The Heretik

ERRONEOUS RENDITION

WELCOME TO THE WAR ON ERROR TERROR  How many more terrors errors have been made in our fight for right before we get it all wrong  right? Oops. Our bad. Kafka called to say this is what happens when the fox investigates what happened in the hen house. The case of Khalid Masri has previously been discussed here. Rendition is even more extraordinary when it concerns Masri, but he is not alone.

Unlike the military's prison for terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba -- where 180 prisoners have been freed after a review of their cases -- there is no tribunal or judge to check the evidence against those picked up by the CIA. The same bureaucracy that decides to capture and transfer a suspect for interrogation-- a process called "rendition" -- is also responsible for policing itself for errors.
The CIA inspector general is investigating a growing number of what it calls "erroneous renditions," according to several former and current intelligence officials. . . .
"They picked up the wrong people, who had no information. In many, many cases there was only some vague association" with terrorism, one CIA officer said.
While the CIA admitted to Germany's then-Interior Minister Otto Schily that it had made a mistake, it has labored to keep the specifics of Masri's case from becoming public. As a German prosecutor works to verify or debunk Masri's claims of kidnapping and torture, the part of the German government that was informed of his ordeal has remained publicly silent. Masri's attorneys say they intend to file a lawsuit in U.S. courts this week.
Masri was held for five months largely because the head of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center's al Qaeda unit "believed he was someone else," one former CIA official said. "She didn't really know. She just had a hunch."

SHE DIDN’T REALLY KNOW  Does anyone know if “she” still has a job?

JUST WHO MIGHT “she” be? Presumably “who” she is was leaked to Dana Priest at the WaPo [Never Yet Melted via Tom Maguire]

How stupid does Ms. Priest think Washington Post readers are exactly? It would be a lot fairer too, let me suggest, if Priest also operated openly, and told the world just who it is that planted this story, including savory tidbits of inside gossip about “a former Soviet analyst with spiked hair that matched her in-your-face personality who heads the CTC’s al Qaeda unit,” who it is who is recklessly prepared to discredit and compromise US efforts to prevent terrorist attacks on large Western civilian population targets in order to avenge in-house slights, bring down rivals, and gain partisan political advantage.

YEAH, IT ALL COMES back to domestic politics. For advantage. Or something.

SEPTEMBER ELEVENTH CHANGED EVERYTHING and it looks like it wasn’t all for the good.

"It was the Camelot of counterterrorism," a former counterterrorism official said. "We didn't have to mess with others -- and it was fun."
Thousands of tips and allegations about potential threats poured in after the attacks. Stung by the failure to detect the plot, CIA officers passed along every tidbit. The process of vetting and evaluating information suffered greatly, former and current intelligence officials said. "Whatever quality control mechanisms were in play on September 10th were eliminated on September 11th," a former senior intelligence official said.

YEAH, IT WAS FUN Fun when your family doesn’t see you for months and our captors don’t have to give a shit response because they don’t have to mess with others, just with you.  We will go on doing what we do worst best. Everybody else can just back off.

THE WHITE HOUSE MAY have a perception problem. What is fun and what is wrong?  Contrary to in house reports at the White House, all is not white where they walk. Black is still black. The new black rhetoric that obfuscates on “black site” CIA prisons resonates because. . . the policy is wrong.  Black and white, dumbass, wrong.

Convinced that the media, rather than Europe’s leaders, are making the biggest fuss about reports of “black sites” housing top Al-Qaeda prisoners, Rice has decided she can afford to brush off mounting criticism of America’s human rights record.
The White House adopted an aggressive tone when Scott McClellan, the presidential spokesman, said on Friday that George W Bush did not condone torture. “When it comes to human rights, there is no greater leader than the United States of America,” he said.

 

THE WHITE HOUSE HAS NO SHAME
MORE TERROR ERROR Another oops here.  Take a flyer, dude via Correntewire.

FIVE FOR FIVE

DILAWAR’S TORMENTOR HAS BEEN SENTENCED  [story]  Justice and judgement hang in the balance of how we treat the prisoners in our charge.  A taxi driver, not a terrorist, Dilawar was hung by his wrists from a ceiling for five days.  With some certainty, prosecution of Diliwar's killers would hang on legal terms and defense would hang on excuses.  Uncertainty of just what is and what is not allowed would be one excuse, frustration another.  Dilawar suffers no uncertainty nor frustration.  One certainty remains. Dilawar is dead.
 

Claus said the abuses were the result of frustrations during interrogations. He admitted to forcing water down the throat of a detainee known as Dilawar and twisting a hood over the man's head. Dilawar died at the detention center in 2002. No one has been charged with causing his death.[CNN]

Even as the young Afghan man was dying before them, his American jailers continued to torment him. [NY Times]

``They are my actions, and I can't ever take them back,'' Claus said. ``I am extremely sorry this has become a national issue and an international issue at that. The Army doesn't deserve ... this.'' [Guardian UK]

Dilawar doesn't deserve this either.  Five for five.  The tormentor Claus got five months, Dilawar will be dead for five forevers.

MORE ON DILIWAR [here] [hat tip: Talk Left]

RELATED READING
"WHAT YOU ALLOWED TO HAPPEN HAPPENED" [Body and Soul] There have, in fact, been some pretty serious cases of abuse involving Special Forces soldiers and Navy Seals. The elite. This is not all about Lynndie England and a bunch of semi-educated animals, and that's nothing new.

ONE WHO STOOD UP: Letter of Captain Ian Fishback to John McCain [WaPo] Some argue that since our actions are not as horrifying as Al Qaeda's, we should not be concerned. When did Al Qaeda become any type of standard by which we measure the morality of the United States? We are America, and our actions should be held to a higher standard, the ideals expressed in documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Others argue that clear standards will limit the President's ability to wage the War on Terror. Since clear standards only limit interrogation techniques, it is reasonable for me to assume that supporters of this argument desire to use coercion to acquire information from detainees. This is morally inconsistent with the Constitution and justice in war. It is unacceptable.

GETTING TO THE BOTTOM [Joseph L. Galloway/Knight Ridder]  There have been 17 separate investigations of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and other prisoner abuse scandals. All have gone straight to the bottom of every case. All have consistently claimed that no one higher up the chain of command, including the civilian leadership in the Pentagon, bears any responsibility for any of this.

Hogwash. BS. Nonsense.

THIS IS HOW THE WORLD ENDS

THIS IS HOW the world ends [story] THREE, TWO, ONE . . . Our elite Eightysecond Airborne does dubious battle and fails to win hearts and minds.  In the tortured twist of “war on terror” we are now the terrrible torturers yet again.  Would THIS all be worth it if the war could be won?

THIS IS HOW the civilized world ends.  Not with a bang but a whimper.  We become the monsters we battle.  The Eightysecond Airborne Division has fallen from the sky  all the way down to hell.  We win no hearts nor minds, only a dark prize for what we do in secret.

WE DROWN IN MORAL QUICKSAND, our leaders convinced we can still build democratic sandcastles in the raging surf.

RELATED HERETIK POST [WEEDS OF WAR]

RECOMMENDED READING
[JUAN COLE] The first reason to get the ground troops out now is that they are being fatally brutalized by their own treatment of Iraqi prisoners. Abu Ghraib was horrific, and we who are not in Congress or the Department of Defense have still only seen a fraction of the photographs of it that exist.

MORE FROM [T CHRIS /TALK LEFT] Forced to confront this latest scandal, now that it's been made public, the Army has launched a criminal investigation.  Will its object be to limit the exposure of top Pentagon officials while casting the entire blame on soldiers in the field?

A POISONED TREE? [STEVE SOTO/ LEFT COASTER] We’re not talking about some rogue group of knuckle-draggers from a weekend warriors guard or reserve unit here. We’re talking about the 82nd Airborne, for God’s sake.

THE HERETIK WOULD SAY this is not god's work, nor is it the devil's deed.  Man does evil to man and the seeds that grow from this are the flowers of evil.

[THINK PROGRESS] EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH FORMER CENTCOM COMMANDER on similarities between Iraq and American Revolution: Well, it’s true [that the two conflicts are alike], but we’re on the wrong side. We’re the Brits. This is part of the hubris of this crowd that would think that in a country where 95 percent of the population was tribal, where it had been under various colonial rules for however long – since the Caliphate I guess – that all of a sudden this thing was going to turn around overnight. By the way, I just finished reading [David] McCullough’s book, 1776.  We’re in there.  (Laughter.) … Yeah, but we have red coats.

THE HERETIK ASKS: ONE, TWO, THREE . . . . WHAT ARE WE FIGHTING FOR?  Where do we go from here, and how did we get to this point?

HINDSIGHT IS MORE THAN TWENTY/TWENTY [LIMITED INC]  Hindsight should tell us this: Iraq was able, two years ago, to stand on its own two feet. The American occupation has been aimed at preventing an independent Iraq, not at creating one. The idea of indefinite occupation, ie colonizing Iraq, depended, however, on two factors: that Iraq would eventually be a cash cow, and that the American population would go along with Bush’s plan. The first pillar of the Bush plan has collapsed. The second is collapsing. Iraq is in the hands of Iran’s allies. The cost of continuing the war is unsustainable. Moreover (although the Americans still don’t know this), American has become irrelevant to the ultimate outcome in Iraq. Under the shadow of the American shock troops, the real political fight has been happening, in which the American side is represented by a Kurdish faction – and even that faction is becoming impatient with their ally. [HAT TIPS: Empire Burlesque, Avedon]

THE HERETIK ASKS how many out there think this moral rot would be worth the price to our national soul if we "won" in Iraq? 

How much more of our moral capital will evaporate in the heat of desert war, even as our putative goals are unrealized and impossible to attain?  Don't even ask about the missing eight or nine billion.  We slouch on on gangrenous legs someday sure to pay a price yet unseen in number, a dark shadow on the horizon nonetheless.

STREAMLINE OR STEAMROLL?

In Times of Executive Excess and Legislative License, The Wronged Common Man Historically Has Looked to the Federal Courts to Make Right What Was Wrong. HABEUS CORPUS has been that wronged citizen’s last legal refuge. This has been true for death row inmates, for people wrongly convicted of crimes, for anyone who feels the powers that be be a little too comfortable in their self appointed thrones.  Justice is so inconvenient and it does take time to redress wrongs and make them right. Apparently that is too much time and too inconvenient for some.

The Washington Post yesterday printed an EDITIORIAL on the quietly Orwellian STREAMLINED PROCEDURES ACT OF 2005 now before Congress.   Steamrolled Citzens Act of All Time was too honest a label, but that is its effect.

CONGRESS HAS a novel response to the rash of prisoners over the past few years who have been exonerated of capital crimes after being tried and convicted: Keep similar cases out of court. Both chambers of the national legislature are quietly moving a particularly ugly piece of legislation designed to gut the legal means by which prisoners prove their innocence. . . . [MORE]

Habeas Corpus, the root liberty from which all freedom flowers, is under assault by powers that don’t want to be inconvenienced.  Habeas corpus still embodies the idea that you cannot be held without charge and whoever holds you must answer for it.  Apparently answering question may be considered inconvenient, but it still is the American way.  For now.

THE LOWLIGHTS SO FAR

WHAT A BITCH!  JUSTICE TAKES TIME  Look how those prisoners are seizing power! The House Judiciary Committee will have none of that nonsense!

Today, we are also examining Rep. Lungren’s proposal, H.R. 3035, The “Streamlined Procedures Act,” which reforms federal habeas corpus review of State court convictions. The Subcommittee, in the judicial security hearing and in examining child crimes, and even last Congress during consideration of the Justice for All Act, has gathered a substantial amount of evidence showing that federal court habeas review, particularly in the death penalty area, has suffered from extraordinary delays -- some as long as 15 years for a pending habeas petition to be resolved by a single federal judge -- and misguided application of precedent to frustrate the ends of justice.

States provide significant habeas review, and applicants are now using the federal review to frustrate justice, which once calls for reform aimed at ensuring that justice delayed does not turn into justice denied.
[MORE]

Habeas Corpus, the root liberty from which all freedom flowers, is under assault by powers that don’t want to be inconvenienced.  Habeas corpus still embodies the idea that you cannot be held without charge and whoever holds you must answer for it.  Apparently answering question may be considered inconvenient, but it still is the American way.  For now.

[STREAMLINED PROCEDURES ACT OF 2005]

MORE TO FOLLOW
HAT TIP: [DED]

JUST TRUST US

Just Trust Us Is What Authorities Say When They Do Things in the Dark They Would Prefer You Not See in the Open. Secrecy is the cover under which authority does sad deeds.  Secrecy is the death pall over the body politic of a free society.  Secrecy shuts the door on an open society. The loss of an open society is the continuing unstated price we pay for our “security.”  Some say that is an open and shut case not worthy of further open discussion.

What distinguishes the greatness Americans cherish is our openness to the dream, to the aspiring immigrant, to all that might be.  What might be great in America, what we aspire to, and the dream itself are all being crushed by  how we now treat our immigrant newcomers in the certain provisions of the Patriot Act.  Some will say “we” are safe so long as certain restrictions and punishments apply to “them.”  The unquenchable hunger for “security,” however, is rarely a rational and satisfied urge.  That hunger chews at the less well legally armed immigrant and soon seeks the citizen who presumes he has better legal legs and constitutional guarantees to stand on. We who thirst for justice and liberty are left with our mouths slackjawed and dry.

People new to the language of the legal landscape will be shocked how some of our laws translate to the immigrant.  The STORY of the threat of suicidal girls in teenage girls chatroom has been told here before. For those who have forgotten, more on that HERE.  The more RECENT STORY of now unthreatened HINDU GRANDPARENTS was brought to my attention HERE.  Another TALE  of the hungry dog that would keep us safe, but might devour us all  comes HERE. Be careful what magazines you put out on the reading table.  You can do things legally almost twenty years ago only to find out what you did then is “illegal” now.  You may not be found guilty of a crime, but if you are an immigrant you can suffer still a bad fate: deportation.  Some will say so what: we who have been here will never go there.

Constitutional guarantees are well and good, but they are regularly challenged by well intentioned men who enact ill conceived laws.  Constitutional guarantees are great and noble, but they must be protected from well intentioned men who unknowingly attack the liberties and rights they swear to defend.  If we do not defend the less well armed now, we will find our legal legs less strong later. If we do not see how others are openly and “legally” abused, we may find our own courts closed to our arguments later. 

We who aspire to the heights in the future should not descend any further in a slide to the despicable and discredited, intolerant ways of the past. We must not forget each of us has the immigrant within us.  We must remember to treasure the liberties and rights a free society cannot do without.  In moments of crisis and weakness, we must find the strength to hold true to our best selves.  We must find protection from our special agent “defenders.”

FURTHER READING

TEENAGE SUICIDE GIRLS
[THE HERETIK] [BOOK OF DAYS] [ALL SPIN ZONE] [BODY AND SOUL]

HINDU GRANDPARENTS
[ALL SPIN ZONE] [INDYMEDIA] [SEPIA MUTINY]

ON THE READING TABLE
[ANGRY WHITE KID] [COMMITTEE4JUSTICE]

CONSTITUTIONALLY INCAPABLE

CONSTITUTIONALLY INCAPABLE
Most Americans Presume They Could Never Be Locked Away for Months without a Chance to See a Lawyer or to Hear at Least The Charges Against Them. Most Americans presume the Fifth and Sixth Amendments to the United States Constitution are enough to protect them from the criminal behavior of a government that would without question put citizens behind bars in secret and only answer questions when the unfortunate situation became too public.  If most Americans presume and think they are protected by the Fifth and Sixth Amendments when the government invokes the obscure  material witness law, most Americans are wrong.

A law originally designed to prevent witnesses who might give evidence in criminal prosecutions is now being used by the government to hold citizens and others never charged with crimes, who also never testify before grand juries or in criminal trials.  A government that fosters such acts is constitutionally incapable of protecting our freedoms and in a twist perverse is the enemy of the freedom it claims to protect.

The material witness law has been twisted beyond recognition. Procedures designed for the temporary detention of witnesses who might otherwise skip town have been misused to hold men who were in fact criminal suspects. Holding as “witnesses” people who are in fact suspects sets a disturbing precedent for future use of this extraordinary government power to deprive citizens and others of their liberty. The rule of law itself suffers when a law is used as a pretext to sidestep longstanding checks on the arbitrary exercise of executive power.
-snip-
The material witness law does not specify how long a witness may be incarcerated before being presented in a criminal proceeding or released. The Department of Justice took full advantage of this gap in the law.
-snip-
While the government must inform arrested criminal suspects that they have the right to an attorney, to have an attorney provided, and to remain silent (so-called Miranda warnings), the government has taken the position that material witnesses are not guaranteed this protection by law.
-snip-
Criminal suspects have the right to be informed of the basis for their arrest. Yet the Department of Justice has frequently taken the position that it does not have to provide the material witnesses any information at all.
-snip-
Faced with prosecutors invoking grand jury powers and national security concerns, federal courts have done little to protect the material witnesses.
-snip-
The witnesses’ highly public arrests and the government’s suggestions that they were linked to terrorism damaged their businesses and community reputations. The damage has continued long after their release because the government rarely issued statements publicly exonerating them.
-snip-
History has shown that in times of perceived national peril, governments often succumb to the temptation to abuse their powers of arrest and incarceration. [HRW]

Our country is in the midst of  conflict. Some heads say one thing, some hearts say another.  What we do in the balance will churn some stomachs more than others.

WHERE IS FREEDOM TODAY?
Every Other Time George Bush Speaks About the War on Terror (which Is Now a "Mission"), he declares this gift of the Almighty must be spread across the globe, bu that ideal doesn't not get honored in its reality here at home.  Of all the perverse and twisted ironies in the "War on Terror," we often terrorize our own citizens in misguided ways in order to win a war on terror.

After I got in the cell I went kind of crazy. I was calling the guards to find out exactly what was my crime. Where’s my lawyer if I have a lawyer. Because nobody told us anything. What’s going to happen or what’s going on. Nobody answered me so I kept banging on the door. Of course I start crying. … The guard came, the supervisor or something. He starts yelling at me. I yelled back and I said [I] need to know why I am here. I need to talk to somebody. He said we don’t know, once we know, we will let you know. I felt he didn’t know why we were being held. I had nothing to do but sit and cry. That’s technically all we did. Sit and pray and cry. Sit and pray and cry.
—Tarek Albasti, a U.S. citizen detained in October 2001 by the U.S. Department of Justice as a material witness and held in solitary confinement in a federal prison in Chicago. The Department of Justice later apologized to him. [HRW]

PREVIOUS HERETIK POST:
[HARMFUL MATERIAL]

[RELEVANT  BACKGROUND]

KEEP YOUR FRIENDS CLOSE

KEEP YOUR FRIENDS CLOSE
And Your Enemies Closer Took A Strange New Meaning in Latest  Revelations in the Omar Abu Extraordinary Rendition Case.  Now it turns out the Moslem Imam “terrorist” Abu Omar also known as Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr may have had another identity known to the CIA: paid informant.  The Italians are still angry with how the problem of terrorist informant was cleaned up for them by the CIA. And of course the CIA comes back with a new standard excuse: The world is a better place without the likes of such a terrorist who used to work as an informant for us.  The possibility that this twisted reality may have been revealed to the Italians could be one explanation for the CIA’s strange behavior in trashing yet another friendly relationship with an ally like Italy.

FROM IL CORIERRE
“It is unthinkable that authorisation for any operation of this kind should have been granted”. Prime minister Berlusconi summons US ambassador.
ROME - In the wake of the Washington Post’s revelations, the government has made an official denial. Italy was not aware of the CIA plan to abduct Imam Abu Omar on suspicion of terrorism. Abu Omar was kidnapped in Milan two years ago by undercover CIA agents, and then taken to Egypt, where he was tortured.
“ITALY WAS NOT INVOLVED” - No operations related to the abduction “were ever brought to the attention of the Italian government or the country’s institutions”, the minister for relations with Parliament, Carlo Giovanardi, told the Senate yesterday, adding that “in consequence it is unthinkable that any operation of this kind was authorised, or that Italian services were involved”.
[MORE]

The United States  currently engages in serious damage control on public relations here. On the United States side, no one has yet explained how and why its agents felt the need to totally discount respect for Italian sovereignty and law.  When quick results are paramount, bad results are the consequence. When policy is not well thought out, thoughtless offense is inevitable

FROM THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE
Neither the Bush administration nor the CIA has acknowledged any role in the operation. But U.S. government officials privately paint Nasr, better known as Abu Omar, as a dangerous terrorist who once plotted to kill the Egyptian foreign minister and was worthy of an audacious daylight abduction involving more than 20 operatives, weeks of planning and hundreds of thousands of dollars.
One senior U.S. official, who spoke on condition that she not be identified, asserted: "The world's a better place with this guy off the streets."
But evidence gathered by prosecutors here, who have charged 13 CIA operatives with Abu Omar's kidnapping, indicates that the abduction was a bold attempt to turn him back into the informer he once was.
As a result, Italian-American relations are at their lowest point in years, 13 Americans are fugitives from Italian justice, and Milanese prosecutors and police, who had been closely monitoring Abu Omar and knew nothing about his planned abduction, are furious.
"Instead of having an investigation against terrorists, we are investigating this CIA kidnapping," a senior prosecution official fumed last week.
According to the prosecutor's application for the 13 warrants, when Abu Omar reached Cairo on a CIA-chartered aircraft, he was taken straight to the Egyptian interior minister.
If he agreed to inform for the Egyptian intelligence service, Abu Omar "would have been set free and accompanied back to Italy," the document said.
[MORE]

So here we have a story of a terrorist who was an informant who might stop being a terrorist if he were again an informant.  People and things are what they are. To deny what one is in hopes of what it might be produce absurdities in this case. Trusting the Egyptians to keep us informed of their informer’s new information is as absurd as trusting that the rendered prisoner Abu Omar would not be tortured to change him from terrorist to informer who is yet a terrorist.

Today is Franz Kafka's birthday and he couldn't written this better.  Or worse.

HARMFUL MATERIAL

There Ought to Be a Law.  It Can’t Happen Here. Americans say both of these things regularly Their ought to be a law conveys our American sense of caution.  We have to watch out. It can’t happen here is a typical american dream. What happens when there is a law and yet things happen here is an american nightmare.  Most Americans believe you can only be arrested for a crime, or for suspicion of having committed a crime, but the truth is the government can arrest you for someone else’s crime if it believes you have evidence material to the case and needs you to provide it.  In the current political environment you are material ready for abuse.

Human Rights Watch has just published Witness to Abuse, which recounts in harsh detail what happens when an impatient government machinery anixous for results in an era of crisis crushes due process and fundamental rights to be informed of reason for arrest, evidence against the accused, and access to legal counsel.  In addition the current representatives have done this all in secret.

The Justice Department has refused to reveal how many material witnesses it has detained in connection with its counterterrorism investigations and has largely ignored repeated Congressional inquiries. After a year of extensive research, Human Rights Watch and the ACLU have confirmed 70 such material witnesses. Sixty-four were of Middle Eastern or South Asian descent; 17 were U.S. citizens, and all but one was Muslim.
--snip--
“It’s hard to argue about a national security argument. Anytime I ask[ed] what the basis was it would be a canned national security argument. I would ask: ‘What’s the justification?’ The government responds: ‘National security.’ I would say, ‘What does that mean?’ The government would say: ‘I can’t tell you.’”
—Susan Otto, an attorney who represented material witness Mujahid Menepta in Oklahoma.
--snip--
“I was transferred … to solitary confinement in the Special Housing Unit, or the ‘ninth floor hole.’ The room was maybe six-by-five feet. I was in a small cell for twenty-four hours a day with the lights on. Guards came every ten to fifteen minutes and banged on the door. They look through the hole and stare and looked at me. For two months, I left the cell only for interrogations. Later I was allowed outside after two months but they would leave me out in the freezing cold. I didn’t sleep for one or two months. The guards would bang on the door all night. They would say, ‘This is the guy—the Taliban guy,’ or call me ‘Khan Taliban.’ The guards said so many bad things. They told me: ‘You won’t ever see your family. You’re going to die here. Do you smell the WTC [World Trade Center] smoke? You’re gone. How would you like to die? With the electric chair?’ ... [Whenever I was taken out of my cell] they would twist my hands. My feet were shackled and guards would step on chains. I got a deep cut on my feet. I was stripped too many times to remember and hit on the back. I would be pushed against the wall. Whenever they took me to the FBI, guards would twist my hands and fingers and tell me to ‘Just shut up.’”
—Ayub Ali Khan, an Indian national arrested as a material witness on September 12, 2001 in San Antonio, Texas and held in the Special Housing Unit at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York

[HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH]

MORE ON THIS TO FOLLOW SOON
 

ANARCHY USA

RENDITION: ANARCHY USA The Secret is Out. The extraordinary rendition of Abu Omar gets to the heart of whether the United States respects the rule of law, the first principle of democracy. If not law first, criminals rule us in the end.  By what means do we come to this end?  Secrecy is a greater threat to our nation than any outside agents. What our agents do in our name is covered by a sheet of covert necessity. Pull that sheet off and we find ourselves in bed with chaos loosed upon the world.
Even more than a story about warring intelligence agencies and laws broken in Italy, the extraordinary rendition of Abu Omar is reveals the turf of amoral anarchy on which the war on terror is fought. American exceptionalism has never played well to other nations. With every new detail that comes out in extraordinary rendition cases like Abu Omar’s, the CIA’s  poker face  cannot hide cards played far too quickly in a losing game for law.  If we allow our cops to act like criminals for national security, from what are we secure?

FROM IL CORIERRE
The victim was tailed on a street in Milan, immobilized with a chemical spray, kidnapped, sent in secret to the US air base at Aviano, and from there to the fastnesses of the Mubarak regime, with no legal guarantees whatsoever. Now the Abu Omar case threatens to widen the split between the United States and Italy, following the regrettable aftermath of the Sgrena case and the death of Nicola Calipari. Abu Omar’s abduction took place on the territory of a friendly sovereign state, and ally of Washington, which has courageously supported the postwar peace process in Iraq by sending troops to Nassiriya, thus exposing itself to Madrid-style terrorist reprisals. The fact that, in between dallyings in luxury hotels and expenses James Bond would have baulked at, the CIA chose to act without informing the Italian authorities confirms that the US administration has yet to grasp the scale of the damage wreaked on America’s image by the chains at Guantanamo, the photos of Abu Ghraib, and the covert actions of the CIA, whose strategic aims were explained yesterday to the Corriere della Sera by Robert Baer, a former member of the Directorate of Operations. What is the point of the forthright speech by Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice urging America’s Egyptian and Saudi allies to at last open their societies to democracy if the CIA then sends Abu Omar, illegally abducted in Italy, to Cairo, to be unceremoniously interrogated without lawyers, transparency, or legal process, all considered superfluous luxuries in time of war by Washington hardliners? [MORE]

The United States  currently engages in serious damage control on public relations here. On the United States side, no one has yet explained how and why its agents felt the need to totally discount respect for Italian sovereignty and law.  When quick results are paramount, bad results are the consequence. When policy is not well thought out, thoughtless offense is inevitable

FROM THE WASHINGTON POST
The CIA "told a tiny number of people" about the [Abu Omar] action, said one intelligence veteran in the management chain of the operation when it took place. "Certainly not the magistrate, not the Milan police."
--snip--
The Italian court case offers an accidental glimpse into how U.S. and foreign intelligence agencies coordinate and communicate on sensitive counterterrorism matters in ways that are expressly kept secret, even from other parts of their governments. This bifurcation between stated policies and secret practices has become more common since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, as the CIA has sought cooperation from other governments to covertly apprehend and transport suspected terrorists to undisclosed locations without legal hearings.
--snip—
The Italian operation was highly unusual even in the context of 100 renditions.

In most, if not all, other post-Sept. 11 renditions, the security service of the foreign country has apprehended the suspect, then transferred him into CIA custody. In the Italian case, operatives from the CIA's paramilitary branch, the Special Activities Division, were dispatched, making the risk of disclosure much higher.

Two of the CIA veterans said the operatives became directly involved because, by 2003, counterterrorism operations had become the main thing the agency's leadership and the White House cared about. "Everyone wanted into the game," a CIA officer said. "The CIA chief in Italy wanted to have a notch in his belt."
[MORE]


The Italian press thus far has a far better understanding of how the Omar Abu case impacts our society than anyone in the American media and our as yet unknowing citizens

The finest moments in American history, from Lincoln to Roosevelt, show that despite all the gray areas, it is possible to defend democracy by force without distorting its spirit.  . . . .  Was this an unauthorized operation by the CIA? Did the White House know? Was the Pentagon informed? How far up did that knowledge filter? Did the Italian authorities give the green light? Or was the light yellow? Did any Italians attend the notification briefings, and if they did, why did they say yes?
[MORE]

The letter of the law, the spirit of the law.  If we do not see the letters of the law that are written on the wall of Omar Abu’s secret prison cell, the spirit of law and the best spirit of our nation will be lost. We will be left then in the care of monsters, in the wasteland of anarchy.

BAND ON THE RUN: EXTRAORDINARY RENDITION

BAND ON THE RUN:
Search for CIA Kidnappers of Abu Omar Spreads Across Europe. Former CIA station chief in Milan is most sought after and may have witnessed Omar’s torture in Egypt. With extraordinary rendition, what annoys our Italian allies most is a me first attitude of American agents. Agents regularly break laws of other countries, but some do it with more of an approving nod from local government than others.  The question that must be asked while this sad music plays is what does this say about international law if we regularly break  the law to catch people we consider criminals.

WANTED: WOMEN AND MEN
MILAN - From today, thirteen CIA agents are wanted all over Europe. The operatives are accused of abducting Imam Abu Omar in Milan and taking him to Egypt, where he was tortured. The formal transmission of the arrest warrant to the Eurojust judicial coordination office means that it will automatically become effective in all EU member countries. At this stage, any European police officer could arrest, as well as identify, the thirteen CIA agents, who are now “on the run”.
  [IL CORRIERE]

CIA STATION CHIEF MOST WANTED
The alleged former CIA station chief in Milan, a 51-year-old Honduran-born American who is among those named in the arrest warrants, is believed to have accompanied or followed Abu Omar to Egypt and to have been present for some of the interrogations, a senior Italian judicial official said yesterday.
That raises the possibility that the American agent was aware of the alleged torture, the Italian official said. The man's movements were tracked by his use of a cellular telephone to make calls from Egypt in the two weeks after the disappearance of Abu Omar, the official said.
Abu Omar, during a brief period of freedom in 2004, told associates that he was tortured with electrical shocks to his genitals and beatings during the interrogations in Egypt.
[LA TIMES NEWS SERVICE]

 

 

In some ways this new controversy comes down to a difference in philosophy and style.  In its aggressive assault in the "War on Terror," the United States does not have the patience to deal with critics at home and allies abroad who insist on doing things by the book, the law book.  The same administration that derides it critics at home for treating terror as a law enforcement issue take the same impatient approach with allies like Italy.  The Italians had their own plans for prosecuting Omar Abu.  He won't be prosecuted in Italy any time soon.  Nor does it look like the American CIA agents will be, if they are ever found.

European counterterrorism officials have pursued a policy of building criminal cases against terrorism suspects through surveillance, wire-taps, detective work and the criminal justice system. The United States, however, has frequently used other means since Sept. 11, 2001, including renditions - abducting terror suspects from foreign countries and transporting them for questioning to third countries, some of which are known to use torture.

Those two approaches seem to have collided in the case of an Egyptian cleric, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, or Abu Omar, who led a militant mosque in Milan.

By early 2003, the Italian secret police were aggressively pursuing a criminal terrorism case against Mr. Nasr, with the help of American intelligence officials. Italian investigators said they had told the Americans they had strong evidence that he was trying to build a terror recruitment network, possibly aimed for Iraq if the United States went forward with plans to topple Saddam Hussein.

On Feb. 17, 2003, Mr. Nasr disappeared.

When the Italians began investigating, they said, they were startled to find evidence that some of the C.I.A. officers who had been helping them investigate Mr. Nasr were involved in his abduction.

"We do feel quite betrayed that this operation was carried out in our city," a senior Italian investigator said. "We supplied them information about Abu Omar, and then they used that information against us, undermining an entire operation against his terrorist network."
[NY TIMES]

The go it alone approach to taking prisoners in other countries has its mirror in the United States approach to giving up its own agents when they are accused of crimes in Italy.  It's not going to happen.

‘There is close to no probability that the United States is going to extradite any of these people to Italy, notwithstanding the letter of any treaty," said Peter J. Spiro, who teaches international law at the University of Georgia. "It's very unlikely that there is going to be any sort of cooperation on this end."

It is not unusual for intelligence operations to violate local laws, but operations like the one at issue here are typically undertaken with at least the tacit blessing of the local government. The government of Silvio Berlusconi has made no official comment on the case.

"If the apprehension and removal, to use those relatively neutral terms, of this individual, were done without the knowledge and authorization of at least some part of the Italian government," said Douglass W. Cassel Jr., who teaches international law at Northwestern University, "then it's a clear violation of international law."
  [NY TIMES]

So what does the leader of the free world have to say about extraordinary rendition?  George Bush has very well chosen, deceptive words when he was asked a question on rendition at his March 17, 2005 Press Conference.

THE QUESTION THAT IS ASKED AND WHAT LIES IN THE ANSWER

Q Mr. President, can you explain why you've approved of and expanded the practice of what's called rendition, of transferring individuals out of U.S. custody to countries where human rights groups and your own State Department say torture is common for people under custody?
THE PRESIDENT: The post-9/11 world, the United States must make sure we protect our people and our friends from attack. That was the charge we have been given. And one way to do so is to arrest people and send them back to their country of origin with the promise that they won't be tortured. That's the promise we receive. This country does not believe in torture. We do believe in protecting ourselves. We don't believe in torture. And --
Q As Commander-in-Chief --
THE PRESIDENT: Sorry, what -- make Roberts feel terrible.
Q That's all right.
THE PRESIDENT: No, no, you shouldn't make --
Q It doesn't bother me at all. (Laughter.)
THE PRESIDENT: Elisabeth.
Q As Commander-in-Chief, what is it that Uzbekistan can do in interrogating an individual that the United States can't?
THE PRESIDENT: We seek assurances that nobody will be tortured when we render a person back to their home country.
[WHITE HOUSE]

Bush parses his answer quite plainly about assurances and countrymen being sent back home, but what of reports of people rendered to Egypt and to Syria that were not of those countries?  A greater question remains.  We take great pride in our intelligence service for its abilities.  When we render people to other countries, are we saying those countries can do something we cannot? Or something we will not, but will allow them to do in our name?  So long as they don't explicitly tell us.  Nudge, nudge. Wink, wink.

PREVIOUS HERETIK POST ON RENDITION:
[EXTRAORDINARY RENDITION RULED ORDINARY CRIME IN ITALY]

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