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Post by ocelot on Feb 16, 2007 8:26:11 GMT -5
Italian judge indicts 26 Americans, 5 Italians in alleged CIA kidnapping Last Updated: Friday, February 16, 2007 | 7:11 AM ET The Associated Press 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 centre-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 defence 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.
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Post by achebeautiful on Feb 17, 2007 16:11:38 GMT -5
I acknowledge this post, Leona, but I cannot comment on it because I am so unfamilair with any of it. One thing I can say though is that Italy sure is doing quite a job of catching people lately, aren't they?
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Post by ocelot on Feb 17, 2007 21:08:57 GMT -5
Europeans Investigate CIA Role in Abductions By Craig Whitlock The Washington Post
Sunday 13 March 2005
Suspects possibly taken to nations that torture. Milan - A radical Egyptian cleric known as Abu Omar was walking to a Milan mosque for noon prayers in February 2003 when he was grabbed on the sidewalk by two men, sprayed in the face with chemicals and stuffed into a van. He hasn't been seen since.
Milan investigators, however, now appear to be close to identifying his kidnappers. Last month, officials showed up at Aviano Air Base in northern Italy and demanded records of any American planes that had flown into or out of the joint U.S.-Italian military installation around the time of the abduction. They also asked for logs of vehicles that had entered the base.
Italian authorities suspect the Egyptian was the target of a CIA-sponsored operation known as rendition, in which terrorism suspects are forcibly taken for interrogation to countries where torture is practiced.
The Italian probe is one of three official investigations that have surfaced in the past year into renditions believed to have taken place in Western Europe. Although the CIA usually carries out the operations with the help or blessing of friendly local intelligence agencies, law enforcement authorities in Italy, Germany and Sweden are examining whether U.S. agents may have broken local laws by detaining terrorist suspects on European soil and subjecting them to abuse or maltreatment.
The CIA has kept details of rendition cases a closely guarded secret, but has defended the controversial practice as an effective and legal way to prevent terrorism. Intelligence officials have testified that they have relied on the tactic with greater frequency since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The Bush administration has received backing for renditions from governments that have been criticized for their human rights records, including Egypt, Jordan and Pakistan, where many of the suspects are taken for interrogation. But the administration is getting a much different reception in Europe, where lawmakers and prosecutors are questioning whether the practice is a blatant violation of local sovereignty and human rights.
There are many practical and legal hurdles to filing criminal charges against U.S. agents, including the question of whether they are protected by diplomatic immunity and the matter of determining their identity. However, prosecutors in Italy and Germany have not ruled out criminal charges. At the same time, the European investigations are producing new revelations about the suspected U.S. involvement in the disappearances of four men, not including the Egyptian, each of whom claims they were physically abused and later tortured.
In Germany, a 41-year-old man, Khaled Masri, has told authorities that he was locked up during a vacation in the Balkans and flown to Kabul, Afghanistan in January 2004, where he was held as a suspected terrorist for four months. He said that only after his captors realized he was not the al Qaeda suspect they were looking for did they take him back to the Balkans and dump him on a hillside along the Albanian border. He recalled his captors spoke English with an American accent.
German prosecutors, after several months of scrutinizing his account, have confirmed several key parts of his story and are investigating it as a kidnapping.
"So far, I've seen no sign that what he's saying is incorrect. Many, many pieces of the puzzle have checked out," said Martin Hofmann, a Munich-based prosecutor overseeing the investigation. "I have to try to find out who held him, who tortured or abused him, and who is responsible for this."
In Sweden, a parliamentary investigation has found that CIA agents wearing hoods orchestrated the forced removal in December 2001 of two Egyptian nationals on a U.S.-registered airplane to Cairo, where the men claimed they were tortured in prison.
One of the men was later exonerated as a terrorism suspect by Egyptian police, while the other remains in prison there. Details of the secret operation have shocked many in Sweden, a leading proponent of human rights.
Although Swedish authorities had secretly invited the CIA to assist in the operation, the disclosures prompted the director of Sweden's security police last week to promise that his agency would never let foreign agents take charge of such a case again.
"In the future we will use Swedish laws, Swedish measures of force and Swedish military aviation when deporting terrorists," Klas Bergenstrand, the security police chief, told reporters. "That way we get full control over the whole situation."
Clues to a Mystery
In Milan, the Egyptian-born cleric attracted the attention of counterterrorism police soon after arriving in Italy in 1997 from Albania. Known as Abu Omar, his full name was Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr. He was 42, a veteran fighter from the wars in Bosnia and Afghanistan and a wanted man in Egypt, where authorities had charged him with belonging to an outlawed Islamic radical group.
Nasr frequently preached at two mosques in Milan that have long attracted religious and political extremists, according to Italian and U.S. officials. One of the mosques, a converted garage on Viale Jenner, is classified as a financier of terrorism causes by the U.S. Treasury Department, which has accused it of supporting "the movement of weapons, men and money around the world."
Nasr reinforced the mosque's reputation by preaching angrily against the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan and handing out vitriolic pamphlets criticizing U.S. policy in the Middle East. Italian counterterrorism police tapped his home telephone and kept him under surveillance.
"He was the kind of person who, let's put it this way, did not speak diplomatically," said Abdelhamid Shaari, president of the Islamic Cultural Center at Viale Jenner, who denies that either the mosque or the center sponsor terrorism or illegal activity. "When he attacked America, he did not speak in half-measures. He got right to the point."
When Nasr vanished, his family and mosque leaders reported it as a kidnapping, after a witness said she saw the abduction. The witness, a recent immigrant, said she was scared to repeat her story to the police, however, leading some investigators to speculate that Nasr had disappeared on his own and gone to Iraq to fight U.S. forces.
Italian police opened a missing person investigation, but the case stalled for more than a year. That changed in April 2004, when Nasr's wife unexpectedly received a telephone call from her husband. He told her he had been kidnapped and taken to a U.S. air base in Italy. He said he was then flown to another U.S. base, before being taken to Cairo.
The call was recorded by Italian police, who had kept the wiretap on Nasr's home telephone in place. Although transcripts have not been made public, Nasr's colleagues at the mosque said he reported that he had been tortured and kept naked in subfreezing temperatures in a prison in Cairo.
During the phone call, Nasr told his wife that he had been let out of prison in Egypt but remained under house arrest. His relatives have said they believe he was imprisoned again shortly afterward when news of the recorded conversation was reported by Italian newspapers.
The existence of the wiretap is revealed in sealed Italian court papers reviewed by The Washington Post. The documents, dated in the spring of 2004, include a judge's authorization to continue the wiretap and show that investigators were pursuing the theory that covert agents - possibly from the United States, Italy or Egypt - were behind the kidnapping.
Italian investigators have since determined that 15 agents, some of them CIA operatives, were involved in Nasr's abduction, according to reports in Corriere della Sera, a leading Italian daily. Investigators were able to trace calls made by the agents by linking calls made by the same phones near the mosque and Aviano Air Base on the day Nasr vanished, the newspaper reported.
The investigation is being led by Armando Spataro, a well-known counterterrorism prosecutor whose office has also built a hard-nosed reputation for winning convictions in cases involving the Mafia and political corruption. Spataro, who has worked closely with U.S. officials in the past on terrorism cases, confirmed that he visited Aviano last month but declined to comment further.
Capt. Eric Elliott, a U.S. military spokesman at Aviano, said Spataro met at the base for several hours with Italian military officials, who then forwarded a request for records to their American counterparts. Elliott declined to describe the records being sought, citing "an active investigation."
The U.S. Embassy in Rome declined to answer questions about whether American agents were involved in Nasr's disappearance. "We do not comment on intelligence matters," said Ben Duffy, an embassy spokesman.
Italian opposition lawmakers have demanded answers from Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's government on whether Italian agents or intelligence services played a role. But government ministers have remained tight-lipped.
Shaari, the director of the Islamic cultural center in Milan, said some Muslims are worried they could be kidnapped, too.
"If they can take Abu Omar, then they can take anyone," he said. "This is an extremely dangerous precedent, both for the Muslim community and for Italy, as a democratic and free state."
Claims Corroborated
In late December 2003, Khaled Masri got into a bitter argument with his wife in their home town of Ulm, Germany. They agreed he should get away for a few days, so he bought a bus ticket for Skopje, Macedonia.
At the Macedonian border on New Year's Eve, immigration officials took a close look at his passport and detained him, without explanation. Other agents later interrogated him and pressed him to admit he was a member of al Qaeda, according to accounts Masri gave his attorney and German prosecutors.
Masri protested his innocence, but was kept under guard in Macedonia for three weeks. He said that one day in late January 2004, he was beaten, stripped, shackled and put on a plane that took him to Afghanistan. There, he was kept in a cell under dismal conditions, deprived of water and repeatedly interrogated. Only after going on a hunger strike, he said, did his captors relent; he was flown back to the Balkans in May 2004.
He said he was released near an Albanian border checkpoint, where guards returned his passport and cash. By the time he made it home, even his wife was reluctant to believe his story, thinking he had left her for another woman, according to his attorney.
German police have questioned Masri several times and said they have found his version consistent and believable. Stamps in his passport show he entered Macedonia and left Albania on the dates he described. The bus driver on the route to Skopje confirmed to investigators that Masri had been on board and was taken away by border guards.
Investigators have conducted a chemical radioisotope analysis of Masri's hair. They said the findings back up his story that he was malnourished while in captivity.
Flight logs also support Masri's claim that he was flown out of Macedonia by U.S. secret agents. Aviation records show a U.S.-registered Boeing jet arrived in Skopje at 9 p.m. on Jan. 23, 2004, and departed about six hours later. Masri had provided German investigators with the same time and date.
The flight plan shows the aircraft was scheduled to go to Kabul, but later amended its route to include a stopover in Baghdad. The existence of the flight logs was first reported by Frontal 21, a news show on the German television network ZDF. A copy of the logs was obtained by The Washington Post.
Records show the jet, with tail number N313P, was registered at the time to a U.S. firm, Premier Executive Transport Services Inc., that records suggest is a CIA front company. The same firm owned another aircraft, a Gulfstream jet, that has been used in other rendition cases, including the one in Sweden.
Masri's attorney and investigators said they think he was abducted because his name is similar to that of an al Qaeda suspect, Khalid Masri, who allegedly played a crucial role in persuading the members of the Hamburg cell that carried out the Sept. 11 attacks to go to Afghanistan, where they first met Osama bin Laden.
Manfred Gnjidic, the lawyer, said he has asked the U.S. Embassy in Berlin for an explanation of what happened, but has received no response.
"We are quite sure that they were behind this," said Gnjidic. "We are looking for punishment and to hold someone accountable."
Robert Wood, an embassy spokesman, declined to answer specific questions about the case. "But our policy is pretty clear," he said. "The United States does not transfer detainees to countries where we believe it is more likely or not that they will be tortured."
Macedonian officials also had little to say. "Our answer is, no comment," said Goran Pavlovski, spokesman for the Macedonian Interior Ministry. "If the Germans want information, they should ask us about it, and we will respond."
Under German law, prosecutors have the authority to investigate any crime committed against a German citizen, even in foreign lands.
Hofmann, the Munich prosecutor, acknowledged that he has limited powers to investigate cases outside Germany. But he said he is preparing a formal request for legal help from the Macedonian government, as well as from Albanian and Afghan officials.
"I'm confident that other information will be forthcoming," he said. "This case has a considerable political meaning. There's a certain amount of pressure on everyone involved."
Human Rights Observer Cites 2002 Abuse The Associated Press
Saturday 12 March 2005
New York - Unreleased U.S. Army reports detailing the deaths of two Afghan men who were beaten to death by American soldiers show that military prison abuses began in Afghanistan in 2002, and were part of a systematic pattern of mistreatment, a human rights representative said Saturday.
More than two dozen American soldiers face possible criminal prosecution - and one already is charged with manslaughter - in the deaths at the main U.S. detention facility in Bagram, just north of the Afghan capital of Kabul.
As documented by the Army's Criminal Investigation Command, the men died a year before the photographed horrors at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, according to John Sifton, the Afghanistan researcher for the New York-based Human Rights Watch.
In a phone interview, Sifton said his group had obtained 20 pages of electronically scanned Army reports.
The American Civil Liberties Union sued to obtain the case files under the Freedom of Information Act, but the Army withheld portions of the records because of an ongoing investigation and possible charges.
On Saturday, a Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Jeremy Martin, would say only that the cases from 2002 "were thoroughly investigated and people were punished appropriately."
"The Bush Administration and the Pentagon describe the abuse problems as isolated incidents, not systematic, not part of a plan. The evidence shows otherwise," Sifton said. "Far from being isolated incidents, these beatings were part of a pattern of abuse."
Members of the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion who set up intelligence operations at the Bagram facility did the same at the Abu Ghraib prison.
The two Afghan detainees died in December 2002 - a week apart - as reported in Army memos, with updates detailing their fate after they were captured by Afghan forces and handed to the U.S. military.
There were several other deaths of Afghans in American custody before December 2002, Sifton said, "and we want more information."
"It's amazing," he said. "Nobody has been punished for this. The command has recommended that 28 people be prosecuted for this, but only two have been charged so far."
The unreleased Army documents detail U.S. military investigations of the deaths of a man named Mullah Habibullah, about 30, and another identified only as Dilawar, a 22-year-old taxi driver with a 2-year-old daughter, according to Sifton.
Under U.S. detention, the two men were chained to the ceiling in standing positions, one at the waist and one by the wrists, while their feet remained on the ground, according to the Army reports. One of them was maimed over a five-day period, dying with his leg muscle tissue destroyed from blows to his knees and lower body.
The Army has publicly acknowledged the two deaths and announced in October that up to 28 U.S. soldiers face possible charges in connection with what were ruled homicides.
Sifton said the Army documents show that U.S. military investigators are accusing intelligence officers and police guards of using severe, unapproved tactics on many prisoners at Bagram, not only the two men.
Last month in a closed hearing at Fort Bliss, Texas, Pfc. Willie V. Brand of the 377th Military Police Company was charged with involuntary manslaughter in connection with Dilawar's death, one Army document shows. Brand is accused of beating him to death over five days.
An autopsy performed by a medical examiner and cited by the Army showed that Dilawar's legs were so damaged by blows that amputation would have been necessary.
Dilawar died from "blunt force trauma to the lower extremities complicating coronary artery disease," according to an Army report dated July 6, 2004.
Habibullah died of a pulmonary embolism apparently caused by blood clots formed in his legs from the beatings, according to a June 1, 2004, military report.
Another member of the Cincinnati-based 377th Company, Sgt. James P. Boland, was charged with assault, maltreatment and dereliction of duty in Dilawar's death, and dereliction of duty in Habibullah's death.
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Post by ocelot on Feb 17, 2007 21:13:47 GMT -5
Europe 'knew about' CIA flights European governments were almost certainly aware of the CIA's secret prisoner flights via European airspace or airports, a key report has said. The preliminary report comes from Swiss MP Dick Marty, for the human rights watchdog the Council of Europe.
The US admits picking up terrorism suspects but denies sending them to Arab nations to face torture.
Mr Marty said he could not be certain that the CIA used secret prisons in Europe to interrogate terror suspects.
The BBC's Tim Franks at the Council of Europe says the Swiss senator's report does not appear to reveal hard new facts.
'Great deal of evidence'
Mr Marty began his investigation in November and presented his interim report to the Council of Europe in Strasbourg on Tuesday morning.
In his report, he said "rendition" - the secret transport of prisoners via Europe to third countries where they may have been tortured - seemed to have affected more than 100 people in recent years. The facts had "not even been denied", he said.
At a news conference he denounced the practice as "criminal acts" which "run counter to the laws that prevail in all civilised countries today".
He cited the case of the Egyptian political refugee, Abu Omar, who was, he said, abducted by the CIA in the middle of the Italian city, Milan, in 2003, flown to Egypt and then tortured.
The report said his case was just one part of "a great deal of coherent, convergent evidence pointing to the existence of a system of 'relocation' or 'outsourcing' of torture".
Mr Marty singled out the Italian judiciary for praise and said the CIA kidnapping had "completely destroyed" an Italian police investigation into Abu Omar and his associates.
In another case, a German man was said to have been kidnapped in Macedonia and taken to Afghanistan.
COUNCIL OF EUROPE Founded in 1949 and based in Strasbourg, France Forty-six members, 21 of them from Central and Eastern Europe Set up to defend human rights, parliamentary democracy and the rule of law Acts as human rights watchdog for Europe Oversees the European Court of Human Rights Comprises a decision-making committee of ministers and 630-member parliamentary assembly
Mr Marty also looked into allegations of secret CIA detention centres in Romania and Poland. Here he said there was "no formal, irrefutable evidence", although he said that there should be further investigation.
Several Eastern and Central European countries accused of hosting them have all strenuously denied the charge.
Mr Marty's report talks about CIA activities challenging the very functioning of the law-based state and its democratic foundation.
"Acts of torture or severe violation of detainees' dignity through the administration of inhuman or degrading treatment are carried out outside national territory, and beyond the authority of national intelligence services...
"It is highly unlikely that European governments, or at least their intelligence services, were unaware," the report said.
'Black sites'
Mr Marty told the Council of Europe that the investigation into CIA renditions was continuing.
He welcomed the fact that the European Parliament had also set up an ad hoc committee to investigate the controversial flights.
And he said he had received detailed information on Monday from Eurocontrol - the Brussels-based air safety organisation - and from the EU's Satellite Centre, including sites located in Romania.
The prisons story broke in early November, when the Washington Post newspaper said the CIA had been running facilities in Eastern Europe, Afghanistan and Thailand.
It said more than 100 people had been sent to facilities known as "black sites" since they were set up following the 11 September 2001 attacks.
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Post by ocelot on Feb 17, 2007 21:17:01 GMT -5
Italy Indicts 26 Americans in C.I.A. Abduction Case By IAN FISHER Published: February 16, 2007 ROME, Feb. 16 — An Italian judge today ordered the first trial involving the American program of kidnapping terror suspects on foreign soil, indicting 26 Americans, most of them C.I.A. agents, but also Italy’s former top spy.
The indictments covered the episode in which a radical Egyptian cleric, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, who disappeared near his mosque in Milan on Feb. 17, 2003, says he was kidnapped. The cleric, known as Abu Omar, was freed this week from jail in Egypt, where he says he was taken and then tortured.
Despite the indictment, issued by a judge in Milan, it is unlikely that any of the Americans will ever stand trial here.
All the operatives, which included the top two C.I.A. officials in Italy at the time, have left the country. Moreover, Italy has not requested their extradition, and if it did, there seems little chance the Bush administration would agree.
But the indictment nonetheless marked a turning point in Europe, where anger is high at the secret American program of “extraordinary renditions” that whisked away terror suspects in contravention of the law after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
This week, the Swiss government approved an investigation into the flight that allegedly carried Mr. Nasr from Italy to Germany, across Swiss airspace. The plane reportedly left from an American air base in Germany to Egypt.
Late last month, a German court issued an arrest warrant for 13 people suspected of involvement in the kidnapping in Macedonia of a German citizen of Lebanese descent. There are also investigations into extraordinary renditions in Portugal and Spain.
Meantime this week, a European parliamentary committee issued a detailed report into what it said were “at least” 1,245 secret C.I.A. flights in Europe, some of them involving extraordinary renditions. The report, which awaits approval by the Parliament, is particularly sensitive because it suggested forcibly that a number of governments knew of the flights.
“We believe there has been either active collusion by several E.U. governments or turning a blind eye,” one member of the European Parliament, Baroness Sarah Ludford of Britain, said this week.
Here in Italy, the possible complicity of the government of then-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is one of the most difficult issues in the case. Among the Italians indicted today were Nicolo Pollari, who was until earlier this year Italy’s chief of military intelligence, and his former deputy, Marco Mancini.
Mr. Pollari has denied responsibility, saying he cannot defend himself because he would need to use evidence that is classified as state secrets. The suggestion is that officials outranking Mr. Pollari, the nation’s chief spy, gave approval for the kidnapping.
“We are very disappointed by the decision of the judge, being convinced that the lack of proof and the acquisition of documents covered by secrets of state demonstrates Pollari’s innocence,” Mr. Pollari’s lawyer, Tittal Madia, said, according to the Corriere della Sera newspaper.
The case has snarled Italian politics with several complications. Earlier this week, the government of Prime Minister Romano Prodi asked the Constitutional Court to review whether the prosecutor in Mr. Nasr’s case, Armando Spataro, overstepped his bounds by wiretapping the phones of Italian agents.
Today, Mr. Spataro said in a statement that he was “astonished” by the government’s move, saying he had followed all the laws in gathering evidence.
Meantime, a member of Mr. Prodi’s government, Antonio Di Pietro, minister of infrastructure and a former corruption prosecutor, criticized the government for not having requested the extradition of the 26 C.I.A. agents.
Mr. Prodi’s government has not said whether it will make such requests. But the issue looms as one more source of conflict between Italy and the United States.
While both American and Italian officials say the relationship remains solid, it has been tested in recent months on several fronts. On Saturday, a big demonstration is being planned in Vicenza, in northern Italy, where the Americans have asked to enlarge an existing air base, and Italian officials have recently criticized American actions in Iraq, Lebanon and Somalia.
Earlier this month, an Italian court ordered an American soldier to stand trial for the death in Iraq of Nicola Calipari, an Italian secret service agent killed in 2005 while securing the release of a kidnapped Italian journalist. As with the C.I.A. agents, the serviceman is unlikely to be extradited to Italy.
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Post by ocelot on Feb 17, 2007 21:19:11 GMT -5
Germany Issues Warrants for 13 in Connection With Alleged CIA-Orchestrated Kidnapping Wednesday, January 31, 2007
BERLIN —
Arrest warrants have been issued for 13 people in connection with the alleged CIA-orchestrated kidnapping of a German citizen in the agency's extraordinary rendition program, a Munich prosecutor said Wednesday.
Prosecutor Christian Schmidt-Sommerfeld said the warrants were issued in the last few days. He did not say for whom the warrants were issued, but indicated a statement would be issued later Wednesday.
Extraordinary rendition is a practice in which the U.S. government sends foreign terror suspects to third countries for interrogation.
Munich prosecutors have previously said that they had received from Spanish investigators the names of several U.S. secret agents believed to be involved in the kidnapping of Khaled al-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent.
Al-Masri says he was abducted in December 2003 at the Serbian-Macedonia border and flown by the CIA to a detention center in Kabul, Afghanistan, where he was abused. Al-Masri says he was released in Albania in May 2004 after the CIA discovered they had the wrong person.
In September, German authorities said they received a list of about 20 suspects from Spanish investigators believed to have been involved in the case.
At the time, German media reported that Spanish authorities were probing the identities of the people they suspect flew aboard a Boeing 737 from the island of Palma de Mallorca on Dec. 24, 2003, to pick up al-Masri after he had been detained by Macedonian authorities.
ARD public television reported that investigators worked from passport photocopies made by a hotel where the suspects stayed. The report gave what it said were the cover names of three men who were pilots and lived in North Carolina.
In October, Munich prosecutors said that based on the list, they were seeking to ban several CIA agents suspected of kidnapping al-Masri from entering German territory. They did not elaborate.
The al-Masri case has been a sore point in otherwise good German-U.S. relations.
The U.S. Justice Department has declined to provide Munich prosecutors assistance, citing ongoing legal proceedings in the United States.
Al-Masri has asked a federal appeals court in Richmond, Va., to reinstate a lawsuit he filed against the CIA. A judge dismissed the lawsuit in May, ruling that a trial could harm national security by revealing details about CIA activities.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other U.S. officials have declined to address the case. However, German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said the United States has acknowledged making a mistake with him.
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Post by ocelot on Feb 17, 2007 21:21:14 GMT -5
In Another CIA Abduction, Germany Has an Uneasy Role
By Craig Whitlock Washington Post Foreign Service Monday, February 5, 2007; A11
HAMBURG -- The decision by Munich prosecutors to press charges against CIA counterterrorism operatives for kidnapping a German citizen, Khaled el-Masri, won widespread applause last week from German politicians and the public. "The great ally is not allowed to simply send its thugs out into Europe's streets," lectured the Munich newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung.
But there has been an awkward silence and no prosecutions in the parallel case of another German citizen, Mohammed Haydar Zammar, who was also covertly abducted in a CIA-sponsored mission after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The difference: German agents were directly involved in the Zammar case, providing crucial information to the CIA about his travels and making a secret trip to Syria to interrogate him after he landed in prison there.
Zammar vanished from public view five years ago but resurfaced last fall in a Syrian courtroom, where he stands accused of training in al-Qaeda camps and faces the death penalty. After insisting for years that they couldn't confirm his whereabouts, German diplomats in Damascus have scrambled to provide him with a defense attorney and consular assistance.
Unlike Masri, a car salesman from Bavaria who was grabbed in an apparent case of mistaken identity, Zammar had previously drawn scrutiny from German and U.S. investigators for his role in the Hamburg cell that planned the Sept. 11 hijackings. German authorities have never assembled enough evidence to charge him with a crime. But given his association with the Hamburg group, few people in Germany have been willing to take up his cause or question the legality of how he was abducted.
"He's seen as being in a different category because there's the impression that he's a bad guy, and he's not around to defend himself," said Cem Ozdemir, a German legislator in the European Parliament and member of a committee that has investigated CIA activities in Europe. "Even if he is a bad guy, he doesn't deserve to be tortured."
Details of the German role in Zammar's disappearance have emerged gradually in recent months as legislative panels in Berlin and Brussels have conducted investigations into CIA counterterrorism operations in Europe.
German officials have said that they were not directly involved in Zammar's seizure and did not know where he had been taken until June 2002, when The Washington Post first reported that he had been arrested in Morocco and secretly transferred to Syria at the behest of the CIA. But the legislative probes have revealed that German federal police made the abduction possible by forwarding details of Zammar's travel plans to U.S. agents.
In addition, German officials have admitted that several German intelligence operatives and investigators went on a secret mission to Damascus in November 2002 to interrogate Zammar. According to lawmakers in Berlin who are reviewing the case, the Germans gained access to Zammar only after cutting a deal with the Syrian government to drop a criminal investigation into a suspected Syrian espionage ring based in southern Germany.
German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble defended the interrogation of Zammar as proper and legitimate. But he drew heavy criticism from other lawmakers when he suggested that German intelligence agents might use information shared by other countries, such as Syria, even if it was obtained as a result of torture.
Guel Pinar, a Hamburg lawyer who has represented Zammar and his family, said it was apparent German officials knew in advance that the CIA had targeted him for "extraordinary rendition," an extralegal tactic under which Islamic radicals have been abducted and interrogated at secret sites overseas.
"Clearly, the Germans at the very least were guilty of being an accessory in terms of his rendition to Syria," Pinar said in an interview. "They knew what they were doing when they gave his travel dates to the Americans. Why else would they do that?"
German prosecutors have not announced any criminal inquiries into Zammar's disappearance, even though his family reported him missing five years ago. Pinar said she has drafted a civil lawsuit on his behalf against the German government. But she said his wife, Rabab Banhaoui, has decided against filing it, for fear it would worsen his situation in Syria.
German authorities have made few statements about the case. The German Foreign Ministry did not respond to several requests for an interview. The German Embassy in Damascus, which has been monitoring Zammar's closed-door trial, declined to comment.
Zammar reemerged last October, when a European Union official monitoring trials in Damascus saw him in a state security court and notified the German Embassy. If not for the chance encounter, Zammar might have remained out of sight forever, Pinar said. "No one in the world would have known," she said.
A spokeswoman for the European Commission delegation in Syria declined to comment, calling the case a "highly sensitive subject."
Zammar, 45, was born in Syria but emigrated to Germany in 1972 and obtained citizenship there. Syrian authorities have charged him with membership in the Muslim Brotherhood, a fundamentalist group that is banned in the country, and with visiting al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. It is unclear whether he is charged with committing any crimes in Syria.
A parliamentary committee is expected to review the German government's handling of Zammar's case later this month. One question is whether information obtained by German interrogators is being used against him in court by Syrian prosecutors, a particularly sensitive issue since he faces the death penalty, which is banned in Germany.
"It is a big problem, I believe, for Germany and the federal government," said Hans-Christian Stroebele, a member of the committee from the Greens party. "It's the duty of a state to help its citizens. But clearly in Zammar's case, the state did not do this."
Former inmates in Syria, including Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen who was similarly targeted for rendition by the CIA but later released, have said that Zammar was kept in a tiny cell in a special prison wing. They said prisoners were regularly tortured, and that Zammar -- who tipped the scales at 300 pounds when he lived in Hamburg -- had lost about a third of his weight.
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