Secret cables reveal Washington intervened in Italy to defend CIA kidnappers

[http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/dec2010/omar-d23.shtml]

By David Walsh
23 December 2010

The German magazine Spiegel reported December 17 that secret US diplomatic dispatches, released by WikiLeaks, reveal how American authorities put pressure on the Italian government to protect CIA agents responsible for kidnapping and torture.
US officials intervened aggressively with the government of Silvio Berlusconi, going so far as to threaten damaged relations between the two countries, to suppress the case against two dozen CIA agents who abducted Egyptian Islamist cleric Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, known as Abu Omar, in 2003.
In one of the most widely publicized cases of the illegal US practice of “extraordinary rendition,” Omar was abducted in broad daylight from the streets of Milan, taken to the US Air Force base at Aviano, and eventually transported to Cairo, where he was brutally tortured over the course of 14 months. He claims US agents were present during the abuse and interrogation. The imam was released by Egyptian authorities in 2004, later re-arrested and then released for good in 2007, with no criminal charges ever having been laid. He remains under house arrest.
Italian prosecutor Armando Spataro pieced together the CIA plot against Omar over the course of five years. The investigation led to the indictment of 26 Americans, including CIA and military personnel. Successive Italian governments, however, refused or ignored the prosecutors’ extradition requests.
In November 2009, a Milan judge—in the absence of the defendants—handed down sentences of five years in jail for 21 CIA operatives and a US Air Force officer and a sentence of eight years in prison for the primary organizer of the kidnapping, the former Milan CIA station chief, Robert Lady. Another three American citizens—including Lady’s boss, Jeff Castelli, head of the CIA in Italy in 2003—were acquitted on the grounds that they enjoyed diplomatic immunity. See: [Italian court convicts US agents in CIA rendition case [6 November 2009] http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/nov2009/ital-n06.shtml]
Spiegel explains that starting in 2007, when the legal proceedings against the CIA kidnappers began in earnest, “the US government tried to intervene—first in Milan and then in Rome—so as to influence the investigations of the public prosecutor’s office.” The documents, reports the German periodical, “provide detailed descriptions of how both the American ambassador and US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates exerted direct pressure on the Italian government in Rome.”
Gates and the US ambassador wanted to be certain that the Berlusconi regime would use its influence to prevent international arrest warrants being issued for the CIA agents accused of involvement in the Abu Omar abduction, the type of arrest warrant issued for Julian Assange of WikiLeaks on phony sexual assault charges.
In May 2006, Spiegel reports, the American ambassador “relayed a threatening message: If arrest warrants were in fact issued, it could lead to a drastic deterioration in bilateral relations.” In notes following a conversation with a high-ranking Italian government official, the US ambassador wrote that he had explained that “nothing would damage relations faster or more seriously than a decision by the government of Italy to forward warrants for arrests” of the CIA agents in question.
The Italian government was more than happy to oblige. As Spiegel notes, “Even before the Americans started exerting pressure, the Italian government had already been doing all it could to cover up the Abu Omar affair,” in which its intelligence services were deeply involved. The magazine adds, “Other cables create the impression of a subservient stance on the part of the Italians—to the point that they became active accomplices. With startling frankness, members of the government suggest to the Americans that Italy’s independent judiciary could be easily manipulated.”
Discussions of this highly damaging affair went on at the highest levels. Defense Secretary Gates met with Prime Minister Berlusconi in February 2010 in an effort to obtain immunity for Joseph Romano, a US Air Force officer and one of those convicted in November 2009. According to a cable made public by WikiLeaks, Berlusconi told Gates that he “was working hard to resolve the situation.”
The Italian prime minister also told the Pentagon’s top man that the country’s justice system was “dominated by leftists” and that he had many enemies, especially among the public prosecutors. Berlusconi also predicted that the “courts will come down in our favor” on appeal.
On December 15, an Italian appeals court increased the sentences against the 23 Americans convicted in the abduction. The court added one year to the eight-year term handed down to former CIA station chief Lady and two years to the five-year terms given to the other 22 Americans convicted. The CIA criminals remain at liberty, but run the risk of arrest if they travel to Europe.

Books of Note: Descent into Chaos

Regional perspective on an escalating crisis

Ahmed Rashid dissects the tangled geopolitical mess in his native part of the world with insight, warm sensitivity and a readable style that focuses on the human element at the heart of events

JANICE KENNEDY, Canwest News Service; Ottawa Citizen

Published: Saturday, August 09

Canada figures into Rashid's book, but only marginally. He cites the Maher Arar case in "America Shows the Way," his chapter on torture, renditions and secret jails. But the country itself appears primarily as just another member - albeit a fully contributing one - of a NATO presence that has been confused and misguided. He also writes of Canada's ongoing public debate on its role in Afghanistan, a heated discussion echoed by other NATO members.

"The critical mistake Canada made,"

he said in our interview,

"was that it had no policy toward Pakistan. It just went along with whatever the Americans were telling them." This had its impact as Canada arrived in Kandahar, where it "didn't have a clue about what to expect. You can not look at Afghanistan without looking at the neighbouring countries. You need to have a strategic policy that looks at the entire region."

His recommended strategic policy would also address what he calls the "biggest conundrum," the vast and proliferating safe havens for Islamist terrorists along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

Rashid says he is not entirely without hope. But in the disastrous narrative of that powder-keg world he knows so well and describes with such compelling authority in Descent into Chaos, it will be difficult for the average reader to share that sliver of optimism.

DESCENT INTO CHAOS, by Ahmed Rashid, Viking, 544 pages, $31.

repost on the Maher Arar case (timely, eh?)

Canadian authorities complicit in Arar’s illegal detention and torture

By Keith Jones
18 November 2003

Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien has condemned US authorities for their treatment of Maher Arar—the Syrian-born Canadian citizen whom the US deported to Syria so he could be detained without charge and tortured. “It is completely unacceptable and deplorable,” declared Chrétien the day after Arar had held a press conference to explain how US officials had deported him to Syria over his vehement objections and how in Syria he had been held in a tiny cell and savagely beaten.

Washington’s treatment of Arar was abhorrent and criminal. (See Washington’s practice of torture by proxy: the Maher Arar Case.) Chrétien’s denunciation of the conduct of US immigration and security officials, however, fits to a tee the old adage, “he doth protest too much.” Especially since Chrétien has categorically refused to call a public inquiry into the role Canadian authorities played in Arar’s ordeal.

US officials, including Secretary of State Colin Powell, have said that the US only detained Arar because Canadian police and security agencies—the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and probably also the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS)—had identified him as a terrorist suspect. Yet Chrétien has brushed this aside, saying anything that happened to Arar was the fault of US immigration, police and intelligence agencies.

Arar became suspicious that he had been fingered by Canadian authorities when his US interrogators revealed an extensive knowledge of his life in Canada. “They were consulting a report while they were questioning me,” Arar told a November 4 news conference, “and the information was so private, I thought this must come from Canada.”

Arar’s US interrogators confronted him with a copy of the lease he took out on an Ottawa house in 1997 that had been co-signed by another Syrian-born Canadian, Abdullah Almalki. They also told him that he had been observed eating a meal in an Ottawa fast-food restaurant with Almalki.

The subsequent conduct of Canadian authorities indicates that Canada’s security and diplomatic establishment, or at the very least important elements of it, condoned, if not actively sought, Arar’s deportation to Syria.

* Although the Canadian government ultimately protested against Arar’s detention in Syria, CSIS agents reportedly travelled to Damascus to obtain information from the Syrian regime about the “confession” its interrogators had beaten out of him.

* In recent weeks, information about Arar’s forced confession has been leaked to the Canadian media. The source of the leak has not been identified, but undoubtedly it can be traced back to elements within the RCMP and/or CSIS who are anxious to discredit Arar, the better to defend their own role in fingering him.

* According to the Toronto Star, the US Ambassador to Canada, Paul Cellucci, reportedly told a private audience that Canada wanted Arar detained in Syria.

* The Canadian consular official who met with Arar while he was being detained in New York dismissed his warning that he was in danger of being deported to Syria.

* In August, Canadian Foreign Minister Bill Graham reported that a Canadian representative had met with Arar in Syria and Arar had rejected suggestions he had been tortured. Arar says this is utterly untrue. In fact, he put himself in extreme danger by screaming to the Canadian representative that he was being abused and had been tortured. Graham has ordered an internal inquiry to determine why Arar’s account differs so radically from that of the representative who met with him.

Further questions about Canada’s role are raised by the fate of the aforementioned Abdullah Almalki. An engineer and Canadian citizen, he was arrested in May 2002 while visiting his family in Syria and has been held without charge by Syria ever since. Arar encountered Almalki while in detention in Syria and reports that he has been subjected to even worse treatment than he was.

There is every reason to believe that Almalki was arrested on the basis of suspicions raised by the Canadian intelligence authorities—suspicions the Canadian government now concedes were unwarranted. Writes Toronto Star columnist Thomas Walkom, “Abdullah Almalki, a Canadian citizen, is being tortured in a Syrian prison because the security services of his own country passes on unproven suspicions to Damascus—either directly or, more likely, through the US. ... If this is what intelligence sharing means, it must stop right now.”

Chrétien has tried to justify his refusal to call a public inquiry by saying that the Arar case has been referred to the RCMP’s Public Complaints Commissioner. Yet the Commissioner, Shirley Heafey, herself recently complained that the RCMP is not co-operating with her on terror-related enquiries, hiding behind the sweeping, new Anti-Terrorism Act.

See Also:
Washington’s practice of torture by proxy: the Maher Arar Case
[18 November 2003]

Amnesty Int'l slams tolerance of torture
Thu, 26 Jun 2008 13:40:54

Amnesty International accuses Europe of enactment over serious torture issues

Amnesty International has slammed Europe for tolerating human rights abuse and torture, highlighting cases that support its claims.

Coinciding with the UN's International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, Amnesty International has issued a report accusing European governments of complicity and inaction over US-led rendition and secret detention by which people have been unlawfully detained and transferred from one country to another outside of any judicial process.

The report focuses on a number of notorious rendition cases, one of whom is Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian national and UK resident, rendered in 2002, allegedly tortured in Morocco and now detained for nearly fours years without trial at Guantanamo Bay.

"European governments are in a state of denial and have been sidestepping the truth for too long," said Amnesty International. "Their involvement in renditions and secret detention runs in stark contrast to their claims to be responsible actors in the fight against terrorism."

The report highlights six cases involving 13 individuals, details the involvement of European states.

This ranges from governments permitting CIA flights headed for rendition circuits to use European airports and airspace, as with Shannon Airport, to hosting secret detention centers, or "black sites" and includes the participation by security services from European states in interrogations of their own citizens while concealing their whereabouts from their families.

Also US detainees are being regularly transferred to detention centers such as Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; a facility known for its brazen use of torture to extract information from prisoners.

A number of individuals have also been subjected to enforced disappearance and the whereabouts of some three dozen people remain unknown. Every one of the victims of rendition interviewed by Amnesty International has said they were tortured or otherwise ill-treated in custody.

FBA/MMN

Why is nothing said about CANADA? It used Goosebay for landings, it did illegal interrogations, it refuses to obey court orders to release Omar Khadr and there are "detainees" going around talking about their abuse !! And then there's the curious case of CHINA which "observed" illegal interrogations at Guantanamo Bay .. yet where is the international torture prosecutor on this?

Oh, yeah, I forgot! Canadian Amnesty International is ABOVE THE LAW !! And I should know.

WAR CRIMES DOSSIER: N. Carolina backs plan to make torture a felony

RALEIGH, N.C. - A North Carolina House committee is backing a plan which would make torture a felony.

A House judiciary panel on Thursday approved a plan which would ban torture and make violations punishable by prison time. Enforced disappearances, where a person is detained or abducted so they can't get due process of law, also would become felony offenses.

Rep. Paul Luebke is one of the lawmakers pushing for the bill. The Durham County Democrat said he's sponsoring the plan because it will give state officials the power to investigate Aero Contractors. The Smithfield-based company has been accused of helping the CIA ferry terrorism suspects to overseas facilities where they were allegedly tortured.

The bill now goes to the House Appropriations Committee.

Renditions ruin the EU case on human rights

Credit: Istockphoto

Collusion between European Union governments and a secret U.S. torture and kidnapping programme has damaged the EU?s efforts to promote human rights throughout the world, an internal paper drawn up by Brussels officials has admitted.

David Cronin/IPS, Brussels - In 2001, the EU approved guidelines on how diplomats representing it should raise concern over the ill-treatment of detainees with the authorities in foreign countries. These guidelines stemmed from a stated commitment to “carry out systematic and sustained action in the fight against torture.”

A new EU assessment of how the guidelines are being applied acknowledges that some governments have accused the Union of double standards because some of its member states have been implicated in the so-called extraordinary rendition scheme operated by the Central Intelligence Agency of the U.S.

The internal paper, seen by IPS, recommends special efforts to “strengthen EU credibility”.

It says that “coherence needs to be assured” between the EU's stance against torture during its foreign policy work and its own track record on protecting human rights within the Union?s own borders. “Full respect” for human rights should be guaranteed when formulating policies designed to fight terrorism, and expulsion of foreigners should not occur in cases where there is a likelihood they will be tortured, persecuted or murdered once they return to their home countries, the paper adds.

David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, confessed in February that two CIA planes used in the kidnapping and torture programme had landed in Diego Garcia, a British-controlled island in the Indian Ocean, in 2002. This was a reversal of previous denials by the London government that CIA flights had landed on British territory.

Several other EU governments, including Germany, Sweden, Portugal, Ireland and Italy have been accused of allowing their countries be used by the CIA for covert operations. Poland and Romania have both been criticised by the European Commission for their reluctance to provide information about claims that the CIA ran secret detention centres on their soil.

A 2007 report by an inquiry committee in the European Parliament concluded that at least 1,245 CIA flights passed through European airspace or stopped at the continent?s airports between the end of 2001 and the end of 2005.

Claude Moraes, a British Labour politician who sat on the Parliament's committee, said that the result of the EU's collusion with the CIA is “a credibility gap when we lecture other countries about torture.

“The allegations are not going away,”

he added, referring to reports in late April that the British security service MI5 had “outsourced” torture of United Kingdom citizens to Pakistan?s Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI).

Several British nationals arrested in Pakistan have been quoted as saying they were severely beaten by ISI agents before being interrogated by men believed to work for MI5.

Chloe Davies from Reprieve, an organisation that has carried out detailed research into the CIA?s activities, said that Europe's reputation as a defender of human rights has been tarnished.

“Little by little European powers? collusion in the kidnap, rendition and torture of terrorist suspects is coming to light,” she said. “We now know that the CIA operated ?black sites? in Poland, Romania and apparently even on British territory in Diego Garcia.

“On many occasions CIA aircraft have been allowed to land on or cross European territory, en route to the kidnap and rendition of ghost prisoners to torture in secret prisons in countries like Syria, Jordan and Egypt. In addition European governments have allowed hundreds of prisoners to be ferried through their jurisdiction to illegal imprisonment, torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment in Guantanamo Bay (the U.S.-run camp in Cuba).”

The internal EU paper also recognises that there has been criticism of flaws in the EU rules aimed at preventing the export of equipment used for torture or the death penalty.

While these rules were introduced in 2005, a report by Amnesty International published last year found that loopholes in them meant that spiked batons known as "sting sticks" used by the Chinese police and "hanging ropes" used for executions in Sri Lanka, India, and Trinidad and Tobago could still be traded.

Since the Amnesty report was issued, the British government has undertaken to ban export of spiked batons and to work with other EU governments to curb the export of torture tools not explicitly covered by the 2005 rules. Amnesty had cited examples of British-made hanging ropes being used to execute prisoners in Trinidad and Tobago and of handcuffs engraved "made in England" used to shackle detainees in Guantanamo Bay to walls and ceilings.

See also:

http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=2&view=js&name=js&ids=qk1v6dmibzrk

Revealed: torture centre linked to MI5

The ICRC at Bagram - what the mainstream media is muddying

Ok so which is it??? Apparently these guys can't pull their collective heads out of their collective arses. (just one example)


The Associated Press Red Cross: Change Needed at US Prison
The Associated Press - Apr 14, 2008
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — The Red Cross criticized the way the US handles prisoners at the highly secretive Bagram military base, urging reforms Monday that ...

Red Cross praises 'progress' at US-run jails in Afghanistan
ABC Online, Australia - Apr 14, 2008
Jacob Kellenberger cites video contact between inmates held for suspected militant ties at Bagram Air Base and their families, plus the establishment of a ...

Rick Hillier, Hamid Karzai, Stephen Harper, Dick Cheney, the CIA and NATO

I have more "dots" for those who truly have any interested educating themselves.

The news seems to suggest Hillier did not retire, but was squeezed out
by Harper who did not like Hillier stealing the limelight. No one is going to steal The Harper's great thunder!! No way!! and he's got the powers that be totally behind his corrupt little agenda - for now.

I've posted comment often on Linda McQuaig's book Holding the Bully's Coat.

Rick Hillier is a deeply evil man with extraordinarily advanced skills at selling an illegal war whose main purpose was to raised a trillion a
year for corrupt officials and military people and the armaments industry. He's more "compromised" than even General Patreaus.

This (fill in the blank yourself) Hillier must take a huge share of the blame for building Afghanistan up from non-existent to #1 world's heroin exporter -- a trillion dollars a year. 90% of the Karzai economy is based on heroin.

Hillier could easily have put a stop to it.

Many hope that Revenue Canada follows this drug lord like a hawk for the rest of his life. We hope that if he ever spends a penny of that heroin money I want him locked up for life.

Why? Because he acted as hit man for the planet's biggest heroin
dealer, Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan.

Well if you still want to think that the Afghan war is about fighting for freedom and democracy, go ahead. By looking the other way you help the abuse exist - abuse that mainly falls on the heads of innocent women and children - orphans, wives of the maimed, the girls who are sold to make marriages to old men, young children being held in detention, children now forced into cities to beg, women who cry day and night ..

If you think places like Bagram should exist and Rendition take place - well, I reproach you.

If you think Canada is a bastion of freedom and democracy, I implore you to take a deeper look.

If you think there aren't gigantic offshore accounts for all these corrupt officials and the official drug dealers, then I point out you are in denial and it is SO.

Canoe.caMaxime-um damage
TheChronicleHerald.ca, Canada - 12 hours ago
If the Canadian foreign minister wanted to persuade President Hamid Karzai to replace the governor of Kandahar province, he certainly blew the sensitive ...
Afghan tribal leaders welcome Harper's pledge not to meddle Toronto Star
Karzai should replace Kandahar governor: BernieICTV.ca


I ran across these ever so enlightening urls while looking for a pic of Hamid Karzai

http://www.embassyofafghanistan.org/july2007newsletter.html

http://www.afghanemb-canada.net/en/news_bulletin/2006/march/20/index.php

This is my most favorite line of all!! --

American policy may sometimes be unsubtle and overly militarized, but large portions of the European political spectrum remain maddeningly passive. It's a failing that reverberates well beyond Afghanistan. On Darfur, today's most serious humanitarian crisis, Europe has been even more disengaged and timid than the United States. Afghanistan is as good a place as any for Europe to start backing its sensibilities with some mettle.

David Bosco is a senior editor at Foreign Policy.

See those human rights activists in socialist EU countries are to blame for ALL the genocide.

Get it?

Foreign military bases have served as launch pads for American military adventures. Increasingly, they are also being used as CIA 'black sites'.

With California weather in my blood, Cape Cod spring feels like an extension of winter.

What keeps me warm until summer comes is baseball -- and fantasies about vacationing on a tropical island like Guam, where my 6th- and 7th-grade best friend, David Reed, and his Navy dad were transferred to from the now defunct Oakland Navy Base.

"Where's Guam?" I asked.

"It's some tropical island in the North Pacific Ocean. Kinda like Hawaii, but no tourists," Dave said. Then, already honing my gift of asking conversation-changing questions, I said: "Why do we have a base in Guam?"

It wasn't until years later I learned that Guam is a key FOB. That's military jargon for "forward operating base," just one of a million or so military acronyms.

In a world where America is the self-appointed global cop, a FOB is like a police precinct -- a strategically located substation from which hardware and personnel can be quickly dispatched to keep the neighborhood rabble in line.

Diego Garcia is the other key FOB that people who consider themselves well-informed about the Busheviks "war on terror" ought to know about.

David Vine, assistant professor of anthropology at American University and author of the forthcoming book Island of Shame: The Secret History of Exile and Empire on Diego Garcia, details the post 9/11 significance of these FOB's, especially Diego Garcia -- the coveted military outpost in the Indian Ocean's Chagos Archipelago, where the beaches look like one of those Corona beer commercials.

In the 1950s, U.S. war planners were worried about local populations catching the decolonization bug sweeping the Third World. So the U.S. Navy came up with the "Strategic Island Concept," which, in part, identified the British colony of Diego Garcia as a good place to build an isolated base, helping to ensure that former colonial subjects in the Middle East and Africa understood that freedom means whatever the hell the Washington consensus says it means.

But, there was one small problem. Actually, 2,000 small problems -- the Chagossians, with ties to the island since the Portuguese first shipped in slaves and indentured laborers from Africa and India in the late 18th century to work the coconut plantations run by French Mauritians.

When British officials were secretly negotiating a 50-year lease with the U.S. in the 1960s, British diplomats were cutting a deal to give Mauritius its independence -- minus Diego Garcia, which just so happens to be in violation of the U.N. Charter, if you're into that kind of namby-pamby stuff like me.

The Brit playbook called for the Palestine play -- relocate much, if not all, of the indigenous population into a neighboring country to make way for new settlers. For the Palestinians, GB had Jordan in mind. For the Chagossians, it was Mauritius that was to absorb the dispossessed.

Of course, the Chagossian problem would be a lot easier to handle because there were only a couple thousand refugees and not several hundred thousand with milennia-old roots in "holy land." And like Golda Meier famously described Palestinians, the Chagossians have been said not to exist, which explains why most mainstream news accounts of the tiny atoll include some line about it being "an uninhabited island" -- a remnant of British government propaganda intended to "as one official put it, 'maintaining the fiction' that the Chagossians were transient contract workers rather than people with roots in Chagos for five generations or more," Vine observes.

Vine goes on to point out the growing military importance of DG ever since the Chagossians took their coconuts to Mauritius. Fast forward to forward operating base Diego Garcia during Gulf War I. It served as the prepositioned weapons-and-supply cache for Marines sent to Saudi Arabia in 1991. The island, named after a ship, later became a launch pad for lobbing long-range bombs on Iraq.

After the '91 war, "the dream for many in the military became the ability to strike any location on the planet from Barksdale Air Base in Louisiana, Guam in the Pacific, or Diego Garcia," Vine reports.

After the 9/11 attacks, DG became even more strategically significant. The Air Force sent 2,000 of its personnel to a new 30-acre housing facility there called "Camp Justice."

(Seriously, who the hell comes up with these ridiculous names)?

When the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan began, B-1, B-2, and B-52 bomber sorties were flown out of "Camp Justice" and the island's blue lagoons were used to store prepositioned weapons and supplies for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

In 2006, with the publication of Stephen Grey's Ghost Plane documenting the presence of a CIA-chartered plane used for rendition flights at DG, reports of "Camp Justice" being a CIA "black site" for detainee interrogation started to eke out. Official rumors were followed by a Council of Europe report identifying Diego Garcia as a secret CIA prison location, along with "black sites" in Poland and Romania.

This past February, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband told Parliament he learned of two instances when the Bush administration, in violation of the base lease with Britain, used Diego Garcia like a Guantanamo University satellite campus.

"The State Department's chief legal adviser said CIA officials were 'as confident as they can be' that no other detainees had been held on the island ... Within days, U.N. special investigator Manfred Novak announced new evidence that others had been imprisoned on the island. Many suspect the United States may hold detainees on secret prison ships in Diego Garcia's lagoon or elsewhere in the waters of Chagos."

With the legal dye having already been cast for secret "renditions" of murkily-defined "enemy-combatants," kept in secret prisons without recourse to Habeas corpus, consider yourself warned. If some guy in a suit approaches you on the street and says you've won a free dream trip to the exclusive tropical paradise of Diego Garcia -- RUN!

Photos I've seen of the island are gorgeous but it would be hard to appreciate the beauty while getting waterboarded.

In the meantime, you might ask your Congressman: why there hasn't been hearings on where -- and what -- in the world is Diego Garcia and those other FOB's?

See more stories tagged with: black sites, cia, military outposts, forward operating base, diego garcia, guam

Sean Gonsalves is a syndicated columnist and news editor with the Cape Cod Times.

More torturegate cointel pro BS .. JOhn RADSEN at seminar!!

Expert: Rendition vital but overused

Jay Price, Staff Writer

DURHAM - The man who started the controversial Central Intelligence Agency program that snatches terrorism suspects from one country and flies them to another for interrogation referred to it Friday as "the single most effective counterterrorism program in American history."

It should have a lesser role, though, and would be unnecessary if the United States were not improperly trying to force democracy on other countries, said Michael Scheuer, who worked for the CIA for 22 years, nearly all of them in covert operations.

Scheuer was speaking at a Duke University conference on how the next presidential administration might handle some of the more difficult aspects of fighting terrorism. He was on a panel about the CIA program, which is called "extraordinary rendition."

When the practice became public, it triggered outrage and protests around the world and legal action against CIA workers in Europe, where some of the suspects were captured. Opponents think that many of the countries where suspects are taken torture them.

Some of the protests have taken place at the Johnston County airport used by Aero Contractors Ltd., a company widely thought to be a front for CIA aircraft operations. A German court indicted several members of the company's air crews last year in connection with a rendition.

It's often overlooked, Scheuer said, that the practice began not with President George W. Bush but under his predecessor, Bill Clinton. Claims by Clinton administration officials that prisoners were sent only to countries that agreed to treat them according to U.S. laws weren't true, he said, adding that it's hard to imagine a country that would agree to such restrictions.

Scheuer ran the rendition program from its start in July 1995 to June 1999, he said.

Under Clinton, the program was different, he said. For one thing, there was little interest in information gleaned from interrogations.

CIA officials thought the country doing the questioning would alter the information to deceive the United States. Also, it had become clear that al-Qaida operatives had been trained to give either bad information or huge volumes of facts that were accurate but so dated that the United States would waste time investigating them.

So instead of interrogations, the CIA tried to get documents in either tape or digital form that the operatives might be carrying with them, Scheuer said.

Under Bush, he said, the emphasis changed to interrogations and having the CIA perform them.

The program is still vital, he said, but was never intended to be such a central source for crucial intelligence about terrorism. It was meant to complement other efforts, such as the work of special operations units and diplomacy.

Others on the Duke panel said that rendition may be effective in the short term but that any rational evaluation of it would require considering long-term effects that may be hard to quantify -- such as the erosion it causes to the reputation of the United States abroad.

The program should be shut down, said Aziz Huq, an expert on detention cases involving national security who is with New York University Law School. Huq said it is corrosive to democratic government in places such as Egypt and Pakistan, where proper governments are crucial in long-term efforts to fight terrorism.

There need to be more congressional oversight and more internal controls, such as an ombudsman, said former CIA lawyer and former federal prosecutor John Radson,[sic. why?? Its' RADSAN] now an associate professor at William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, Minn. These controls should be made public, even if details about the program aren't.

"We should let the world know that we are going to not be doing this willy-nilly, but that the program is important," Radson [sic] said. "When you have 100, 150 people who have been rendered, you can't just say we're going to have a mistake or two."

jay.price@newsobserver.com or (919) 829-4526

I also notice that cointelpro or WHOEVER has taken off many of my items on RENDTION

and torture.

How friggin handy for them ..

Here is an important video with Radsan to watch:

Torturegate: Human Rights Watch on Jordian blacksites

Rights group: CIA sent terror suspects to Jordan

By DALE GAVLAK
Associated Press

AMMAN, Jordan — A human rights group said Tuesday that the CIA transferred at least 14 terror suspects to Jordan for interrogation after 9/11.

Human Rights Watch said in a new report that the U.S. ally in the Mideast served as a proxy jailer for the CIA until at least 2004.

"The Bush administration claims that it has not transferred people to foreign custody for abusive interrogation,"

said Joanne Mariner, the group's terrorism and counterterrorism director.

"But we've documented more than a dozen cases in which prisoners were sent to Jordan for torture."

It said its 36-page report was based mainly on information from former Jordanian prisoners who had been detained with non-Jordanian terrorism suspects.

The group charged that Jordan commonly tortured suspects with extended beatings on the soles of their feet.

But Jordan's State Minister for Information Nasser Judeh called the findings "baseless and untrue," the official Petra news agency reported.

The CIA declined to comment on the report, with spokesman Paul Gimigliano saying that "the agency does not, as a rule, comment publicly on allegations of specific rendition activities." But he defended renditions as a "lawful, valuable tool."

"They have been used for years to take terrorists off the streets," he said. "The United States does not transport individuals for the purpose of torture, and has no interest in any process that would produce bad intelligence."

U.S. officials have acknowledged flying up to 150 of the most serious suspected terrorists secretly from one country to another, but have said they received diplomatic assurances from foreign authorities that they would not be tortured.

"No other country is believed to have held as many as Jordan," New York-based Human Rights Watch said.

While there have been general allegations that Jordan cooperated with the covert operations, along with Egypt and Saudi Arabia, Tuesday's report, if confirmed, would be the most detailed account yet of the extent of Jordanian involvement.

Human Rights Watch said at least five Yemenis, three Algerians, two Saudis, a Mauritanian, a Syrian, a Tunisian, and one or more Chechens from Russia were rendered to Jordan. Five of them are now in U.S. custody in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, it said.

old - reminder about those supporting rendition/kidnap

O! Canada! and major CIA pilot was let go after being found in Canada after the CIA plane went down in Mexico on the way to the Azores ..

Is anyone seeing the connections yet.

What does extraordinary rendition have to do with drug running?

I'll BET WE FIND OUT SOON.

When does Canada FINALLY get intel oversight? When does USCANADA complicity in war crimes end?

When does the Canadian Parliament GET WITH IT ?? When does government start to serve the people ???

Stay tuned.

Veeger

Eyewitness Account of CIA Abduction

Extraordinary Rendition Comes out of the Closet

(11-28-05) "Irish anti-war activists, meanwhile, say a plane known to be involved in the so-called "extraordinary rendition programme" has landed at Shannon Airport in Co Clare on numerous occasions."

from the Wayne Madsen report:

(11-20-05) November 20, 2005 -- CIA torture flights remain in operation. On November 18, a CIA aircraft, a CASA CN-235-300 turboprop, tail number N196D, operated by front company Devon Holding and Leasing, Inc. of Lexington, North Carolina, was recorded as traveling from Iceland to St. John's, Newfoundland, to Manchester, New Hampshire and finally to Johnson County Airport in Smithfield, North Carolina.

N196D stopped in Malta, on May 17, 2004 -- its itinerary was Halifax-St.John's-Keflavik-Edinburgh-Frankfurt-Malta-Amman-Afghanistan. Paper work filed indicated two owners: Devon Holding and Leasing and Stevens Express Leasing Company of Tennessee, another front company being investigated by the Spanish Interior Ministry for fronting for torture flights through Mallorca, Ibiza, and Tenerife in the Canary Islands.

A similar Devon-owned aircraft, tail number N168D, flew a route from St. John's to Keflavik, Iceland and on to Prague on April 6, 2005. It was also reported to have landed in Malta on August 12, 2005; Palma de Mallorca on January 16, 2005; and Ponta Delgada in the Azores on January 11, 2005 for a stop while en route from St. John's to Cagliari, Sardinia.

A former Piedmont Airlines Boeing 737, now CIA torture plane, tail number N313P (re-registered as N4476S), was spotted on the runway at Palma de Mallorca on January 23, 2004. CIA front owners have been variably listed as Premier Executive Transport Services and Keeler and Tate Management, both linked to Jeppesen Dataplan of California. The Boeing 737 was also spotted in Tulsa; Geneva; Oporto, Portugal; and Frankfurt.

Another CIA front company is called Prescott Support. Its C-130, the L-100-30 Hercules, (the same aircraft type reported to be involved with flying around "crated" prisoners) has been spotted at Frankfurt, Singapore (Changi), Kuala Lumpur's Subang Airport (parked in an isolated position away from other aircraft just a few weeks following the Indian Ocean tsunami), Malta, Ponta Delgada (Azores), Kuwait, Oporto (Portugal), Helsinki (Vantaa), and Kenya. Another Prescott Support plane, a DeHavilland Twin Otter/VistaLiner, was identified on a long flight in October 2004 from North Las Vegas to Prescott, Arizona to Starkville, Mississippi to Florence, South Carolina to Wilmington, North Carolina to Goose Bay, Labrador to Reykjavik's city airport in Iceland to Stansted, London, England to Cairo to Kenya.

Reprieve.org reports on rendition and black sites

Publications: Reprieve Reports

• Off the Record: Report on US Responsibility for Enforced Dissapearances in the "War on Terror"
• Council of Europe Report: Reprieve Calls for Immediate Investigation of Secret Prison on British Island of Diego Garcia
• UK Residents in GTMO - BETRAYED BY BRITAIN? Briefing from Clive Stafford Smith, Legal Director of Reprieve
• REPORT: Mass Rendition, Incommunicado Detention and Possible Torture of Foreign Nationals in Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia
• Reprieve releases interim report on suicides in Guantánamo Bay including first-hand information about the dead men and their hunger strike
• Reprieve reports of growing evidence of British governmental involvement in the seizure and rendition of Bisher Al-Rawi and Jamil El-Banna, British residents “grabbed in The Gambia”, sent for torture in the “Dark Prison” in Kabul, and then taken to Guantanamo Bay

Fresh questions on torture flights spark demands for inquiry

• Richard Norton-Taylor and Duncan Campbell
• The Guardian,
• Monday March 10 2008

About this article

Close

This article appeared in the Guardian on Monday March 10 2008 on p9 of the UK news section. It was last updated at 00:04 on March 10 2008.

MPs and human rights groups yesterday demanded an independent inquiry into the use of UK territory by CIA "torture flights" as fresh questions emerged over the government's handling of the issue.

Ministers are coming under growing pressure as officials made it clear they still could not be certain of the extent to which US aircraft made use of British facilities when taking alleged terrorists to prisons where they were likely to be subjected to inhumane treatment.

Last month, David Miliband, the foreign secretary, apologised to MPs, admitting that contrary to "earlier explicit assurances" two flights had landed at Diego Garcia, the British Indian Ocean territory where the US has a large airbase. He said the flights had refuelled there, and each had had a single detainee on board who did not leave the aircraft.

British and US officials have refused to give details about the two detainees other than that one was in Guantánamo Bay and the other had been released. Miliband said he had asked his officials for a list of all flights on which rendition had been alleged.

British officials said yesterday they were "working behind the scenes" in an attempt to get more information from the Americans. The Guardian has learned that Lord Malloch Brown, the Foreign Office minister, has spoken to Manfred Novak, the UN's special investigator on torture, about the alleged use of Diego Garcia as a detention centre to hold US suspects.

Novak said he had credible evidence from sources he could not reveal that detainees were held on the island between 2002 and 2003. British officials say they have no evidence of this. Some representatives of human rights groups who met FCO officials last week suggested records of the CIA flights may have been destroyed.

Flight plan records show that one of the aircraft, registered N379P, flew in September 2002 from Diego Garcia to Morocco. From there it flew to Portugal and then to Kabul. Passenger names have been blacked out. However, Reprieve, which represents prisoners faced with the death penalty and torture, said that in Kabul the aircraft picked up Al-Sharqawi and Hassan bin Attash, two suspects who were tortured in Jordan before being rendered to Afghanistan and flown to Guantánamo Bay. Those rendered through Diego Garcia remain unidentified. In a letter to Miliband, Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve's legal director, said: "It is certainly not going to rebuild public confidence if we say that two people were illegally taken through British territory but then refuse to reveal the fates of these men."

His call for an independent inquiry was echoed by Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, and Andrew Tyrie, Tory chairman of the parliamentary group on extraordinary rendition, pressed Miliband to seek more information from the US, including reports that detainees were held on the island or on US ships anchored nearby.

See also:

leged. British officials said yesterday they were "working ...

Ex-SAS man gagged for claims on UK involvement in rendition - report Indian Muslims, CA - 29 Feb 2008 By IRNA London : A former SAS soldier has been served with a High Court order after making claims about the UK's involvement in the rendition of hundreds of ...

Miliband admits US rendition flights stopped on UK soil Guardian Unlimited, UK - 21 Feb 2008 This article was first published on guardian.co.uk on Thursday February 21 2008. It was last updated at 14:14 on February 21 2008. David Miliband speaks to ...

Government admission on rendition a 'huge embarrassment', say critics Guardian Unlimited, UK - 21 Feb 2008 This article was first published on guardian.co.uk on Thursday February 21 2008. It was last updated at 14:35 on February 21 2008. ...

UK Red-faced Over Torture Flights Journal of Turkish Weekly, Turkey - 22 Feb 2008 The British paper had further published pictures of three planes linked to the CIA rendition program at Scottish airports, suggesting that the UK was a ...

Miliband isn't complicit in rendition Guardian Unlimited, UK - 22 Feb 2008 Michael White is an assistant editor of the Guardian and was its political editor from 1990-2006. I was relieved to see that today's newspapers didn't turn ...

CIA rendition flights taint UK The News - International, Pakistan - 22 Feb 2008 According to The Guardian, Miliband’s statement that he was ‘disappointed’ to have to make the admission was ‘surely an understatement. ...

Call the main Guardian and Observer switchboard: Guardian Unlimited, UK - 21 Feb 2008 He promised there would no future rendition flights without UK approval, and said there were no such requests pending. Gordon Brown, who was in Brussels ...

Extraordinary admissions Guardian Unlimited, UK - 21 Feb 2008 For more than two years, the Guardian and MPs from all political parties have made detailed allegations about Britain's complicity in CIA rendition ...

Call the main Guardian and Observer switchboard: Guardian Unlimited, UK - 21 Feb 2008 Then the foreign secretary revealed we had - if unwittingly - allowed CIA "extraordinary rendition" flights to refuel on UK territory. ...

Boeing jerks get court repreive on rendtion

Court Dismisses Lawsuit on Secret Kidnapping

by Adam Tanner

SAN FRANCISCO - A federal judge, saying the case involved a state secret, dismissed a lawsuit on Wednesday against a unit of Boeing Co that charged the firm helped fly terrorism suspects abroad to secret prisons.The American Civil Liberties Union filed a complaint in May accusing Jeppesen Dataplan Inc of providing flight and logistical support to the U.S. government with at least 15 aircraft on 70 “extraordinary-rendition” flights.

“In sum, at the core of plaintiffs’ case against Defendant Jeppesen are ‘allegations’ of covert U.S. military or CIA operations in foreign countries against foreign nationals - clearly a subject matter which is a state secret,” Judge James Ware wrote in a ruling issued on Wednesday evening.

The court “grants the United States’ motion to dismiss on the ground that the very subject matter of the case is a state secret.”

The complaint to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California alleged Jeppesen “falsified flight plans to European air traffic control authorities to avoid public scrutiny of CIA flights.”

The ACLU filed the suit on behalf of five men who say the CIA had them flown to foreign prisons for interrogations and torture. The plaintiffs are an Ethiopian living in Britain; an Italian who was working in Pakistan; an Egyptian citizen living in Sweden; a Yemeni; and an Iraqi who is a British resident.

The government argued the case should be dismissed because they could not confirm details of the operations.

Those details “include whether any private entities or other countries assisted the CIA in conducting the program; the dates and locations of any detentions and interrogations; the methods of interrogation employed in the program; and the names of any individuals detained and interrogated by the CIA (other than fifteen individuals whose identities have been divulged so that they can be brought to trial),” the U.S. government said in its filing last year.

The judge mentioned he had reviewed a classified declaration from Michael Hayden, director of the CIA, in its assessment of the case.

“The Court’s review of General Hayden’s public and classified declarations confirm that proceeding with this case would jeopardize national security and foreign relations and that no protective procedure can salvage this case,” Ware wrote.

Reporting by Adam Tanner; Editing by Peter Cooney

© 2008 Reuters

Stockwell Day in another ruckus -- legal rendition proposed

Geez, nobody is doing any real investigative work at all! or they'd look at the Public Safety Minister's actions in toto. There is clearly a pattern of curtailing all civil rights. With this guy in cabinet much longer, we will all be Big Brothered forever.

This guy is the slimepit for action by the US NEOCONS and the DOMINIONISTS!!

This is not conspiracy talk - it's merely what it is.

When people can be rounded up by the US and put in dark sites by the Canadians (which has already happened) we are truly no longer free. On American soil, no one is given basic legal rights under GoneGonzales nor Mukasey's watch!! We cannot have people deported/renditioned/kidnapped from Canada and taken into American kangaroo courts!

WAKE UP, CANADA!! Stop the madness!!

God help us all

Day expects court challenge for anti-terror law

OMAR EL AKKAD

From Tuesday's Globe and Mail

February 12, 2008 at 4:40 AM EST

OTTAWA — With just a few weeks to go before a Supreme Court-imposed deadline effectively crushes the current security-certificate program, Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day yesterday urged that a new version of the law be passed, even though he said he fully believes the new law will also face a court challenge.

"We do think it will be challenged" regardless of the wording of the new law, Mr. Day said. "That's why we tried to meet not just the spirit but the letter of the law."

Mr. Day's appearance kicked off a mammoth session by the Senate committee on anti-terrorism. More than 30 groups asked to speak before the committee about Bill C-3, the government's new legislation designed to deal with foreigners deemed to pose a security risk, including alleged terrorists held under security certificates.

The government is racing to have the new law in place before Feb. 23. In 2006, the Supreme Court found that parts of the previous legislation dealing with the same issue violated the Charter of Rights. The court gave the government one year to fix the law, or see the current security certificates expire.

Earlier this month, both the Conservatives and Liberals adopted the new law in the Commons. Now the government is encouraging the Senate to approve the legislation before the February deadline.

Some senators - as well as some outside critics of the new bill - expressed disappointment yesterday that the Senate is being asked to approve the legislation in only a few weeks. However, much of yesterday's debate focused on perhaps the most significant difference between the old law and the new one: the so-called special-advocate program.

Under the old security-certificate legislation, suspected terrorists could be kept from seeing the evidence against them for reasons of national security. Under the new legislation, such suspects would be able to have an advocate - likely a specially selected immigration law expert - act on their behalf. Such advocates would be able to meet at length with suspects, and then see all the secret evidence against them. However, after the advocates have seen the evidence, their subsequent contact with the suspect would be severely limited.

Mr. Day praised the new system as the best of its kind in the world, maintaining the balance between civil liberties and security. However, many of the two dozen or so people who spoke to the committee yesterday disagreed with the minister's assessment.

For more than eight hours, senators heard from myriad religious, legal and community groups.

"An unconstitutional process cannot be replaced by another one," said Christian Legeais for the Justice for Mohamed Harkat Committee. Mr. Harkat, one of the subjects of the security-certificate program, also appeared before the Senate committee.

No matter what the new legislation's fate in the Senate, there are risks for the government. If the law doesn't pass before the Feb. 23 deadline, all current security certificates essentially expire; if the law does pass, it is almost certainly going to be the subject of another court challenge.

More here:

Day expects new terror law to face court test
Globe and Mail - Canada
OTTAWA — Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day says the government fully expects a court challenge to new legislation aimed at deporting foreign-born terror ...
See all stories on this topic

Terror Law Will Survive Courts: Day
580 CFRA Radio - Ottawa,Ontario,Canada
Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day predicts the Conservatives new legislation to deport foreign-born terror suspects will survive any court test. ...
See all stories on this topic

Clips from Taxi to the Darkside

Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bhagram .. who is accountable?

NYT no getting "huffy" about national security "concerns" excuses and alibis

Editorial

Secrets and Rights

President Bush’s excesses in the name of fighting terrorism are legion. To avoid accountability, his administration has repeatedly sought early dismissal of lawsuits that might finally expose government misconduct, brandishing flimsy claims that going forward would put national security secrets at risk.

The courts have been far too willing to go along. In cases involving serious allegations of kidnapping, torture and unlawful domestic eavesdropping, judges have blocked plaintiffs from pursuing their claims without taking a hard look at the government’s basis for invoking the so-called state secrets privilege: its insistence that revealing certain documents or other evidence would endanger the nation’s security.

As a result, victims of serious abuse have been denied justice, fundamental rights have been violated and the constitutional system of checks and balances has been grievously undermined.

Congress — which has allowed itself to be bullied on national security issues for far too long — may now be ready to push back. The House and Senate are developing legislation that would give victims fair access to the courts and make it harder for the government to hide illegal or embarrassing conduct behind such unsupported claims.

Last week, Senator Edward Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat, and Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, jointly introduced the State Secrets Protection Act. The measure would require judges to examine the actual documents or other evidence for which the state secrets privilege is invoked, rather than relying on government affidavits asserting that the evidence is too sensitive to be publicly disclosed. Senator Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and an important supporter of the reform, has scheduled a hearing on the bill for Feb. 13. Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York, expects to introduce a similar measure in the House.

Of course, legitimate secrets need to be protected, and the legislation contains safeguards to ensure that.

To allow cases to go forward, the bill gives judges the authority to order the government to provide unclassified or redacted substitutes. It also gives those making claims against the government a chance to make a preliminary case using evidence that they have gathered on their own.

In October, the Supreme Court passed up an opportunity to rein in the administration’s abuse of state secrets claims and establish new procedures for dealing with potentially sensitive evidence.

The justices declined to take up the case of Khaled el-Masri, an innocent German citizen of Lebanese descent who was kidnapped, detained and tortured in a secret overseas prison as part of the administration’s extraordinary rendition program. Lower federal courts had dismissed Mr. Masri’s civil lawsuit, reflexively bowing to the administration’s claim that proceeding would compromise national security.

Since the Supreme Court has abdicated its responsibility, Congress must now act. Too many laws have been violated, and too many Americans and others have been harmed under a phony claim of national security.

* CIA oldie but goodie - RENDITION, more dots and disinfo

[I am getting tired .. this is STILL under construction.
It needs more {{{{flow}}}} but I'm too tired now to provide it.]

So for fun, anyone reading can see the ribs .. of the arguments to come.]

Die Zeit: Can you be sure that there have been no errors and that no one was falsely transferred?

Michael Scheuer: I am sure that errors have been committed. Clausewitz has spoken of the fogs of war and we are right in the middle of that fog. If errors have been committed, the concerned persons have to be indemnified, Die Zeit, Hamburg, 29 December 2005

“It seems to me you are asking a question about an issue that involves the U.S. government,” Neale said. “Jeppesen, as with the rest of the Boeing company, operates in accordance with the laws.”

Asked about Jeppesen’s role in the rendition program, Mark Mansfield, CIA director of communications, said, “We don’t comment on such matters.”

Boeing Subsidiary Sued for Role in Torture Flights IHT,29 May 2007 , found on http://kickboeingtothecurb.wordpress.com/

Tongue lashing below from Professor SNARK:

All about an item linked below -

Now just why would the CIA allow a former Rendition Bloody Master, Michael Scheuer to speak to the press, albeit in Germany ?? The item is making the rounds of the blogosphere today.

Time for snide remarks. The CIA brings that out in people, I've found. I get to feeling like a White Woman of outrage when I read their "remarks", although I am awfully aware they are feeing the public pure crap. Stuff that makes ggggrrrrrrrooooooooowl in outrage.

What is he saying EXACTLY about "have to be indemnified" ...?

Is this what seals Michael Mansfield's lips on bloody KIDNAP and collusion with rogue nations, that new "high tech" solution to how America can assert its presumed ownership of the world- no one's bloody indemnified so Mansfield remains mum?

You cannot be "idemnified" for war crimes!! And we've already posted on here about the bloody legal insurance problems people in the CIA are facing about the torture tapes "accounting".

How can an Agency operative or official pay a high-buck lawyer to defend themselves against WAR CRIMES - when the CIA will not "indemnify" AND the lawyers' cost so bloody much (drug money kept in offshore accounts might help, but eventually the prosecutors would find out about that little stunt.)

Here's a truth, the CIA is badly split. WAR CRIMES are being exposed - and the lawyers who thought up clever legal defenses and "techniques" for subverting Geneva after they took an oath to uphold it, well, they are in a fix.

So they are trotting out the crew involved to indulge in some SERIOUS finger pointing! And truth be told, they are being fed answers to feed to the press. (How's that for a deceptive food chain?) So I hope anyone readng this will consider what the poision being fed on Die Zeit will be taken with a grain of salt. It's not very nourishing. A certain, Mr. Scheuer, paid with US taxdollars, sworn to uphold an oath to the Supreme Law of the Land in the United States of America is being let out of the Langley bag to feed some heavy weight disinfo concerning rendition.

Hey, Mark Mansfield did that in the NYT!! He pointed the finger at THEM. LOL. Somedays this all just too funny!! Only you know some people DIED in this little CIA caper, some people are left damaged for life and they did nothing wrong! Well, whadda ya know about that, folks!! As Helen Thomas says, you can't bring back a life .. The CIA minimizes and rationalizes every reckless death that they do.

They have a new "leave no marks" protocol, but the torture continues. And that stress breaks done the human immune system -- so the people die, just takes looooooooooonger. That's all.

The CIA and other alphabet soup agencies must, at long last, get it straight, imho.

To ensure AMERICA'S safety - if you don't want to do the time, don't do the crime!! You are being tried in the court of public opinion and guess what! I AM the public .. me, little ole me. First Amendment rights and all that other jazz that seem to haunt youse guys.

Can people of conviction -- who just might be aware there ARE acutally terrorists -- be against rendition without being "leftist democrats" in the CIA's mind? Can some of us just want to ensure that the CIA follows Geneva and that the CIA does do it's usual SPIN when caught with it's pants down, with solid evidence waving in our hands -- and a whole cartload of "missing evidence" on their part?

Hmm - in age where CIA torturing, an agency which has taken MACHO to a whole new level of rationalization - do you suppose, just maybe it would be good to show that "kindly face" of a torturing monster to the public once again? First a waterboarding specialist with a very contrived but effective take for us all to "swallow" - now an interview put in Germany that was destined to come into North America to look at, replete with picture of "said" upset CIA officer.

How very sublimely surreal!!

This was the squibb I got with the link:

Extraordinary Renditions: An Interview with Michael Scheuer
'The CIA has the right to break any law' Do the American secret services have the right to abduct presumed terrorists? For the first time, Michael Scheuer, one of the principal persons in charge of the CIA provides answers to the German newspaper Die Zeit.

My radar goes UP!! when I see that one.

I could dissect it line by line for you.

Afterall I know the POINT that they are trying to score and I also have a nice little set of Geneva protocols to read, on the other hand. I've read a fair bit about CIA operations in the Balkans and what happened with Osama bin Laden when he operated there, training troops to help out Uncle Sam run out the Russian bear in Afghanistan.

Here's the deal MARK - if you've guys' eyes on the blog - and you can tell it Dirty Dick at the next Holiday "do" if you guys last that long, you haven't just screwed up, you've screwed up the peace and security of EVERYONE on this planet for about long enough. And no matter which thug you guyz trot out we are going to STAY alarmed until such time as someone thinks it's time to get some oversight and clear lawbreakers are brought to JUSTICE.

You guys need a LEASH - and don't think it's "just" left wing democrats are the problem by being what you consider "hypocrites" and cowardly milquetoast because they have no appetite for war crimes or torture. You guys and Dirty Dick are the problem. Maybe Bill Clinton, too, but that circular firing squad rationale won't do! Not to us, We the People. The people who do the crime, must do the time!! What goes on is NOT legal! You all take the oath but you do not uphold and guess what, no spin can make the Unitary Executive argument stick. Not really: gues you already know that though.

Since a letter I wrote on here to Mark Mansfield was done, I've got Mark in a big pork pie. Mark said in 1998 that The Agency doesn't torture .. yeah, right. It was "renditioning" then. Nice try Mark .. we're keeping a timeline. We're figuring it ALL out!! Yup.

There are other ways to protect America than to go on doing the Same Old, Same old, including raising America's prestige (what's left of it) by simply showing we respect the Rule of Law!! Yup you might not have to resort to the carrot and the stick as a techique as you do now. It's not about being the POWER agency that thinks the US President owns the entire friggin world and goes in and cause havoc wherever it goes! NOPE, it is NOT. Man, what a mess your Agency has made in this world over the past five decades. A band of Ivy league THUGS running around the world playing "spies" - inticing people, bribing them, playing footsies with maimed wretched people who simply want the buck$ and a chance to "come to America" - the last being a little 'privilege' you never assent to in the end anyway.

Magic word, Mark and the rest of you at Mark's coffee clatch: NUREMBERG.

There is no statute of limitations.

There is no escaping history. The war crimes in this administration are simply HORRIFYING beyond belief!

And an esoteric little phrase for all of you to laugh about at lunch:

FUCK Clausewitz.

There are no excuses . The law was broken. The "fog of war" don't cut when the judge rolls round. You guys knew that - you were warned butcha just had to do it anyway.

The dead, those you tortured and died may be buried, but we know .. we won't be forgetting either.

The new policy is "leave no marks" .. but guess what - kidnap is still criminal. Get some new bloody lawyers you guyz. Ask for some immunity and save yourselves.

All the CRAP must come to light - it's time!!

And as for this;

Die Zeit: What will become of the “extraordinary renditions²?

Michael Scheuer: The program is probably dead because of the leaks, the publications and the criticisms. The result is disillusioning for those in charge within the secret services: Not one of those who had given us the orders to act as we did admits today to have done so.

Um hmmm. Probably? You KNOW, Michael Scheuer. And the best thing YOU can do is turn in those who gave you ORDERS, it's your duty as a citizen.

Why $5,000 bounties are terrible for US "strategic interests" . TORTURE!

	Donate | Calendar | Local Groups | Store

January 9, 2008

Dear Virginia,

Last year at this time, the three of us were in Guantanamo, Cuba with former detainee Asif Iqbal and the mother and brother of detainee Omar Deghayes. Omar's mother, Zohar, had not seen her son in five years. When we got to the gates of the U.S. Naval Base to stage our protest, she broke down. "It breaks my heart to think of my son in a cramped narrow cell without sunshine or fresh air, living for so many years in conditions not even fit for animals," she cried.

Omar grew up in Brighton, England, where he studied law. In 2001 he traveled to Malaysia, Pakistan and Afghanistan, where he married and had a son. When war broke out in Afghanistan, he fled with his family to Pakistan, planning to return to England. But he was arrested, reportedly for a bounty of $5,000, and sent to Guantanamo. Omar says he was beaten repeatedly and kept in solitary confinement for eight months. In March 2004, when he protested a body cavity search, five guards pepper sprayed him so badly, he lost sight in one eye.

After six years of horrendous detention without charges or a trial, Omar was finally released on December 18, 2007. While we join his family in celebrating his release, we know over 300 prisoners still remain in Guantanamo, subjected to the same abuses and utter disregard for due process.

January 11 marks the International Day to Shut Down Guantanamo. CODEPINK is organizing a protest in Miami outside the Southern Command, which runs the prison. For a list of dozens of local protests across the country, click here. If you can't join a protest, please take a moment to call (202-353-1555) or write Attorney General Michael Mukasey. Demand that Guantanamo prison be shut down, and that all detainees either be charged and tried in US federal courts or released.

Upon Omar's release from prison, he wrote the following note to CODEPINK:

"I thank everyone from America who has written and emailed my family for my release. I do not have hatred toward Americans. I know that not all Americans are bad. Even inside the prison, some guards were not bad. I thank you for your support and ask that you continue to work hard to ensure that due process is provided for all prisoners and to force the closing of the prison in Guantanamo."

If you would like a write a note of apology to Omar or his mother, Zohra, you can send it to info@codepinkalert.org.

Let's begin the new year by demanding that our government respect the rule of law.

With justice for all,
Medea Benjamin, Jodie Evans and Ann Wright

P.S. Travel with CODEPINK!

• Make your plans now to join CODEPINK in New Orleans, April 11th and 12th, as we celebrate V to the 10th, the 10th anniversary of Eve Ensler's V-Day: The Campaign to End Violence Against Women and Girls and Change the Story of Women. Click here to find out more about this inspiring weekend, which will include powerful activist trainings as well as performances of Swimming Upstream and The Vagina Monologues with Oprah Winfrey, Ellen DeGeneres, and other superstars. Come earlier in the week, and you can help us bring healing, compassion and PINK to New Orleans through our transformative community project.
  
  
• You can also travel with CODEPINK worldwide to connect with our sisters in other countries and spread peace around the globe. We are partnering with Global Exchange to send women's delegations to places such as Afghanistan and India in March, Iran and Vietnam in April, and South Africa in August. Find out more about these life-changing journeys here. We look forward to traveling with you!