Foreign secretary Jack Straw faces trial threat over Libya rendition

Legal action: Abdel Hakim Belhadj and Jack Straw

Πηγή: LES
By Craig Woodhouse
April 18 2012


A Libyan military commander will drag Jack Straw to court if the former foreign secretary does not reveal whether he signed papers allowing his alleged rendition, lawyers said today.

Abdel Hakim Belhadj’s legal team said he was determined to get an “admission or acknowledgment” after deciding to sue Mr Straw.

The move follows reports suggesting the Labour MP signed documents that allowed Mr Belhadj, 45, to be taken by CIA agents from Thailand to Colonel Gaddafi’s Libya via UK-controlled Diego Garcia in 2004.

Mr Belhadj claims he was seized en route to Britain while living in exile in China, sent back to Libya and imprisoned and tortured.

The civil action seeks to examine Mr Straw’s role in the rendition and claim damages from him for the trauma. It is believed to be the first time such legal proceedings have been taken against a former foreign secretary.

Sapna Malik, a partner at lawyers Leigh Day & Co, told BBC Radio: “The real issue here is not about the amount of compensation — it’s really to get public acknowledgement and an admission from Jack Straw and those others involved of their role in his rendition.”

However, she added that damages might be sought “in due course”.

Mr Straw, who served as foreign secretary between 2001 and 2006, has been given a month to respond or face having to defend himself in court.

The Blackburn MP was sent a letter yesterday asking him to produce a number of documents. They include papers mentioned in a Sunday Times article which alleged that Mr Straw signed off the rendition, as well as his diaries, memoirs and notes from March 2004 onwards.

Sami Al Saadi, a Libyan who claims to have shared the same fate as fellow Gaddafi opponent Mr Belhadj, is also taking legal action against Mr Straw.

Mr Belhadj, a key military figure in the uprising that toppled Gaddafi last year, is already suing the Foreign Office and MI6. The Metropolitan Police are investigating his claims. British ministers have always denied any complicity in rendition or torture. A spokesman for Mr Straw said he had no comment to make about the events.

In an interview with Radio 4 last year, he said the Labour government had been opposed to unlawful rendition, “were not complicit in it, nor did we turn a blind eye to it”. According to the Sunday Times, this prompted MI6 officers to show him evidence he had signed off the operation.

Amnesty urges EU nations to probe CIA renditions

Πηγή: Mail Star
April 9 2012

European countries, including Malta, must investigate their alleged involvement in CIA renditions, Amnesty International said today, as a hearing into a new report on the EU's complicity got underway.

The term extraordinary rendition refers to the highly controversial US practice of kidnapping terrorism suspects and secretly transporting them on private aircraft, normally owned by Central Intelligence Agency front companies, to secret prisons in countries where torture is used as a routine interrogation technique.

Making use of European airspace and territory has been the subject of parallel probes by the European Parliament as well as the Council of Europe. But the firm’s denials of participation in such flights run contrary to the findings of the European Parliament’s ‘Temporary Committee on the alleged use of European countries by the CIA for the transport and illegal detention of prisoners’, which found Malta’s airspace and soil had been used by Blackwater USA subsidiary company Blackwater Aviation for such purposes.

Blackwater had taken exception to an article published by The Malta Independent on Sunday last June, which had reported the EP committee’s findings. The report, the contents of which are being disputed by Blackwater, claimed that Malta had served as a base for company aircraft carrying out renditions.

The EP report underscored that while Malta was found to have been used on at least seven occasions by six different aircraft known to have carried out renditions, the Maltese dynamic in such operations was not extensively investigated due to a shortage of time and the sheer number of countries that had warranted investigation.

As such, the EP committee had only investigated higher profile cases in countries such as Italy, Germany and Poland and stressed its report was “therefore not exhaustive”. It added, however, it was still concerned by stopovers in countries such as Malta.

The report on the illegal transfer, disappearance, and torture of detainees in Europe is being prepared by the European Parliament's (EP) committee on Civil Liberties, Justice & Home Affairs (LIBE). It is the follow-up to the EP's 2007 investigation.

"New data and information which has come to light over the past five years makes it imperative for member states to act," said Julia Hall, Amnesty International's expert on counter-terrorism and human rights, who is testifying at the hearing on Tuesday.

"The EP process is the perfect opportunity to press reluctant governments to make progress on accountability for operations which involved egregious human rights violations, including torture and enforced disappearance."

The 2007 report, led by rapporteur Claudio Fava, faced major opposition in the European Parliament, resulting in virtually no real accountability among EU countries.

The fifth anniversary - and the new report - mark key milestones in the road to unlock the truth about European complicity. The rapporteur’s report lists full details of flights including type of aircraft used.

Governments which allegedly colluded with the CIA have an obligation under international human rights law to ensure an independent, impartial, thorough and effective investigation is carried out.

Since the Fava report, the Lithuanian Government has admitted hosting secret CIA prisons; a building in Romania's capital Bucharest has been identified as being an alleged CIA detention centre, and a Polish investigation into secret sites has repeatedly faltered, despite data released in 2009 adding to evidence of complicity.

According to media reports today, a former head of intelligence in Poland has been charged in relation to CIA detainees held in Poland. Amnesty International said it is monitoring the situation closely.

Denmark and Finland have been linked to Lithuania in recent releases of rendition flight data. Finland has declined to investigate further and Denmark's current enquiry is too narrow to comply with human rights standards.

A proposed British enquiry was abruptly halted in 2011 pending the outcome of a criminal investigation into British complicity in CIA renditions to Libya.

"There is no dearth of information’, said Hall. "But there’s an appalling lack of political will to secure the truth. How can the EU, which portrays itself as a human rights standard-bearer, presume to tell other governments, notably those involved in the Arab Spring, how important human rights are when it steadfastly refuses to investigate its own alleged complicity in torture and disappearance?"

Amnesty International has urged EU countries to cooperate fully with the EP process, which includes sharing information and permitting site visits.

It believes the LIBE committee should produce an authoritative and comprehensive report highlighting gaps in accountability processes at national and EU level.

The report should recommend an EP resolution which requires member states to conduct a human rights-compliant investigations into complicity in the CIA operations, afford effective redress to victims of these practices, and reform any agency or system which led to the abuses in the first place.

CIA extraordinary rendition aid linked to private US companies

The CIA allegedly contracted private U.S. companies to aid in extraordinary rendition of terror suspects to torture centers. (Photo Credit: Public Domain/Central Intelligence Agency/Wikipedia)

Πηγή: newsytype

By Steve Tarlow 

September 1, 2011

The United States’ extraordinary rendition program, which involves transporting and allegedly torturing suspected terrorists, is a controversial aspect of the war on terror. Now, the Guardian reports that the cloak-and-dagger treatment that is bad news for how the world perceives the U.S. and U.K. governments is good news for private American companies. Contracting secret transportation of suspected terrorists to secret prisons amounts to big business.
Fly the unfriendly skies of rendition

As the 10th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, records revealed in a New York-based fee dispute lawsuit, including invoices, receipts and more, suggest that a number of private American firms were paid handsomely by the U.S. government to fly terrorism suspects to various locations around the world. Suspects were reportedly sedated via anal suppositories, then hooded and muffled in the back of the aircraft to facilitate easy transport.

Testimony from multiple sources has revealed that torture techniques were used at many, if not all, of the interrogation center destinations.

Records from the lawsuit reveal that a number of high-ranking executives at firms like Sportsflight and Richmor were completely aware of the purpose of the private charter flights. As a result, corporations and individuals are now at risk of being sued by al-Qaida and Taliban suspects who were victimized by the U.S. extraordinary rendition program.

The case against Sportsflight and Richmor

Sportsflight, an aircraft broker, and Richmor, an aircraft operator, entered into a contract agreement with the U.S. government to rent Gulfstream IV executive jets at $4,900 per hour, rather than the market rate of $5,450 per hour. Crews were made available to fly with only 12 hours’ notice.

Sportsflight owner Don Moss appreciated the business.


“(We were told) we’re going to be very, very busy,” he told the court.

Records of known terror suspects such as Egyptian cleric Abu Omar and alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed – among others involved in the CIA rendition program – are reportedly among the evidence in the New York lawsuit. Flights to and from Alaska, Japan, Thailand, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka are logged, records which support details previously obtained from Indonesian terror leader Encep Nuraman, the Guardian reports.

Richmor is known to have provided aircraft for a private military company called DynCorp, which was acting on the CIA’s behalf. Bills for aircraft were traced through Sportsflight and another aircraft broker, Capital Aviation.

No Reprieve for the CIA

Legal charity Reprieve allegedly discovered the CIA rendition documents that were taken into evidence against Sportsflight and Richmor. Reprieve director Cori Crider spoke to the Guardian of the “sinister business”:


“These documents reveal how the CIA’s secret network of torture sites was able to operate unchecked for so many years. They also reveal what a farce it was that the CIA managed to get the prisoners’ torture claims kicked out as secret, while all of the details of its sinister business were hiding in plain sight,” she said.

The CIA’s exoneration and Holder’s reckoning

Πηγή: The Washington Post

By Marc A. Thiessen, Published: July 4

This Fourth of July weekend, some of the CIA’s dedicated counterterrorism officials will be celebrating more than our nation’s freedom from oppression — they will be celebrating their own. On Thursday, after a grueling two-year investigation, the Justice Department announced that a special prosecutor appointed by Attorney General Eric Holder found no criminal wrongdoing by the CIA officials involved in the agency’s Rendition, Detention and Interrogation program.

Almost every news report led with the fact that the prosecutor, John Durham, was continuing his inquiry into two detainee deaths that took place outside the CIA interrogation program. But the real news was that, after an exhaustive look into the handling of some 100 high-value terrorists held in the CIA program, Durham found no crimes to prosecute. The agency’s interrogators, whose work stopped numerous terrorist attacks and led us to Osama bin Laden, have now been exonerated by the Justice Department for a second time.

Therein lies the outrage. During the Bush administration, career prosecutors from the Eastern District of Virginia conducted an exhaustive inquiry into allegations of abuse in the CIA program and decided against prosecutions in all but one case (a CIA contractor, not in the official interrogation program, who was later convicted of assault). The prosecutors drafted “declination memos” explaining precisely why they decided not to pursue charges. Not only did Holder, a political appointee, overrule the decisions of these career prosecutors, according to The Post, “Before making his decision to reopen the cases, Holder did not read detailed memos that prosecutors drafted and placed in files to explain their decision to decline prosecutions” (emphasis added).

Holder charged ahead over the vigorous objections of seven former CIA directors, who declared in a letter to President Obama that “Holder’s decision to re-open the criminal investigation creates an atmosphere of continuous jeopardy for those whose cases the Department of Justice had previously declined to prosecute” and “will seriously damage the willingness of many other intelligence officers to take risks to protect the country.” Joining their objections was Obama’s then-CIA director, Leon Panetta, who reportedly made his views known in a “profanity-laced screaming match” at the White House.

None of this deterred Holder from pursuing his ideologically driven crusade against the CIA’s interrogators. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Holder had told the left-wing American Constitution Society that “our government authorized the use of torture” and promised the crowd, “We owe the American people a reckoning.” Now — after two years of wasted resources and untold grief for these dedicated intelligence officers — Holder has come up empty. The special prosecutor he assigned to deliver that day of “reckoning” came to the same conclusion as the career prosecutors under the Bush administration: Further investigation of the CIA’s interrogation program “is not warranted.”

The two remaining cases reportedly involve a detainee who froze to death in his cell in Afghanistan in 2002 and another who died in American custody in Iraq in 2003. As Panetta noted in a statement last week, “Both cases were previously reviewed by career federal prosecutors who subsequently declined prosecution.” According to former senior intelligence officials I spoke with, both were battlefield detentions that took place early in the war, and neither had anything to do with the CIA’s interrogation program.

The CIA created a well-run, highly disciplined interrogation and detention regime, where clear guidelines were established, the safety of the detainees was ensured, invaluable intelligence was uncovered and any deviations from approved techniques were stopped, reported and addressed. Now the special prosecutor assigned by Holder to investigate that regime has affirmed — once again — that this program operated completely within the law.

The CIA officers who ran the agency’s interrogation program have been cleared, but their lives will never be the same. They have spent much of the decade since Sept. 11 under threat of prosecution, fighting to defend their good names even as they worked to keep us safe. As a result of the witch hunt Holder unleashed, some of our most talented, capable counterterrorism officials have left government service — and countless others, who might have contemplated such service, have chosen other careers instead. The damage this investigation has done is incalculable.

For this, the American people are indeed owed a reckoning.