Van nieuwsblog.burojansen.nl

NEW YORK (Reuters) – A judge on Monday refused to find the CIA acted in contempt when it destroyed videotapes that showed harsh interrogations of two suspects.
U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein told a Manhattan federal court hearing that efforts by the CIA to improve how it preserves documents was enough restitution, and that it should pay legal fees to the plaintiffs, the American Civil Liberties Union.
“I don’t think a citation of contempt will add to anything,” Hellerstein said.
In December 2007, the CIA acknowledged destroying dozens of videotapes made under a detention program begun after the September 11 attacks. The interrogations, in 2002, were of alleged al Qaeda members Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.
Until 2007, the CIA had publicly denied the tapes ever existed. They were destroyed in 2005.
A probe by a special federal prosecutor last year found that no CIA personnel should face criminal charges for destroying the videotapes.
Monday’s decision came after years of legal battles between the CIA and the ACLU, which first sued the agency in 2004 to obtain documents on its treatment of prisoners.
When news of the tapes surfaced, the ACLU said the CIA and its chief spy at the time had acted in contempt of court by trashing tapes that should have been preserved under a court order following the ACLU’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
By destroying the tapes, the CIA showed disrespect for the court, said Lawrence Lustberg, an attorney for the ACLU.
Although the CIA failed in not disclosing and preserving the tapes, Judge Hellerstein said: “The bottom line is we are in a dangerous world. We need our spies, we need surveillance, but we also need accountability.”
As part of that accountability, the judge on Monday asked the CIA to detail the new policies it says it has implemented since the tapes were destroyed.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Tara La Morte, arguing for the CIA, said the CIA’s new policies were “above and beyond” what the court required and that the ACLU was “out to exact retribution on the CIA.”
“I don’t think that’s correct,” the judge interrupted.
(Editing by Greg McCune)
Mon, Aug 1 2011
By Basil Katz
Find this story at 1 August 2011
© Thomson Reuters 2011.

Harper facing criticism from human rights groups

The four-page, 2010 framework document, sent to then-Defence Minister Peter MacKay, says when there is a “substantial risk” that sending information to – or soliciting information from – a foreign agency would result in torture, the matter should be referred to the responsible deputy minister or agency head.
The four-page, 2010 framework document, sent to then-Defence Minister Peter MacKay, says when there is a “substantial risk” that sending information to – or soliciting information from – a foreign agency would result in torture, the matter should be referred to the responsible deputy minister or agency head. Pawel Dwulit/Canadian Press

The Conservative government has secretly ordered the Canadian military to share information with allies even when there’s a serious risk it could lead to torture.

The Defence Department was making good progress on developing a directive from the minister to put the policy into effect, a newly declassified memo shows.

The memo reveals Defence was slated to be the fifth and final federal agency to apply the Harper government’s instruction to exchange information with a foreign agency when doing so may give rise to a “substantial risk” of torture.

TIMELINE: Spies and Canada’s secrets
Security gaps found in destruction of top-secret military data
The others are the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, the RCMP, the Canada Border Services Agency and Communications Security Establishment Canada, the electronic eavesdropping agency known as CSE.

The Canadian Press obtained a copy of the November 2011 memo under the Access to Information Act.

National Defence cannot release a copy of the resulting directive on information sharing — nor say when it was completed and issued — because it’s a classified document, said department spokeswoman Tina Crouse.

“We don’t have any comment right now,” she said.

Effectively condones torture
The federal policy has drawn sharp criticism from human rights advocates and opposition MPs, who say it effectively condones torture, contrary to international law and Canada’s United Nations commitments.

The war in Afghanistan is a stark illustration of the fact Canadian military forces can and do develop close relationships with foreign security forces that are unquestionably responsible for torture, said Alex Neve, secretary general for Amnesty Canada.

”Analyze the situation. If you think that sharing this information is likely to contribute to torture abroad, don’t do it.’- Justice Dennis O’Connor
A policy that leaves the door open for the possibility of collaboration even if torture may result “is particularly troubling,” Neve said in an interview.

The memo says the Defence directive was to flow from a federal framework that “establishes a consistent process of decision making” across departments and agencies when the exchange of national-security related information puts someone at serious risk of being tortured.

The four-page, 2010 framework document, previously released under the access law, says when there is a “substantial risk” that sending information to — or soliciting information from — a foreign agency would result in torture, the matter should be referred to the responsible deputy minister or agency head.

Certain factors considered
In deciding what to do, the agency head will consider various factors, including the threat to Canada’s national security and the nature and imminence of the threat; the status of Canada’s relationship with — and the human rights record of — the foreign agency; and the rationale for believing that sharing the information would lead to torture.

arar_maher040122
Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian, was detained in New York in September 2002 and deported soon after by U.S. authorities. A federal commission of inquiry concluded that faulty information the RCMP passed to the Americans likely led to the Ottawa engineer’s traumatic detention. ((CBC))

The framework says it applies primarily to sharing with foreign government agencies and militaries, but also with military coalitions, alliances and international organizations.

In 2011, then-public safety minister Vic Toews issued directives to CSIS, the RCMP and the federal border agency that closely followed the wording of the government-wide framework.

That same year, MacKay issued a similar directive to CSE, which reports to the defence minister.The newly released memo, prepared for Peter MacKay — defence minister at the time — says the directive for his department was being “tailored to recognize the unique operational needs of a military organization.”

Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian, was detained in New York in September 2002 and deported soon after by U.S. authorities — ending up in a vile Damascus prison cell. Under torture, he gave false confessions to Syrian military intelligence officers about involvement with al-Qaeda.

IN DEPTH: Maher Arar
A federal commission of inquiry, led by Justice Dennis O’Connor, concluded that faulty information the RCMP passed to the Americans very likely led to the Ottawa telecommunications engineer’s traumatic detention.

O’Connor recommended that information never be provided to a foreign country where there is a credible risk it will cause or contribute to the use of torture.

Critics say the recent federal directives on information sharing are squarely at odds with that recommendation.

It would have been easy to write a policy that conforms with it, Neve said.

“Analyze the situation. If you think that sharing this information is likely to contribute to torture abroad, don’t do it.”

The Canadian Press
Posted:Apr 13, 2014 1:29 PM ET
Last Updated:Apr 13, 2014 1:29 PM ET

Find this story at 13 April 2014

© The Canadian Press, 2014

FORT MEADE, Md. — A military judge ordered prosecutors on Tuesday to turn over never-revealed details about the time a Guantánamo Bay detainee spent in secret C.I.A. prisons after his arrest in connection with the deadly attack on the destroyer Cole in Yemen.

The order was a victory for defense lawyers representing the detainee, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who is accused of orchestrating the Oct. 12, 2000, bombing of the Cole in Aden, Yemen. The attack killed 17 American sailors, wounded 42 others and tore a huge hole into the side of the ship.

Mr. Nashiri, who was born in Saudi Arabia, has been held at the United States military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, since 2006, after spending time at a series of secret C.I.A. prisons.

A C.I.A. inspector general’s report said Mr. Nashiri, considered to have once been one of the most senior leaders in Al Qaeda, was waterboarded and threatened with a gun and a power drill because interrogators believed he was withholding information about possible attacks against the United States. Such practices were allowed under rules approved by the George W. Bush administration, but many have since been repudiated.

Prosecutors, who can appeal Tuesday’s ruling, had argued that information about Mr. Nashiri’s time spent in C.I.A. custody was irrelevant. The defense says the case was tainted by C.I.A. actions in the secret prisons and could be used to spare him from the death penalty.

The government has confirmed little about what happened in the C.I.A. prisons. Tuesday’s order, by Col. James L. Pohl, a judge with the United States Army, did not make any details available to the public. His order explicitly noted that all parties in the case are required to follow a protective order barring release of classified information.

The judge said the government must provide details about Mr. Nashiri’s capture, detention, rendition and interrogation. The information the judge ordered the government to reveal included a chronology of how Mr. Nashiri was shuttled among the secret prisons, and how he was transported, clothed and restrained. The government must also provide reports, summaries of interrogations and any photos or videos documenting his confinement conditions.

Under the rules for military commissions, prosecutors are barred from using any evidence or testimony obtained by coercion, and the defense has argued that all information from Mr. Nashiri is tainted by the harsh treatment he endured.

The hearing was held Tuesday at Guantánamo Bay, but reporters were able to watch it here.

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESSAPRIL 22, 2014

Find this story at 22 April 2014

© 2014 The New York Times Company

Judge James Pohl orders agency to produce detailed account of its detention of USS Cole bombing suspect at secret prison

A judge overseeing the trials of terror suspects at Guantánamo Bay has ordered the CIA to turn over details of its treatment of a detainee in one of its secret prisons, a watershed ruling that sets the stage for the military commissions to learn much more than the US public about the agency’s brutal interrogations.

While the ruling is still sealed, Judge James Pohl, an army colonel, issued the order on Monday for the CIA to produce a detailed account of its detention and interrogation of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who is charged with orchestrating the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000 that killed 17 US sailors.

Details of the order, issued through the military commissions prosecution team, were first reported by the Miami Herald on Thursday.

Pohl is also the judge overseeing the stalled 9/11 tribunal involving Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other detainees. Their defense attorneys have long bemoaned their lack of access to CIA information about the treatment of their clients before their 2006 arrival at Guantánamo, which they argue directly impacts their fitness to stand trial and the evidence underlying their cases.

The defense teams in the 9/11 tribunal said on Thursday they would seek Pohl’s ruling on similar disclosure orders covering everything from a chronology of their clients’ detention, to any approvals by the CIA of the use of particular interrogation techniques.

Pohl’s move comes as the CIA is locked in a bitter public battle with the Senate intelligence committee over the panel’s recent report into the agency’s post-9/11 torture programs. It opens a new front for the agency in an unexpected venue.

A bright spot for the CIA may be that Pohl has not ruled that information regarding Nashiri’s treatment – which, according to declassified information, involved waterboarding and a threat with a gun and a revved power drill – must be made public, but rather turned over to the commission.

Lawyers for one of the defendants, Ammar al-Baluchi, filed a motion on April 2 to acquire the Senate committee report. Lawyers for Baluchi and co-defendant Ramzi bin al-Shibh said that the defense teams were now petitioning Pohl to issue a similar order for CIA disclosure in their cases.

“It is important to know what happened, who did it, where did it happen, who authorized it, who knew about it, and what was the result,” said Baluchi’s attorney, James Connell.

“Those are the important thing to know in order to answer some of the hugest questions in this case: what was the pretrial treatment of the defendants, what was the impact on the admissibility of their statements, what impact does it have on the United States’ compliance with international standards, and what impact does it have on the appropriate sentence of the case, if any.”

Pohl’s order to the CIA reportedly requires the agency to turn over more information than is contained in the portions of the report that the committee recently voted to declassify, including communications between the so-called “black site” prisons and agency headquarters; names of interrogators; and the techniques used on Nashiri.

Brigadier General Mark Martins, the chief military commissions prosecutor in both cases, did not tip his hand as to whether he would contest the CIA disclosure order.

“We are studying that ruling,” Martins said.

“I can pledge that whatever happens, whatever we do will adhere to the rule of law and will be an effort to seek justice.”

CIA spokesman Dean Boyd declined comment, saying: “As a general matter, CIA does not comment on ongoing court litigation.”

Human rights advocates hailed Pohl’s ruling on the CIA as a potential transparency breakthrough.

“For the first time, the CIA is being forced to disclose details about secret black sites and torture that it has fought for years to hide,” said Hina Shamsi, an attorney with the ACLU.

“Without this information, defense lawyers cannot properly do their job and represent their client.”

Andrea Prasow of Human Rights Watch said the Pohl ruling “represents a chink in the armor of secrecy that the US government erected around its torture program”.

Along with the Senate report’s partial declassification, “it is only a matter of time before the public will learn the horrific details of officially sanctioned torture, and the pattern of lies designed not only to allow torture to continue, but to immunize torturers from prosecution,” Prasow said.

If the prosecution believes the defense teams in either the Nashiri or the 9/11 case ought to receive CIA accounts of their treatment in the agency’s custody but the CIA disagrees, Connell said the tribunals in either case would have to be paused to resolve the dispute.

“The agency with equities in that information can have a veto over the prosecution,” Connell said.

Spencer Ackerman at Guantánamo Bay
theguardian.com, Thursday 17 April 2014 18.39 BST

Find this story at 17 April 2014

© 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba — The military judge in the USS Cole bombing case has ordered the CIA to give defense lawyers details — names, dates and places — of its secret overseas detention and interrogation of the man accused of planning the bombing, two people who have read the still-secret order said Thursday.

Army Col. James L. Pohl issued the five-page order Monday. It was sealed as document 120C on the war court website Thursday morning and, according to those who have read it, orders the agency to provide a chronology of the overseas odyssey of Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, 49, from his capture in Dubai in 2002 to his arrival at Guantánamo four years later.

The order sets the stage for a showdown between the CIA and a military judge, if the agency refuses to turn over the information to the prosecution for the defense teams. The order comes while the CIA fights a bitter, public battle with the Senate on its black site torture investigation.

The judge’s order instructs prosecutors to provide nine categories of closely guarded classified CIA information to the lawyers — including the names of agents, interrogators and medical personnel who worked at the so-called black sites. The order covers “locations, personnel and communications,” interrogation notes and cables between the black sites and headquarters that sought and approved so-called enhanced interrogation techniques, the two sources said.

It does not, however, order the government to turn over Office of Legal Counsel memos that both blessed and defined the so-called Torture Program that sent CIA captives to secret interrogations across the world after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks — out of reach of International Committee of the Red Cross delegates.

“It’s a nuclear bomb that may shut down the case,” said one person who read the order and is not a part of the Cole case.

It covers so many of the agency’s closely guarded secrets that the source predicted “the prosecution would probably take an interlocutory appeal,” meaning rather than release the information Pentagon prosecutors will ask a military commissions appeals court to overrule Pohl.

It was not known whether the CIA would assert a national security privilege. “As a general matter, CIA does not comment on ongoing court litigation,” said agency spokesman Dean Boyd.

Different remedies sometimes suggested by defense attorneys in pretrial hearings range from abating the proceedings until the government complies to making life in prison, rather than military execution, the maximum possible penalty.

The chief prosecutor, Army Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, would not comment on whether he would appeal.

“We are studying that order,” he said, adding that the prosecution would comply with both “the rule of law” and “our discovery obligation.”

Nashiri pretrial hearings are still scheduled for next week, he said.

Defense lawyers at the five-man Sept. 11 war crimes trial said Thursday that, upon learning of Pohl’s order in the USS Cole case, they styled a motion seeking access to the same CIA information about their clients.

After the Miami Herald disclosed the order Thursday morning, Nashiri’s civilian lawyer, Rick Kammen, cast it as material that “the prosecution has publicly resisted producing.”

“The prosecution’s argument that the defense is precluded from checking the government’s work is frivolous. One of the defense functions is to check the government’s story,” he said. “The biggest cause of reversals in capital cases is due to prosecutorial withholding of exculpatory material including material relevant to punishment.”

He added: “We also note that the CIA has lied to at least three federal courts, the 9/11 Commission and, according to the newspapers, Congress. This demonstrated history of lying clearly obligates us to a full investigation.”

Even if the prosecution does secure the information from the CIA and releases it to Nashiri’s lawyers, that does not necessarily mean that the public will get to know the details.

The program is still classified, and Pohl ordered the material produced as discovery — for pretrial preparation in the case of Nashiri, the Saudi captive who the U.S. has called the mastermind of al-Qaida’s suicide bombing.

Two men sailed a bomb-laden skiff alongside the Cole on Oct. 12, 2000, and blew themselves up, crippling the warship and killing 17 U.S. sailors.

The development comes two weeks after the Senate voted to declassify a portion of an investigation of the so-called CIA torture program that could contain some of the answers sought by lawyers for Nashiri before his death-penalty trial. But the judge’s order appears to go further to a level of detail not provided in the executive summary, findings and recommendations that might be made public, if President Barack Obama agrees.

It also follows the recent Pentagon release of unclassified portions of a secret Feb. 22 Cole case hearing among lawyers with security clearances that allow them to know certain aspects of the still-secret CIA Rendition, Detention and Interrogation (RDI) program.

One person who read Pohl’s ruling this week said the order “largely ordered a huge amount of RDI material produced to the defense.” Pohl apparently at one point specifies that information must be unredacted, not blacked out.

At that hearing, the lead prosecutor preparing for Nashiri’s Dec. 4 death-penalty tribunal, Navy Cmdr. Andrea Lockhart, argued that the government had provided the defense with anything “relevant” to trial preparation.

The defense doesn’t have the authority to “double-check the government’s work,” Lockhart told the judge, “and they certainly don’t have the right to do their own independent investigation” of what happened to Nashiri.

Pohl apparently concluded otherwise.

Defense lawyers want to independently reconstruct what happened to Nashiri in secret confinement to challenge the integrity of certain evidence and to argue that his mistreatment disqualifies a death penalty sentence.

The CIA waterboarded him, and an internal abuse investigation showed its agents interrogated Nashiri while he was nude and that they threatened him with a revving power drill, handgun and threats to sexually assault his mother.

Chief prosecutor Martins, has already noted that the Obama administration revamped the tribunal to prohibit use of involuntary interrogations at trial. In the transcript, Lockhart says all mistreatment of Nashiri is now in the public domain.

Navy Cmdr. Brian Mizer, one of Nashiri‘s lawyers, told the Miami Herald recently that an investigation of the treatment should determine whether any of Nashiri’s answers to questions at Guantánamo were truly voluntary: “You have to get back to the past to determine whether this is just a dog barking on command.”

A military medical board has diagnosed Nashiri, 49, a self-described former millionnaire merchant from Mecca, as having post-traumatic stress disorder and a major depressive disorder.

His lawyers want to interview officials who worked at the black sites, comb through manifests and read approved Standard Operating Procedures on so-called enhanced interrogation techniques that spelled out how to waterboard Nashiri in secret custody.

Posted on Thursday, 04.17.14
BY CAROL ROSENBERG

Find this story at 17 April 2014

Copyright 2014 Miami Herald Media Co.

WASHINGTON — A secret Senate report on the CIA’s treatment of Al Qaeda detainees from 2001 to 2006 concludes that the spy agency used brutal, unauthorized interrogation techniques, misrepresented key elements of the program to policymakers and the public, and actively sought to undermine congressional oversight, officials who have read the report say.

Contrary to previous assertions by President George W. Bush and CIA leaders, the use of harsh interrogation techniques — which many consider to be torture — did not produce game-changing intelligence that stopped terrorist attacks, the report concludes. Though detainees supplied useful intelligence after such treatment was applied, the report argues that the information could have been elicited through noncoercive methods.

The 6,200-page report was produced by Democratic staffers on the Senate Intelligence Committee, which earlier this month voted 11 to 3 to seek declassification of a 480-page executive summary and a list of findings. The White House and the CIA will now decide what, if anything, must be censored for national security before the summary is released to the public.

The report’s top-line conclusions amount to a scathing indictment of the CIA. Current and former agency officials and many Senate Republicans say they take issue with some of the findings, although not all the specific points of dispute are clear.

“Given that the report remains classified, we are unable to comment,” CIA spokesman Dean Boyd wrote in an email. “Our response to the 2012 version of the report found several areas in which CIA and [the committee] agreed, and several other areas in which we disagreed.”

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the CIA held Al Qaeda operatives in secret prisons in Europe and Asia and received permission to use sleep deprivation, stress positions, slapping, humiliation and other techniques to break down detainees viewed as uncooperative. Among the most controversial techniques was waterboarding, which creates a sensation of drowning.

The Justice Department had authorized the CIA to use the techniques in a series of secret legal opinions that have since been rescinded.

Bush and CIA officials involved in the program say it produced crucial, lifesaving intelligence. Critics say some of the techniques amounted to torture that was both immoral and ineffective.

Those who have seen the report, who did not want to be identified discussing a classified document, say it concludes that the CIA misled the Justice Department, the White House and congressional leaders about key elements of the program and exaggerated the intelligence gained from using the harsh techniques. In many cases, the report says, the best intelligence a detainee provided was obtained before the techniques were used.

Officials say the report also found that the CIA used techniques that hadn’t been approved by the Justice Department or CIA headquarters, and that even the approved techniques were far more brutal and harmful to detainees than the CIA communicated to senior policymakers and members of Congress who were briefed on the program.

The program was so badly mismanaged that the CIA did not always have an accurate accounting of how many detainees it held, the report is said to conclude. Sources said the report found that much of the program was outsourced to contractors, including two psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who were the architects of the program and personally conducted some of the waterboarding sessions.

CIA employees who raised questions internally about the use of the coercive techniques were ignored, the report concludes, and CIA interrogators who committed misconduct were not held accountable. A Justice Department criminal investigation looking at whether CIA officers could be prosecuted in connection with the harsh interrogations ended in 2011 with no charges filed.

Senate staffers spent years poring over millions of pages of CIA documents to complete the report. They were prevented from interviewing participants because a criminal investigation was ongoing, so they relied on interviews conducted by the CIA’s inspector general. The inspector issued a report in 2004 that criticized how some of the techniques were used, but also concluded the interrogation program as a whole produced useful intelligence.

By KEN DILANIAN

Find this story at 11 April 2014

Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles Times

Investigators mapped flight paths of private contractor planes that stopped in Djibouti, a suspected CIA ‘black site’

New evidence culled from a court case involving CIA contractors has revealed flight paths through Djibouti that appear to indicate the country’s role as a hub of the CIA’s rendition network in Africa, according to documents released by the U.K.-based human rights group Reprieve and New York University’s Global Justice Clinic.

The documents could support the case of Mohammad al-Asad, a former CIA detainee who is suing the government of Djibouti for its alleged role in hosting CIA “black sites” — specifically the one where he says he was detained and tortured for two weeks between December 2003 and January 2004. A Senate investigation into the agency’s “detention and interrogation program” had previously confirmed that several individuals had in fact been detained in Djibouti, according to two officials who read the still-classified report and spoke to Al Jazeera.

Investigators behind the document release combed through contracts, invoices and letters put into evidence for a court case — which involved CIA contractors and was separate from the Djibouti allegations — and pieced together a series of rendition circuits, or flight paths, between 2003 and 2004. They include legs through Djibouti — even though the Horn of Africa did not appear to be a convenient stopover between the United States and Afghanistan, the circuits’ endpoints.

“Djibouti was not on the way, it was a destination,” said Margaret Satterthwaite, al-Asad’s attorney and a professor at the Global Justice Clinic. “That’s kind of a telltale sign of a rendition circuit.”

The evidence also implicated private companies — including Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC), DynCorp Systems and Solutions (which was purchased by CSC in 2003 and later divested), Richmor Aviation and First Flight — in the Africa rendition program for the first time.

“These documents provide further evidence of how U.S. corporations played a crucial role in the CIA’s torture network, rendering people to torture around the world far from public scrutiny and even further from the rule of law,” said Kevin Lo, corporate social responsibility advocate at Reprieve.

A spokesman for Computer Sciences Corp. said his company did not comment on “speculation about its clients or their activities” but added in an email to Al Jazeera: “CSC has had the privilege for over fifty years of supporting governments and private sector organizations worldwide, and has done so within the law.”

Richmor Aviation and First Flight did not respond to Al Jazeera’s requests for comment in time for publication.

Al-Asad’s case is currently under consideration by the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights. In an exclusive interview with Al Jazeera, al-Asad, who is now 54 years old, said he was taken from his home in Tanzania to Djibouti, where he was detained for two weeks. He was then rendered to Afghanistan, where he says he was tortured at various points over the course of more than a year at several CIA black site prisons.

Djibouti has vehemently denied “knowing” participation in any U.S. rendition or torture programs in the country. Its ambassador to the U.S., Roble Olhaye, called al-Asad a “liar.”

“Everything about his case relies on hearsay and conjecture. There were no flights that came to Djibouti on that day he said he was brought to my country from Tanzania,” Olhaye said. “That was checked by our lawyers.”

Human rights researchers say that after the 9/11 attacks, dozens of suspects captured by the U.S. were secretly detained, interrogated and tortured in Djibouti. Although President Barack Obama signed an executive order in 2009 banning the CIA’s use of black-site prisons, the order states that it does “not apply to facilities used only to hold people on a short-term, transitory basis.”

And while Djibouti says it is not aware the CIA had ever operated a black-site prison on its soil, Olhaye pointed out: “If something was done in the context of the American base there, how would we know?”

Camp Lemonier in Djibouti, which hosts the Combined Joint Task Force–Horn of Africa, is a known hub for U.S. drone operations against Al-Qaeda in Yemen and Al-Shabab in Somalia.

Satterthwaite said the choice of Djibouti for a black site is logical not only because the country has been a strategic partner in the U.S. “war on terror” for more than a decade, but also because the country has a long history of silencing human rights advocates and journalists. “It’s not hard to keep things secret there,” she said.

May 9, 2014 9:15AM ET
by Michael Pizzi @michaelwpizzi

Find this story at 9 May 2014

© 2014 Al Jazeera America, LLC.

Horn of Africa nation has denied hosting secret prison facilities for US, but classified document may undermine claim

The legal case of a former CIA detainee suing the government of Djibouti for hosting the facility where he says he was detained could be helped by the contents of a still-classified Senate report. Djibouti, a key U.S. ally, has denied for years that its territory has been used to keep suspected Al-Qaeda operatives in secret captivity. But the Senate investigation into the agency’s “detention and interrogation program” concluded that several people had been secretly detained in the tiny Horn of Africa state, two U.S. officials who read an early draft of the report told Al Jazeera.

Official confirmation of Djibouti’s role in hosting “black sites” used in the CIA’s rendition program would be welcomed by Mohammad al-Asad, a Yemeni arrested at his home in Tanzania on Dec. 27, 2003, blindfolded and flown to a location he insists was Djibouti. Two U.S. officials who read an early draft of the report of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation — and who requested anonymity because the report remains classified — were unaware of whether al-Asad’s case was specifically cited in the document. But they confirmed that the report found that several detainees had been held in Djibouti, and that at least two of them had been wrongfully detained.

Djibouti’s Ambassador to the U.S., Roble Olhaye, told Al Jazeera his country was not a “knowing participant” in the CIA’s rendition program and he rejected claims by al-Asad that he was temporarily imprisoned there.

However, Olhaye said, “If something was done in the context of the American base there how would we know?” But, he said, Djibouti’s agreement with the U.S. precluded the base from being used to house prisoners.

Al-Asad said that after his arrival in the country he alleges was Djibouti, he was held in a prison cell and tortured. He said he was interrogated by an American woman about his connections to the now-defunct Saudi charity Al-Haramain. The group, later accused by the U.S. Treasury of supporting terrorism, had in 1994 rented apartment space from al-Asad in a building he owned in Tanzania.

Asad
Yemeni citizen Mohammad al-Asad
In an exclusive interview with Al Jazeera, al-Asad, now 54 years old, said he was detained for about two weeks in Djibouti and then rendered to Afghanistan, where he says he was tortured at various points over the course of more than a year at several CIA black site prisons.

Before he was released in 2005 and sent back to Yemen, he said, he received a visitor from Washington.

“What I remember through the interpreter was that he said, ‘I am the head of the prison, and you will be the first one at the top of the list of the people we are going to release because we have nothing on you,’” al-Asad told Al Jazeera. “The interpreter said that he was the director of all the prisons.”

Al-Asad was never charged with terrorism or related crimes, but he pleaded guilty in Yemen to making false statements and using forged documents to obtain his Tanzanian travel papers.

Al-Asad, who still lives in Yemen, has been trying since his release to hold Djibouti officials accountable for his detention. In 2009, he sought redress from the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, a quasi-judicial body that has jurisdiction over Djibouti and other countries that approved the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights. In the coming days, that commission, which is based in Gambia, is expected to decide whether it will take up al-Asad’s case.

Olhaye called al-Asad a “liar”, adding, “Everything about his case relies on hearsay and conjecture. There were no flights that came to Djibouti on that day he said he was brought to my country from Tanzania. That was checked by our lawyers.”

But John Sifton, the Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch, who has spent more than a decade investigating the CIA’s rendition, detention and interrogation program testified before the commission last year and said “the fact that the flight records of CIA aircraft that are public do not include a flight that matches Mr. al-Asad’s trajectory is not indicative of anything in and of itself.”

Sifton said the CIA could “easily circumvent data collection” and “aircraft used by the CIA could easily be rendered untraceable while flying in and around Djibouti.”

Al-Asad has based his legal case on flight records, collected by Human Rights Watch and the U.K.-based human rights charity Reprieve, demonstrating CIA-linked aircraft flying in and out of Djibouti (PDF).

His lawyers have also obtained documents from Tanzanian immigration officials stating that al-Asad was sent to Djibouti on a Tanzanair aircraft after his 2003 arrest.

“This is one of the most direct pieces of evidence we have showing that Djibouti is where our client was held before being handed to the rendition team on the tarmac,” said Margaret Satterthwaite, al-Asad’s attorney and a professor at New York University’s Global Justice Clinic.

Al-Asad, who still lives in Yemen, has been trying since his release to hold Djibouti officials accountable for his detention.
If the case proceeds, it will mark the first such investigation into the workings of the rendition program in Africa, and could open the door to additional legal challenges by former “war on terror” captives.

A handful of similar cases are already pending before the European Court of Human Rights. However, U.S. courts — citing state secrecy — have rejected attempts by detainees to hold their former captors accountable.

Al Jazeera’s sources noted that in addition to 6 million pages of CIA records, Senate committee investigators obtained some information about the wrongful detentions from people they characterized as “whistleblowers.” The U.S. officials declined to elaborate.

Djibouti, a former French colony, has been one of the key U.S. counterterrorism partners for more than a decade, hosting the Combined Joint Task Force–Horn of Africa at Camp Lemonnier. The U.S. Air Force also reportedly uses Djibouti as a base for a fleet of drones to strike at Al-Qaeda and Al-Shabab suspects in Yemen and Somalia.

According to human rights researchers, after 9/11 dozens of suspects captured by the U.S. were secretly detained, interrogated and tortured in Djibouti.

The Obama administration, as recently as August 2012, reportedly continued to render suspects to Djibouti for short-term detention. Although President Barack Obama signed an executive order in 2009 banning the CIA’s use of black-site prisons, the order states that it does “not apply to facilities used only to hold people on a short-term, transitory basis.”

Confirmation by the Senate Intelligence Committee of Djibouti’s role in the rendition program would be a “critical” development, said Satterthwaite.

“The cooperation of countries all over the world — including Djibouti — was central to the operation of the U.S. rendition, secret detention, and torture program,” Satterthwaite said. “While the role of European partners such as Poland and Romania has been the subject of much reporting and investigation, the assistance of countries such as Djibouti has yet to be scrutinized. Further, as the home of a fleet of U.S. drones, Djibouti is an enormously important partner but has not received adequate scrutiny for its role in facilitating U.S. abuses.”

The cooperation of countries all over the world — including Djibouti — was central to the operation of the U.S. rendition, secret detention, and torture program.
Margaret Satterthwaite
Al-Asad’s attorney
Jonathan Horowitz, who works on national security and legal issues at the Open Society Justice Initiative, said al-Asad’s case provides the African human rights commission with an opportunity “to state that African governments can’t collude with other governments to abuse human rights, and they can’t use the fight against terrorism to justify violating people’s rights.”

Last year, Open Society issued a report, Globalizing Torture, which found that 54 countries, including Djibouti, were complicit in the extraordinary rendition of 136 CIA prisoners. The nonpartisan Constitution Project also produced a Detainee Task Force report identifying Djibouti as a CIA rendition partner and focused heavily on al-Asad’s case to support its conclusions.

“One of the things that is really important to recognize here is that the CIA torture and rendition program couldn’t have gone global without the assistance from other countries,” Horowitz said.

Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to work on strengthening its counterterrorism relationship with Djibouti. Next week, Djibouti’s president, Ismaïl Omar Guelleh, will travel to the U.S. to meet with President Obama at the White House. Ambassador Olhaye does not believe the Senate’s report, if it is ever released, will identify his country as a rendition partner.

“I don’t believe the Senate report will say anything about my government,” he said. “Maybe about the American base. Our prisons have not been participating in that kind of thing.” Olhaye said neither he nor anyone from his country has had any discussions with U.S. officials about the Senate’s report.

May 2, 2014 5:00AM ET
by Jason Leopold @JasonLeopold

Find this story at 2 May 2014

© 2014 Al Jazeera America, LLC.

Senate investigators want public reckoning of torture tactics under Bush admin., despite CIA attempts to obstruct

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence voted 11-3 Thursday to declassify parts of a secret report on Bush-era interrogations of terrorism suspects.
“The purpose of this review was to uncover the facts behind this secret program, and the results were shocking. The report exposes brutality that stands in stark contrast to our values as a nation. It chronicles a stain on our history that must never again be allowed to happen,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., chairwoman of the committee, said in a statement. “This is not what Americans do.”
Now that the 15-member panel votes has approved the declassification of a 400-page summary and the key findings of its report, the onus is on the Central Intelligence Agency and a reluctant White House to speed the release of one of the most definitive accounts about the government’s actions after the 9/11 attacks.

The CIA will now start scanning the report’s contents for any passages that compromise national security.

That has led to fears that the CIA, already accused of illegally monitoring the Senate’s investigation and deleting files, could sanitize key elements of what Senate investigators aim to be the fullest public reckoning of the “enhanced interrogation techniques” used on Al-Qaeda suspects in CIA-run prisons abroad. Feinstein has urged the White House to get involved.
Thumbnail image for Senate CIA torture report could throw Gitmo hearings into chaos
Senate CIA torture report could throw Gitmo hearings into chaos
Release of study on detention program might further disrupt military commissions for terrorist suspects at Guantánamo

Congressional aides and outside experts familiar with the document say it is highly critical of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods, and concludes among other things that such practices provided no key evidence in the hunt for Osama bin Laden. The CIA disputes many of the conclusions in the report.

“It’s important to tell the world, ‘Yes, we made a mistake and we’re not going to do it again,'” said Sen. Angus King, a Maine independent who planned to vote for the summary’s release.

Human rights groups and advocates too believe the release of the report crucial to ensuring that similar tactics are never adopted again and that the debate over torture is settled once and for all.
“This information has been kept secret from the American people and from policymakers for years and keeping it secret just perpetuates the false impression that torture is effective and works,” said Laura Pitter, senior national security researcher at Human Rights Watch. “In fact, is is immoral, illegal and ineffective and never should be employed, and was a terrible mistake that the U.S. needs to reckon with on so m any levels.”

But some in the intelligence community said the Senate report, which was written by the committee’s Democratic staff, was missing a key element: the voices of key CIA officials.

Those missing include former Bush administration officials involved in authorizing the use of waterboarding and other harsh questioning methods, or managing their use in secret “black site” prisons overseas.

“Neither I or anyone else at the agency who had knowledge was interviewed,” said Jose Rodriguez, the CIA’s chief clandestine officer in the mid-2000s, who had operational oversight over the detention and interrogation program. “They don’t want to hear anyone else’s narrative,” he said of the Senate investigation. “It’s an attempt to rewrite history.”

Rodriguez himself is a key figure in the Senate report, not least for his order in 2005 to destroy 92 videotapes showing waterboarding of terror suspects and other harsh techniques.

Rodriguez said the Senate’s report would be a “travesty” without input from him and officials such as former CIA directors Michael Hayden and Porter Goss. Congressional aides said the CIA’s own field reports, internal correspondence, cables and other documents described day-to-day handling of interrogations and the decision-making and actions of Rodriguez and others.

Senate investigators have griped for years about what they contend is the CIA’s failure to be held accountable for the harsh methods used during the George W. Bush administration’s war on terror.

Bad blood between Senate aides and the CIA ruptured into the open last month when Feinstein took to the Senate floor to accuse the agency of improperly monitoring the computer use of Senate staffers and deleting files, undermining the Constitution’s separation of powers. The CIA alleges the Senate panel illegally accessed certain documents. The Justice Department is reviewing criminal complaints against each side.

Feinstein said this week she had “no idea” how long a declassification process would take, but expressed hope that it could be resolved in a matter of weeks.

Amid all the distrust, Senate Democrats are pressing for President Barack Obama to step into the fray.

Obama, who outlawed waterboarding after taking office, sought closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and released long-secret, Bush-era legal documents on harsh interrogations. He has publicly supported declassification of at least the findings of the Senate committee’s report “so that the American people can understand what happened in the past, and that can help guide us as we move forward.”

Still, the president has so far declined to weigh in publicly on Congress’ dispute with the CIA.

April 3, 2014 12:19PM ET Updated 3:26PM ET
Al Jazeera and The Associated Press

Find this story at 3 April 2014

© 2014 Al Jazeera America, LLC.

Human rights group representing Gaddafi opponent rendered to Libya via Diego Garcia says Britain must ‘come clean’ over role
Jamie Doward

The government is under mounting pressure to “come clean” about the role of an overseas UK territory leased to the US and allegedly used as a secret “black site” detention centre.

An opponent of Colonel Gaddafi who was rendered in a joint MI6-CIA operation, and a leading human rights group representing him, have demanded that the foreign secretary, William Hague, clarify the UK’s position on Diego Garcia, an atoll in the Indian Ocean leased to the US until 2016. The Senate’s intelligence security committee is preparing to declassify a file that reportedly confirms that the CIA detained “high-value suspects on Diego Garcia” and that “the black site arrangement on the atoll was made with the ‘full cooperation’ of the British government”.

The revelations are hugely troubling for the government and threaten to raise awkward questions about the UK’s relationship with the US, its closest security ally. They strengthen claims made by Abdel-Hakim Belhaj, a rebel military commander and opponent of Gaddafi, who was arrested in Malaysia and rendered with his pregnant wife to Libya, allegedly via Diego Garcia, in a joint US-UK intelligence operation.

Papers discovered in Tripoli in 2011 show that the British security services were instrumental in helping Libya to seize Belhaj, who says he was tortured during his rendition and during his subsequent four-and-a-half-year incarceration by the Gaddafi regime. A flight plan confirmed the CIA had intended to render him via Diego Garcia.

Belhaj, who unsuccessfully tried to bring a case against former foreign secretary Jack Straw, former senior MI6 official Sir Mark Allen, the security services and the Foreign Office, told the Observer that the Senate report raised new questions about the role played by the British overseas territory in facilitating the CIA’s extraordinary rendition programme.

“The first time I heard that I had gone through a place called Diego Garcia was when I was told by the head of the Libyan intelligence, Moussa Koussa, during my first interrogation session in a prison outside Tripoli,” Belhaj said.

“He was running the interrogation and was angry that it had taken a long time for me to arrive in Libya. I told him that the plane had stopped somewhere on the way from Bangkok. He told me that he knew, and that the plane had landed on an island in the Indian Ocean called Diego Garcia.

“Perhaps he was showing off, or perhaps he had been given wrong information, I don’t know. I just know that the flight stopped somewhere. I was chained up in a very painful position and had no means to know where I was, or even whether my pregnant wife – who had been kidnapped at the same time – was with me.”

Although the British government admitted in 2008 that two rendition flights carrying detainees had stopped for refuelling on Diego Garcia in 2002, it has consistently denied that detainees were held on it.

“Each year the US government reaffirms to us during our official political-military discussions that all previous assurances since 2008 on this subject remain correct,” Mark Simmonds, the minister for overseas territories, wrote in a letter last month to Richard Ottaway, the chairman of parliament’s foreign affairs select committee. “Namely that, apart from two instances in Diego Garcia during 2002, there have been no other instances in which US intelligence flights landed in the United Kingdom, UK overseas territories or crown dependencies, with a detainee on board since 11 September 2001.”

Polly Rossdale, deputy director at human rights group Reprieve, which has acted for Belhaj, said: “The government must come clean about the UK’s role in this dirty affair.”

A spokesman for the Foreign Office declined to add any comment to what ministers had already told parliament.

The Observer, Sunday 13 April 2014

Find this story at 13 April 2014

© 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

General Paul Aussaresses was an intelligence chief whose revelations of torture and murder in Algeria shocked his country.

Aussaresses, who has died aged 95, scandalised France and disgraced himself when, in 2000, he revealed that he had participated in summary executions and acts of torture during the Algerian War of Independence.

The revelations, made when Aussaresses was 82, could hardly be called confessions, because they were not accompanied by any sign of remorse. On the contrary, Aussaresses noted that if confronted by the same situation again “it would piss me off, but I would do the same”.

For France, however, the news was deeply shocking, throwing into sharp relief long-buried concerns about its forces’ behaviour in its former colony, as well its treatment of Algerian allies afterwards. Aussaresses assured his countrymen that the future President François Mitterrand, then justice minister, had been kept scrupulously informed of every detail of what was happening in Algiers. “He knew,” Aussaresses noted. “Everyone knew.”

Jacques Chirac, president at the time of the publication of Aussaresses’s book, Services Spéciaux: Algérie 1955-57 (2001), declared himself “horrified” by its tales of murder, beatings, electrocution and waterboarding, and called for the “full truth” to come out. But the truth was worse than most people imagined.

Aussaresses described hanging Larbi Ben M’Hidi, a leader of the Algerian militant FLN, then making it look like suicide.

At the time, when such men were written off as terrorists, it seemed Aussaresses – France’s intelligence chief in Algeria – was hardly challenged. But 40 years later, his reflection that torture was an “effective” tool proved out of step with the mood of his country. He found little support, and was hauled before the French courts and stripped of his decorations. Even his family renounced him.

The truth, however, was that far from having collaborated during World War II, Aussaresses had fought behind enemy lines. Had he chosen not to open his mouth in his dotage, it is likely that many French politicians would have queued to pay homage at his funeral.

Paul Aussaresses was born on November 7, 1918, at Saint-Paul-de-Joux, south-west France. He was educated in Bordeaux, excelling in classics, and attended the St Cyr military academy at Aix-en-Provence, where it had relocated after the German invasion of 1940. By the end of his life he was more or less fluent in six languages.

After the war he moved into the French secret services, helping to create the shock unit of counter-intelligence, SDECE agency.

He arrived in Philippeville (now Skikda), Algeria, in autumn 1954, just as full-scale hostilities were about to break out. There he made no bones about his “enhanced” interrogation techniques, and quickly won a reputation for his ability to penetrate FLN cells. Such was his success that, in 1957, he was promoted to chief of intelligence by Gen Jacques Massu, leading what Aussaresses himself described as “the company of death”.

After France withdrew from Algeria, Aussaresses took his counter-insurgency experience to Fort Bragg, where he trained with the US Green Berets and produced a report entitled The American Army against guerrillas forces.

He returned to France in 1966, the year after he was appointed a Commander of the Legion of Honour.

Aussaresses spent much of the early 1970s in Latin America, training up special forces for many of the less salubrious regimes of the era. Little more was heard of him until 2000.

Paul Aussaresses was twice married and had three daughters.

PUBLISHED 07 DECEMBER 2013 09:30 PM

Find this story at 7 December 2013

© Independent.ie

WASHINGTON — The Senate Intelligence Committee has asked the C.I.A. for an internal study done by the agency that lawmakers believe is broadly critical of the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation program but was withheld from congressional oversight committees.
The committee’s request comes in the midst of a yearlong battle with the C.I.A. over the release of the panel’s own exhaustive report about the program, one of the most controversial policies of the post-Sept. 11 era.
The Senate report, totaling more than 6,000 pages, was completed last December but has yet to be declassified. According to people who have read the study, it is unsparing in its criticism of the now-defunct interrogation program and presents a chronicle of C.I.A. officials’ repeatedly misleading the White House, Congress and the public about the value of brutal methods that, in the end, produced little valuable intelligence.
Senator Mark Udall, Democrat of Colorado, disclosed the existence of the internal C.I.A. report during an Intelligence Committee hearing on Tuesday. He said he believed it was begun several years ago and “is consistent with the Intelligence’s Committee’s report” although it “conflicts with the official C.I.A. response to the committee’s report.”
“If this is true,” Mr. Udall said during a hearing on the nomination of Caroline D. Krass to be the C.I.A.’s top lawyer, “this raises fundamental questions about why a review the C.I.A. conducted internally years ago — and never provided to the committee — is so different from the C.I.A.’s formal response to the committee study.”
The agency responded to the committee report with a vigorous 122-page rebuttal that challenged both the Senate report’s specific facts and its overarching conclusions. John O. Brennan, one of Mr. Obama’s closest advisers before taking over the C.I.A. this year — and who denounced the interrogation program during his confirmation hearing — delivered the agency’s response to the Intelligence Committee himself.
It is unclear what the agency specifically concluded in its internal review.
Mr. Udall, whose public criticisms of the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of telephone data has raised his profile in Congress and won him praise from privacy advocates, said he would not support Ms. Krass’s nomination until the C.I.A. provided more information to the committee about the interrogation program.
Ms. Krass did not respond directly to Mr. Udall’s statements about the internal C.I.A. review. Dean Boyd, an agency spokesman, said the agency was “aware of the committee’s request and will respond appropriately.”
Mr. Boyd said that the C.I.A. agreed with a number of the conclusions of the voluminous Senate investigative report, but found “significant errors in the study.”
“C.I.A. and committee staff have had extensive dialogue on this issue, and the agency is prepared to work with the committee to determine the best way forward on potential declassification,” he said.
Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who is the Intelligence Committee’s chairwoman, said recently that her committee would soon vote to adopt the report’s executive summary and conclusion, which would then be subject to a formal declassification process before it was publicly released.
Republican members of the committee, angry about what they see as a biased and shoddy investigation by their Democratic colleagues, are planning to make public a rebuttal of their own.
The Senate report, which took years to complete and cost more than $40 million to produce, began as an attempt to document what was perhaps the most divisive of the Bush administration’s responses to the Sept. 11 attacks. But it has since become enmeshed in the complex politics of the Obama administration.
President Obama ended the detention program as one of his first acts in the Oval Office, and has repeatedly denounced the C.I.A.’s interrogation methods under the program. During a speech in May, he said that the United States had “compromised our basic values by using torture to interrogate our enemies, and detaining individuals in a way that ran counter to the rule of law.”
And yet Mr. Obama has repeatedly resisted demands by human rights groups to seek prosecutions for the lawyers who approved the interrogation methods or the people who carried them out, and the White House has been mostly silent during the debate over the past year about declassifying the Senate report.
For all his criticisms of the counterterrorism excesses during the Bush administration, Mr. Obama has put the C.I.A. at the center of his strategy to kill militant suspects in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere.
Human rights groups have tried to pressure the White House to intervene to get the Senate report declassified.
“Whether it’s stalling or concealing, the C.I.A. is trying to avoid reckoning with its past abuse,” said Naureen Shah of Amnesty International USA. “And that’s what makes declassifying the Senate’s report so crucial right now.”
Ms. Krass is a career government lawyer who works at the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, the arm of the department that advises the White House on the legality of domestic and foreign policies.
The office was particularly controversial during the Bush administration, when lawyers there wrote lengthy memos approving C.I.A. interrogation methods like waterboarding and sleep deprivation, as well as signing off on the expansion of surveillance by the National Security Agency.
Under Mr. Obama, the office has approved other controversial practices, including the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical cleric living in Yemen who was an American. Mr. Awlaki was killed in September 2011 by a C.I.A. drone strike, launched from a secret base in Saudi Arabia.
Much of Tuesday’s hearing was consumed by a debate about whether the White House should be forced to share Justice Department legal memos.
Under polite but persistent questioning by members of both parties, Ms. Krass repeatedly said that while the two congressional intelligence committees need to “fully understand” the legal basis for C.I.A. activities, they were not entitled to see the Justice Department memos that provide the legal blueprint for secret programs.
The opinions “represent pre-decisional, confidential legal advice that has been provided,” she said, adding that the confidentiality of the legal advice was necessary to allow a “full and frank discussion amongst clients and policy makers and their lawyers within the executive branch.”
Senator Feinstein appeared unmoved. “Unless we know the administration’s basis for sanctioning a program, it is very hard to oversee it,” she said.
Still, it is expected that the committee will vote to approve Ms. Krass.
December 17, 2013
By MARK MAZZETTI
Find this story at 17 December 2013
© 2013 The New York Times Company

Aborted inquiry found that British spies knew detainees were abused, deprived of sleep and made to wear hoods.
The Obama Administration has repeatedly said it wishes to close the Guantanamo detention facility [AP]
British spies knew about detainee abuse but were told they did not have to intervene because they might damage relations with the US, a senior British judge has found.
The report, from Peter Gibson, comes from an inquiry intended to examine whether Britain was implicated in the mistreatment of detainees following the 9/11 attacks.
But it was scrapped earlier this year after Libya alleged that Britain was complicit in “rendition” – capturing people suspected of terrorism and transferring them to third countries without legal process.
Gibson found evidence that British spies had been aware of physical assault, sleep deprivation and the use of hoods.
“Officers were advised that, faced with apparent breaches of Geneva Convention standards, there was no obligation to
intervene,” he said in the report.
Britain had been reluctant to complain about the ill-treatment of detainees for fear of damaging relations with allies, including the US, the report said.
Allegations of torture
In some cases, British officials failed to raise objections about renditions when they should have, while ministers were unaware of the operations.
Britain’s MI6 linked to Libya torture scandal
After reviewing 20,000 documents, Gibson said he had found 27 issues that needed further investigation, including allegations of torture.
“Documents indicate that in some instances UK intelligence officers were aware of inappropriate interrogation techniques,” the report said.
“(The) government or its agencies may have become inappropriately involved in some cases of rendition.”
In response the British government said on Thursday that a parliamentary committee would take over from Gibson’s role and look at Gibson’s outstanding concerns.
Cabinet minister Ken Clarke said the inquiry’s findings showed Britain’s spy agencies had struggled to come to terms with the threat from armed groups after the 9/11 attacks.
Unprepared and inadequate
“It is now clear that our agencies and their staff were in some respects not prepared for the extreme demands suddenly
placed upon them,” Clarke told parliament.
“Guidance regulating how intelligence officers should act was inadequate, the practices of some of our international partners should have been understood much sooner. Oversight was not robust enough.”
The heads of MI5 and MI6, Britain’s domestic and overseas intelligence agencies, have repeatedly said they would never use, or encourage others to use, torture to gain information.
In November 2010, however, Britain agreed to make payments to 16 former Guantanamo Bay detainees in settlements over claims they were mistreated abroad with the knowledge and in some cases complicity of British spies.
Last updated: 19 Dec 2013 20:22
Source:
AP
Find this story at 19 December 2013
Copyright Aljazeera

Today the Government has published a report submitted to the Prime Minister by Sir Peter Gibson and Dame Janet Paraskeva, the Panel of the Detainee Inquiry, on the Inquiry’s work.
The Inquiry’s Report speaks for itself. It is a rigorous, thorough and independent piece of work. It reveals more information than ever before about the workings of Government and the Agencies, on the issues highlighted in the report.
Sir Peter said:
“There are matters which deserve further investigation. That is what the documents have disclosed and we explain why in our report.”
Dame Janet said:
“We have worked hard to put as much as possible into the public domain. I do hope the Government will decide to build on our work in a future Inquiry and give the detainees a chance to have their say.”
The library of documents, the analysis of information and preliminary identification of potential witnesses the Inquiry carried out, will save any subsequent Inquiry a huge amount of time and resource.
The report does not find facts or reach conclusions. It is based on the scrutiny of documents, no witness has yet had the opportunity to explain or add to this information. But the Inquiry has shone a bright light onto issues which might be investigated further by a future Inquiry or on which the Government can take action now.
The Inquiry covered four separate themes: interrogation and treatment issues, rendition, training and guidance as well as policy and communications. Its work revealed 27 separate issues the Inquiry would like to have investigated further and which might be followed up by a future Inquiry.
In summary the report says:
Interrogation and Treatment issues:
Documents indicate that in some instances UK intelligence officers were aware of inappropriate interrogation techniques and mistreatment or allegations of mistreatment of some detainees by liaison partners from other countries.
Rendition
Documents indicate that Government or its Agencies may have become inappropriately involved in some cases of rendition.
Training and Guidance
No reason to doubt that instruction to personnel was that detainees must be treated humanely and consistently with UK’s international legal obligations. But officers on the ground needed clear guidance on when and with whom to raise concerns.
Policy and Communications
Documents raise the question whether the Agencies could have identified possible patterns of detainee mistreatment more quickly and whether or not sufficient information was given to the ISC to enable it to perform its duties.
Notes for editors:
The Inquiry’s original task was set out by the Prime Minister when he announced its establishment on 6 July 2010, to: “….look at whether Britain was implicated in the improper treatment of detainees, held by other countries, that may have occurred in the aftermath of 9/11”
On 18 January 2012, the then Justice Secretary, told the House: “….. following consultations with Sir Peter Gibson, the chair of the Inquiry we have decided to bring the work of his Inquiry to a conclusion. We have agreed with Sir Peter that the Inquiry should provide Government with a report on its preparatory work to date, highlighting particular themes or issues which might be the subject of further examination. The Government are clear that as much of this report as possible will be made public.”
As the Justice Secretary made clear in his statement to the House, the CPS’ announcement of new criminal investigations to be carried out by the Metropolitan Police meant that the Inquiry start its mandate as originally envisaged.
The Inquiry examined some 20,000 documents and as a result has raised a number of robust questions for a future Inquiry to investigate further and a number of areas where the Government can act now. The vast majority of the documents the Inquiry examined were highly classified.
For more information including the Inquiry’s Terms of Reference, Protocol, biographies of Sir Peter Gibson and Dame Janet Paraskeva, and a link to the report please visit: www.detaineeinquiry.org.uk
Find this story at 19 December 2013
Find the report at
© UK Crown Copyright 2013

British intelligence officers were told to ignore evidence of breaches of the Geneva convention when detainees from Iraq and Afghanistan were being interrogated in 2002, a report by the aborted inquiry into alleged British complicity in torture has found.
The inquiry was axed earlier this year after fresh criminal investigations were launched into allegations involving Libyan victims Photo: EPA
British intelligence officers were told to ignore evidence of breaches of the Geneva convention when detainees from Iraq and Afghanistan were being interrogated in 2002, a report by the aborted inquiry into alleged British complicity in torture has found.
The orders from MI6’s head quarters to intelligence officers came as Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, was telling MPs that anyone who is captured “should be treated humanely in accordance with the Geneva Convention”.
The report published by Sir Peter Gibson disclosed that in 2002 spies working for MI6 overseas were told to turn a “blind eye” to any evidence they witnessed of breaches of the Convention, which sets out how prisoners should be treated.
Documents uncovered by the inquiry showed that “officers were advised that, faced with apparent breaches of Geneva Convention standards, there was no obligation to intervene”, the report said.
“Officers were also advised that such conduct should only be raised with the detaining authority ‘if circumstances allow’. Officers were not advised to cease any interview immediately if they felt that the detainee was not being treated in accordance with the appropriate standards.”
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Mr Blair had told MPs on January 16, 2002 : “I totally agree that anybody who is captured by American troops, British troops or anyone else should be treated humanely in accordance with the Geneva Convention and proper international norms.”
Yet two days later, Mr Blair wrote on the bottom of a Number 10 note about detainees in Guantanamo: “The key is to find out how they are being treated.
“Though I was initially sceptical about claims of torture, we must make clear to the US that any such action wd be totally unacceptable & v. quickly establish that it isn’t happening” [sic].
The partly-redacted report recommended 27 areas which should be examined further, adding that it “would also want to put on its recognition of the extreme harshness of the conditions and the treatment experienced by the detainees”.
One area it wanted to examine was whether “UK officers may have turned a blind eye to the use of specific, inappropriate techniques or threats used by others and used this to their advantage when resuming an interview session with a now compliant detainee”.
The inquiry was axed earlier this year after fresh criminal investigations were launched into allegations involving Libyan victims. The report also found that Britain “may have become inappropriately” involved in some cases of rendition of suspected terrorists.
The heads of both MI5 and MI6 have been asked to give their responses to MPs on the Intelligence and Security Committee, which is investigating the claims, by February.
Ken Clarke, the Cabinet Office minister in charge of the inquiry, said the report “finds no evidence in the documents to support any allegation that UK intelligence officers were directly responsible for the mistreatment of detainees held by other countries overseas”.
He added that it was important when considering the report to bear in mind it was a period “when we and our international partners were suddenly adapting to a completely new scale and type of threat from fundamentalist religious extremists.
Mr Clarke said: “It is now clear that our agencies and their staff were in some respects not prepared for the extreme demands suddenly placed on them.”
He said: “There is some damage to our reputation which prides itself as a beacon of justice, human rights and the rule of law. If failures and mistakes were made in this period that is a matter of sincere regret.”
Jack Straw, who was Labour foreign secretary at the time, flatly denied that he knowingly facilitated the torture of British citizens by US authorities, even though he authorised their transfer to Guantanamo Bay.
By Christopher Hope, Senior Political Correspondent
4:34PM GMT 19 Dec 2013
Find this story at 19 December 2013
© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2013