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NAIROBI, Kenya - Ethiopia was under pressure Thursday to release details on detainees from 19 countries held at secret prisons in the country where U.S. agents have carried out interrogations in the hunt for al-Qaida in the Horn of Africa. Canada, Eritrea and Sweden were lobbying for information about their citizens. Human rights groups say hundreds of prisoners, including women and children, have been transferred secretly and illegally to the prisons in Ethiopia. An investigation by The Associated Press found that CIA and FBI agents have been interrogating the detainees. Officials from Ethiopia were not immediately available for comment, but...

A Saudi man held in US custody for five years has told a military hearing he was tortured into confessing a role in the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000. Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, 41, said he had faced years of torture after his arrest in 2002, a Pentagon transcript from the closed-door hearing said.

Rockefeller mulls secret prison shutdown By KATHERINE SHRADER, Associated Press Writer 8 minutes ago The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee is questioning whether the CIA's secret prison program — which he fears has become a black eye to the United States — should continue. The review led by Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., comes as the Bush administration deliberates an executive order, called for by Congress, that will establish new guidelines for the CIA's system for detaining and interrogating suspected terrorists. It is the agency's most publicly controversial intelligence collection program. Rockefeller says there is no doubt that intelligence from...

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...

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...

WASHINGTON (AP) - The CIA took the first step toward a criminal investigation of a leak of possibly classified information on secret prisons to The Washington Post, a U.S. official said Tuesday. The agency's general counsel sent a report to the Justice Department about the Post story, which reported the existence of secret U.S. detention centers for suspected terrorists in Eastern Europe. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the issue deals with classified information, said the referral was made shortly after the Nov. 2 story. The leak investigation into the disclosure of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame's...

A SUSPECTED al Qaeda leader, accused of being involved in September 11 and planning the 2004 Madrid train bombings, has been imprisoned in a secret US jail for the past year, Spain's El Pais newspaper reported today. Mustafa Setmarian, 48, a Syrian with Spanish citizenship, was captured in Pakistan in October 2005 and is held in a prison operated by the US Central Intelligence Agency, Pakistani and European security service officials told El Pais. A spokesman for the US embassy in Spain declined to comment on the report. Setmarian's 2005 capture was reported in May of this year after the...

Yes 34% No 66% Total Votes: 773

Via email from: http://gabriellegoldwater.com Secret Evidence for Secret Prisons?By Cliff Kincaid  |  June 9, 2006European leftists went crazy over the charges and demanded the probe. http://www.aim.org/aim_column/4631_0_3_0_C/ Send this page to a friend Format this page for printing Desperate to justify its Pulitzer Prize-winning story about CIA "secret prisons" in Europe, the Washington Post on Thursday claimed that a European investigator by the name of Dick Marty had found "signs" or "indications" of their existence. In fact, the investigator's report admits he found no "hard evidence" of what the Post reported to be true.The U.S. State Department spokesman said about the...

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...

Federal Source to ABC News: We Know Who You're Calling May 15, 2006 10:33 AM Brian Ross and Richard Esposito Report: A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we (Brian Ross and Richard Esposito) call in an effort to root out confidential sources. "It's time for you to get some new cell phones, quick," the source told us in an in-person conversation. ABC News does not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA...

ABC News Correspondent Brian Ross appeared on The O’Reilly Factor to discuss the exposure of detainee prisons in Western Europe. Ross is among a handful of reporters who have exposed these black prisons and embarrassed our country. Ross says he does not feel that this hurts the USA’s image around the world, in fact he thinks what he did helped it. DOWNLOAD and view video here.

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) - Two Yemeni men say they were held in solitary confinement in secret, underground U.S. detention facilities in an unknown country and interrogated by masked men for more than 18 months without being charged or allowed any contact with the outside world, Amnesty International charged Wednesday. Amnesty and human rights lawyers argued that the report added to long-standing claims that the United States has held "secret detainees" in its war on terror. "We fear that what we have heard from these two men is just one small part of the much broader picture of U.S....

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...

Mueller: FBI Probes Classified Data Leaks By TIM WHITMIRE, Associated Press Writer 12 minutes ago The FBI is conducting investigations similar to the one that resulted in last week's firing of a senior CIA analyst who acknowledged leaking classified information, director Robert Mueller said Monday. "We do have investigations going," Mueller said following a visit to the FBI's Charlotte office, which oversees the agency's operations in North Carolina. "Leaking of classified materials is a concern for those agencies that have classified materials." Mary McCarthy, who was nearing retirement at the CIA, has been identified as being fired after leaking information...

Here is another informative schematic from Jennifer Verner: Readers are encouraged to Google the groups and individuals listed to find out just who William Goodfellow is, and what those "secret prison" articles penned by his wife Dana Priest are really all about.

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'S war against the Bush administration is one of the great untold stories of the past three years. It is, perhaps, the agency's most successful covert action of recent times. The CIA has used its budget to fund criticism of the administration by former Democratic officeholders. The agency allowed an employee, Michael Scheuer, to publish and promote a book containing classified information, as long as, in Scheuer's words, "the book was being used to bash the president." However, the agency's preferred weapon has been the leak. In one leak after another, generally to the New York Times or the...

WASHINGTON, April 25 — The Central Intelligence Agency on Tuesday defended the firing of Mary O. McCarthy, the veteran officer who was dismissed last week, and challenged her lawyer's statements that Ms. McCarthy never provided classified information to the news media. But intelligence officials would not say whether they believed that Ms. McCarthy had been a source for a Pulitzer Prize-winning series of articles in The Washington Post about secret C.I.A. detention centers abroad. Media accounts have linked Ms. McCarthy's firing to the articles, but the C.I.A. has never explicitly drawn such a connection (snip) A C.I.A. spokeswoman, Jennifer Millerwise...

It appears that one of the main sources of Washington Post reporter Dana Priest’s dubious November 2, 2005, story about CIA “secret prisons” abroad was CIA officer and former Clinton official Mary O. McCarthy, whose firing by the agency because of her leaks to Priest and other journalists has been making headlines. She had been hired by Rand Beers of the Clinton National Security Council, who went on to serve as an adviser to the 2004 presidential campaign of Senator John Kerry. Mary O. McCarthy, identified as a “U.S. Government/analyst,” is listed in Federal Election Commission records as a financial...