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Obama’s Amazing AchievementsHis military intervention prompted some stunning reversals. By bombing Libya, President Obama has accomplished some things once thought absolutely impossible in America:(a) War-mongering liberals: Liberals are now chest-thumping about military “progress� in Libya. Even liberal television and radio commentators cite ingenious reasons why an optional, preemptive American intervention in an oil-producing Arab country, without prior congressional approval or majority public support — and at a time of soaring deficits — is well worth supporting, in a sort of “my president, right or wrong,� fashion. Apparently, liberal foreign policy is returning to the pre-Vietnam days of the hawkish “best...

The view from (some) on the right in regard to the Bin Laden news is: waterboarding is vindicated. One GOP Congressman tweeted: Wonder what President Obama thinks of water boarding now? The reason is that there's a direct line to be traced from the big news to data collected at GITMO -- data that was almost certainly collected under duress. Here's the key interrogation note regarding a courier going to Abottabad: Rest @ link

An appellate court in Milan upheld on Wednesday the conviction of 23 Americans charged with kidnapping an Egyptian cleric in 2003 and ordered even harsher sentences. All but one of the Americans are Central Intelligence Agency operatives.

ISLAMABAD: The government handed a foreigner to the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on Sunday. The suspect, Muhammad Haris, was wanted by the United States in a number of cases. His nationality was not revealed. Sources said Mr Haris had been arrested a while ago from an undisclosed location and was under trial in jail. The sources said he had been flown to the United States. The Interior Ministry refused to comment. Online

Ministers insisted that British secret agents would only be allowed to pass intelligence to the CIA to help it capture Osama bin Laden if the agency promised he would not be tortured, it has emerged. MI6 believed it was close to finding the al-Qaida leader in Afghanistan in 1998, and again the next year. The plan was for MI6 to hand the CIA vital information about Bin Laden. Ministers including Robin Cook, the then foreign secretary, gave their approval on condition that the CIA gave assurances he would be treated humanely. The plot is revealed in a 75-page report by...

Attorney General Eric Holder is reportedly mulling whether to investigate the Bush administration's alleged abuse of terrorist detainees. And CIA Director Leon Panetta is currently prodding lawmakers to investigate the Bush administration's alleged directive to the CIA to keep a secret counter-terrorism program hidden from congress. However, before the US Justice Dept. and Congress follow the marching orders of Eric Holder and Leon Panetta, proper protocol would dictate that they first investigate whether Mr. Holder and Panetta, while working in the Clinton administration, had any knowledge of the Clinton administration's extraordinary renditions program. Bear in mind that in 1993, Leon...

CIA Pick Panetta: No More Torture, Renditions Thursday, February 5, 2009 3:41 PM WASHINGTON — CIA Director nominee Leon Panetta says the Obama administration will not conduct the same kind of "extraordinary rendition" that were allowed under the Bush administration. Panetta told a Senate committee on Thursday that Obama forbids what Panetta called "that kind of extraordinary rendition — when we send someone for the purpose of torture or actions by another country that violate our human values." CIA Director Michael Hayden has said that the Bush administration moved secret prisoners between countries for interrogations and imprisonment, separate from the...

Chicago Tribune  WASHINGTON -- The CIA's secret prisons are being shuttered. Harsh interrogation techniques are off-limits. And Guantanamo Bay will eventually go back to being a wind-swept naval base on the southeastern corner of Cuba. But even while dismantling these discredited programs, President Barack Obama left an equally controversial counterterrorism tool intact. Under executive orders issued by Obama last week, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, or the secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the U.S. Current and former U.S. intelligence officials said the rendition program is poised...

President Bush could pardon officials involved in brutal interrogations -- but he may also face a sweeping investigation under the new president. WASHINGTON -- With growing talk in Washington that President Bush may be considering an unprecedented "blanket pardon" for people involved in his administration's brutal interrogation policies, advisors to Barack Obama are pressing ahead with plans for a nonpartisan commission to investigate alleged abuses under Bush. The Obama plan, first revealed by Salon in August, would emphasize fact-finding investigation over prosecution. It is gaining currency in Washington as Obama advisors begin to coordinate with Democrats in Congress on the...

Politicians and human rights groups want to go on board US-registered planes that are believed to be carrying terror suspects when they land in Norway for refueling. Planes believed to be chartered by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have landed at the Sola Airport outside Stavanger as many as 15 times since 2003, reports local newspaper Stavanger Aftenblad. It's also believed that the planes, officially owned by Aviation Specialties Inc of the US, have landed for refueling at airports in Bergen and Evenes as well. A report to the European Parliament in 2006 claimed that Aviation Specialties is a...

MANCHESTER, England - A city police chief who led an investigation into charges that Britain cooperated with secret CIA flights to transport terrorism suspects without formal proceedings has been found dead, his deputy said Tuesday. Manchester Chief Constable Michael Todd, 50, was found dead in Snowdonia, about 240 miles northwest of London, Deputy Chief Constable Dave Whatton said. He had been missing since going out for a walk Monday during his day off. Whatton said the body, which was found Tuesday afternoon, had not yet been formally identified but he believed it was Todd. He said a coroner's inquest would...

Bucharest and Brussels, 16 Nov. (AKI) - Romania, one two countries accused by Europe's top human rights watchdog of hosting secret CIA jails used to interrogate Islamist terrorism suspects, says it has written to the European Union executive denying the charges. The letter to the European Commission is a response to a request from EU justice and security commissioner Franco Frattini asking Romania and Poland - the other country implicated by the Council of Europe - for an explanation. A Romanian spokeswoman in Brussels, Doris Mircea, said that a committee of inquiry set up by the government concluded that the...

Prosecutors in Italy have issued three more arrest warrants over the kidnapping of an Egyptian imam based in Milan by a team of CIA agents. Among those wanted in connection with the operation, which led to the man - Abu Omar - being tortured in Egypt, is a 38-year-old female CIA agent who was working as a diplomat at the US embassy in Rome and is said to have led the operation. Betnie Medero, who was second secretary at the embassy until a few months ago, is one of 22 CIA agents now wanted by Italian police over the kidnapping,...

A Muslim cleric has claimed to have been tortured with electric shocks, left in a cell where rats crawled on him and threatened with rape after he was allegedly kidnapped from a Milan street by CIA agents three years ago.The claims of Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, appeared in an affidavit provided to Milan prosecutors investigating his alleged abduction in February 2003, the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera reported yesterday. Prosecutors say that the cleric, who was formerly suspected of links to terrorism, was driven to the Aviano military air base and flown via Germany to...

CIA's 'secret prisons in Europe' By Henry Samuel in Paris Last Updated: 2:16am BST 09/06/2007 The CIA ran secret prisons in Poland and Romania to interrogate and even torture some detainees in its "war on terror" under a programme authorised by the countries' presidents, an official European inquiry concluded yesterday. Swiss senator Dick Marty said evidence of CIA-run detention facilities in Europe would stand up in court Swiss senator Dick Marty said Poland housed some of the CIA's most sensitive prisoners - so-called "high value" detainees - including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-professed mastermind of the September 11 attacks in...

For the second time in just over a month, the Italian government has asked a top court to stop a pending trial of 26 Americans, most of them CIA agents, in a case that could provide the first public examination of a secret U.S. program that targeted alleged terror suspects from foreign lands. The State Committee of Lawyers, a government advisory board, was asked to review the procedures that led to indictments handed down last month in connection with the abduction from Milan of a radical cleric named Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, also known as Abu Omar. The government sent...

The metamorphosis of Condoleezza Rice from the chrysalis of the protégé into the butterfly of the State Department has not been a natural evolution but has demanded self-discipline. She has burnished an image of the ultimate loyalist, yet betrayed her mentor, George H.W. Bush's national security advisor Brent Scowcroft. She is the team player, yet carefully inserted knives in the back of her predecessor, Colin Powell, climbing up them like a ladder of success. She is the person most trusted on foreign policy by the president, yet was an enabler for Vice President Cheney and the neoconservatives. Now her public...

A human rights group is asking President Bush to disclose the fates of all terror suspects held since 2001, including at least 16 it believes have been locked up in secret CIA facilities. Human Rights Watch said it compiled a report about the 16, whose whereabouts are unknown, along with 22 others possibly held by the CIA, based on interviews with former detainees, press reports and other sources. The report — "Ghost Prisoner: Two Years in Secret CIA Detention" — includes an accounting from Marwan Jabour, a Palestinian who says he was held incommunicado for more than two years by...

Germany has ordered the arrest of 13 suspected CIA agents over the alleged kidnapping of one of its citizens. Munich prosecutors confirmed that the warrants were linked to the case of Khaled al-Masri, a German national of Lebanese descent. Mr Masri says he was seized in Macedonia, flown to a secret prison in Afghanistan and mistreated there. He says he was released in Albania five months later when the Americans realised they had the wrong man. Mr Masri says his case is an example of the US policy of "extraordinary rendition" - a practice whereby the US government flies foreign...

Fair use for education/discussion purposes: Yahoo! News News Home - Help AFP CIA renditions of terror suspects are 'out of control:' report Sun Feb 6, 5:57 PM ET WASHINGTON (AFP) - The Central Intelligence Agency (news - web sites)'s 'rendition' of suspected terrorists has spiralled 'out of control' according to a former FBI (news - web sites) agent, cited in a report which examined how CIA (news - web sites) detainees are spirited to states suspected of using torture. Michael Scheuer a former CIA counterterrorism agent told The New Yorker magazine "all we've done is create a nightmare," with regard...

The Canadian edition of Time Magazine has chosen Syrian born Maher Arar as its Newsmaker of the Year. The Ottawa Ontario resident landed at JFK International Airport in New York in September 2002 after returning from Tunisia where his wife has family. The Canadian citizen was detained in New York and then shipped off to his native Syria where he was detained and tortured for over a year before being released. After returning to Canada, Arar chose not to blend into the woodwork but forced the Canadian government to hold an inquiry into his arrest and detention and to examine...

OTTAWA — When the prime minister unleashes his lap dogs to join a parliamentary pack attack, someone is about to die. Conservative MPs treated RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli with kid gloves during his first appearance before a parliamentary committee two months ago to explain his involvement in the Maher Arar affair. They dropped the gloves and savaged him during his second appearance on Tuesday, when he admitted to misleading MPs due to a severely flawed memory. It was an all-party Zach attack and when Stephen Harper stood in the Commons a few hours later, urging patience for ‘due process’ before...

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Three undercover CIA officers arrived in Norway in the spring of 2003 as part of a possible secret operation targeting for rendition an Islamic militant living in Oslo known as Mullah Krekar, The Washington Post reported. Citing lawyers and unnamed European investigators, the newspaper said shortly after the agents arrived, Krekar received a warning from an anonymous Norwegian official that Krekar, then head of a Kurdish insurgent group, was a CIA target and should watch his back. The spies left Norway by the end of the summer, the report said. If the CIA was planning to abduct...

Britain was named yesterday as one of 14 European nations that allegedly helped the Central Intelligence Agency abduct and secretly transport terrorist suspects to countries where they faced torture.The accusations came in a report by a former Swiss prosecutor for the Council of Europe, which monitors human rights in 46 European nations. Tony Blair denied the collusion allegations and said the report, by the Swiss senator Dick Marty, contained no fresh evidence. Mr Blair told MPs during Prime Minister's Questions: "I have to say the Council of Europe report has absolutely nothing new in it." In Washington, a spokesman for...

EASTERN European countries were yesterday scrambling to distance themselves from the CIA as officials in Washington searched for the source of an embarrassing leak that exposed a programme of secret jails for terrorist detainees. Claims that the CIA has been hiding prominent Al-Qaeda members at a so-called “black site” facility in eastern Europe have prompted angry denials from Romania, Poland and Albania. As details emerged yesterday of CIA flights to remote military airfields in northeast Poland and southeast Romania, George W Bush’s administration ordered an internal inquiry into how classified data was leaked to The Washington Post and Human Rights...

The U.S. government acknowledged yesterday that the CIA operated "a very high number" of secret flights that stopped in Europe en route to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba according to members of the European Parliament visiting Washington, DC. A special commission has been investigating allegations that the CIA kidnapped and flew al-Qaida terror suspects to secret detention centers. A report preparer for the commission, Claudio Fava, said in Washington yesterday that State Department legal advisor John Bellinger acknowledged that some of the secret flights could have involved renditions. "Bellinger didn't deny there were a large number of CIA flights," Fava said. "That...

EU foreign policy chief under fire over CIA flights The failure of EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana to take action over allegations of illegal CIA renditions makes Europe look ‘pathetic’, MEPs have declared. In a stormy meeting of the European parliament’s temporary committee on CIA allegations, Solana was accused of failing to act on allegations of torture. “Surely you have a political obligation as secretary general of the council to investigate these allegations,” Liberal MEP Sarah Ludford declared on Tuesday. “You claim that under the narrow remit of article seven of the treaty, you have no power to investigate...

Update: In 2002 the WaPo called the International detention (prison) story vital - in 2005 they quote another official calling it a burden. In 2002 they informed people that Clinton initiated the practice of extraordinary rendition. In 2005, they made it look like a creation of George Bush. What changed?

The CIA has conducted more than 1,000 undeclared flights over European territory since 2001, and governments knew it, a European Parliament interim report suggests. A temporary parliament committee investigating alleged CIA activities in Europe on Wednesday (26 April) presented its mid-term findings, backing up earlier allegations that the CIA had carried out clandestine operations in Europe in the context of "the war on terror." "The CIA has, on several occasions, clearly been responsible for kidnapping and illegally detaining alleged terrorists on the territory of member states, as well as for extraordinary renditions," Socialist MEP and the committee's rapporteur, Claudio Fava,...

Director Launches Investigation Into Who Gave Sensitive Information To The Media. Feb 7, 2006 — The director of the CIA has launched a major internal probe into media leaks about covert operations. In an agencywide e-mail, Porter Goss blamed "a very small number of people" for leaks about secret CIA operations that, in his words, "do damage to the credibility of the agency." According to people familiar with the Goss e-mail, sent in late January and classified secret, the CIA director warned that any CIA officer deemed suspect by the agency's Office of Security and its Counter Intelligence Center (which...

MILAN, Italy -- When the CIA decides to "render" a terrorism suspect living abroad for interrogation in Egypt or another friendly Middle East nation, it spares no expense. Italian prosecutors wrote in court papers that the CIA spent "enormous amounts of money" during the six weeks it took the agency to figure out how to grab a 39-year-old Muslim preacher called Abu Omar off the streets of Milan, throw him into a van and drive him to the airport.

The CIA's controversial "rendition" program to have terror suspects captured and questioned on foreign soil was launched under US president Bill Clinton, a former US counterterrorism agent told a German newspaper. Michael Scheuer, a 22-year veteran of the CIA who resigned from the agency in 2004, told Thursday's issue of the newsweekly Die Zeit that the US administration had been looking in the mid-1990s for a way to combat the terrorist threat and circumvent the cumbersome US legal system. "President Clinton, his national security advisor Sandy Berger and his terrorism advisor Richard Clark ordered the CIA in the autumn of...

ABC News is reporting that Current and former CIA officers speaking to ABC News on the condition of confidentiality say the United States scrambled to get all the suspects off European soil before Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived there today. The officers say 11 top al Qaeda suspects have now been moved to a new CIA facility in the North African desert. The disgrunted intelligence officers even disclosed an actual list of 12 high-value targets allegedly held by the CIA, and ABC is reporting it : Abu Zubaydah: Held first in Thailand then Poland Ibn Al-Shaykh al-Libi: Held in...

Perhaps the most misunderstood U.S. counterterrorism tool is the "rendition": the transfer of suspected terrorists from one country to another without formal legal proceedings. Human rights activists and international law experts have blasted the tactic as illegal and accused the U.S. government of "outsourcing torture" by shipping some suspects to countries that brutally interrogate prisoners. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert even declared that renditions stand "side by side with contract killings." Not surprisingly, calls to end or curtail the practice are growing. There is no question that renditions are a flawed instrument, especially when used recklessly and without exploring...

In tucked-away corner, war on terror takes off By Scott Shane, Stephen Grey and Margot Williams The New York Times WEDNESDAY, JUNE 1, 2005 SMITHFIELD, North Carolina The airplanes of Aero Contractors Ltd. take off from Johnston County Airport here, then disappear over the scrub pines and fields of tobacco and sweet potatoes. Nothing about the sleepy Southern setting hints of foreign intrigue. Nothing gives away the fact that Aero's pilots are the discreet bus drivers of the battle against terrorism, routinely sent on secret missions to Baghdad, Cairo, Tashkent and Kabul. When the CIA wants to grab a suspected...

Bush gave agency broad interrogation powers, paper reports. NEW YORK - The Bush administration gave the CIA extensive authority to send terrorism suspects to foreign countries for interrogation just days after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, The New York Times reported in Sunday editions. Citing current and former government officials, the newspaper reported President Bush signed a still-classified directive that gave the CIA a broad power to operate without case-by-case approval from the White House in the transfer of suspects — a process known as rendition. The rendition program has been under scrutiny in recent...