq war.

One of the crucial bits of information the Bush administration used to justify the invasion was the supposed existence of mobile biological weapons laboratories. That came from a German BND source who was given the code name Curveball. An official investigation in the United States concluded that of all of the false statements that were made, this was the most damaging of all.

I think it is, it was, a centerpiece. Curveball was an Iraqi who claimed to be an engineer working on the biological weapons program. When he became an asylum seeker in Germany, the BND questioned him and produced a large number of reports that were passed here through the Defense Intelligence Agency. Curveball was a sort of clever fellow who carried on about his story and kept everybody pretty well convinced for a long time.

There are more than a few critics in Washington who claim that the Germans, because of Curveball, bear a large part of the responsibility for the intelligence mess.

There was no effort by the Germans to influence anybody from the beginning. Very senior officials in the BND expressed their doubts, that there may be problems with this guy. They were very professional. I know that there are people at the CIA who think the Germans could have set stronger caveats. But nobody says: "Here's a great intel report, but we don't believe it." There were also questions inside the CIA's analytical section, but as it went forward, this information was seized without caveats. The administration wanted to make the case for war with Iraq. They needed a tangible thing -- they needed the German stuff. They couldn't go to war based just on the fact that they wanted to change the Middle East. They needed to have something threatening to which they were reacting.

The German government was convinced that "Curveball" would not be used in the now-famous presentation that then U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell gave in 2003 before the United Nations Security Council.

I had assured my German friends that it wouldn't be in the speech. I really thought that I had put it to bed. I had warned the CIA deputy, John McLaughlin, that this case could be fabricated. The night before the speech, then-CIA director George Tenet called me at home. I said: "Hey, Boss, be careful with that German report. It's supposed to be taken out. There are a lot of problems with that." He said: "Yeah, yeah. Right. Don't worry about that."

But it turned out to be the centerpiece in Powell's presentation -- and nobody had told him about the doubts.

I turned on the TV in my office, and there it was. So the first thing I thought, having worked in the government all my life, was that we probably gave Powell the wrong speech. We checked our files and found out that they had just ignored it.

So the White House just ignored the fact that the whole story might have been untrue?

The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming, and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy. Right before the war, I said to a very senior CIA officer: "You guys must have something else," because you always think it's the CIA. "There is some secret thing I don't know." He said: "No. But when we get to Baghdad, we are going to find warehouses full of stuff. Nobody is going to remember all of this."

In your book, you mention a very high-ranking source who told the CIA before the war that Iraq had no large active WMD program. It has been reported that the source was Saddam Hussein's foreign minister, Naji Sabri.

I'm not allowed to say who that was. In the beginning, the administration was very excited that we had a high-level penetration, and the president was informed. I don't think anybody else had a source in Saddam's cabinet. He told us that Iraq had no biological weapons, just the research. Everything else had been destroyed after the first Gulf War. But after a while we didn't get any questions back. Finally the administration came and said that they were really not interested in what he had to say. They were interested in getting him to defect. In the end we did get permission to get back to the source, and that came from Tenet. I think without checking with the White House, he just said: "OK. Go ahead and see what you can do."

So what happened?

There were a lot of ironies throughout this whole story. We went on a sort of worldwide chase after this fellow, and in the end, he was in one place, and our officer was in another country asking for permission to travel. I called up people who were controlling operations, and they said: "Don't worry about it. It's too late now. The war is on. The next time you see this guy, it will be at a war crimes tribunal."

Should you have pressed harder?

We made mistakes. And it may suit the White House to have people believe in a black-and-white version of reality -- that it could have avoided the Iraq war if the CIA had only given it a true picture of Saddam's armaments. But the truth is that the White House believed what it wanted to believe. I have done very little in my life except go to school and work for the CIA. Intellectually I think I did everything I could. Emotionally you always think you should have something more.

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