CIA chief backs rendition flights

So the end justifies the means even if the means involves what is in effect torture and wholesale violation of rights including rendering at least two innocent victims to torture: El Masri, and Maher Arar are clear victims. In the case of El Masri US courts deny him any recourse in the name of national security. General Hayden is it would see a criminal but protected from any prosecution in the name of national security. Even his claims about the value of rendition are only based upon his own word. No doubt to provide evidence might be against national security.

CIA chief backs rendition flights

Mr Hayden staunchly defended "special methods of questioning"
The director of the US Central Intelligence Agency, General Michael Hayden, has defended the methods it uses to interrogate terror suspects.
Gen Hayden said programmes such as extraordinary rendition produced what he said was irreplaceable intelligence.

Under the programme, terror suspects are transported to secret prisons in countries with less stringent interrogation rules.

Mr Hayden, speaking in Chicago, said the leads gained justified rendition.

"The irreplaceable nature of that intelligence is the sole reason why we have what I admit freely is a very controversial programme."

The CIA had produced thousands of intelligence reports from the "fewer than 100 hardened terrorists" detained since 2002, Mr Hayden told the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

'Water-boarding' controversy

His comments came as President George Bush's nominee for US attorney general came under fire for his position on interrogation techniques.


Michael Mukasey was grilled by the Senate Judiciary Committee

Nominee Michael Mukasey condemned one technique, water-boarding, as "repugnant" and possibly "over the line," but declined to explicitly rule it out as torture, saying he could not speculate on classified procedures.

Water-boarding simulates drowning by immobilizing a prisoner with his head lower than his feet and pouring water over his face.

Leading Democrats in the Senate have threatened to block Mr Mukasey's confirmation if he does not explicitly rule out water-boarding as illegal.

When asked to comment about Mr Mukasey's statement, Mr Hayden avoided a clear answer.

"Judge Mukasey cannot nor can I answer your question in the abstract. I need to understand the totality of the circumstances in which this question is being posed before I can give you an answer," he said.

CIA Torture Program Ensnare Innocents

This is an interesting interview. Arar by the way still has a case before US courts but it will probably be rejected on national security grounds. Grey fails to note that Arar still is on the US no-fly list.

'CIA Torture Program Ensnares Innocents'
Interview with Stephen Grey, author of Ghost Plane

Christopher Brown (christo)

Published 2007-05-28 12:04 (KST)



The names Khaled El Masri, Moazzam Begg, Binyam Mohammad, and Maher Arar may not sound familiar to most people. But they are among the hundreds of people, many of whom have no proven ties to terrorist organizations, who since 1997 have been removed from airports on suspicions based at times on the flimsiest of evidence. They have been escorted away at boarding gates, grabbed while they changed planes, and approached on street corners. Those accused disappeared into a secret world of endless interrogations and torture; all transported care of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

In his new book Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program, award-winning investigative journalist Stephen Grey tells the true story of what became of the CIA's torture program known by the euphemism "extraordinary rendition" and the airplanes that make the program run. Citizen reporter Chris Brown spoke with him by telephone while he was in New York on a book tour.

Your first encounter with the rendition program began back in December 2001 while you were interviewing a certain congressperson, who later became one of President Bush's key men in the war on terror. Could you briefly talk about this?








I was working for The Sunday Times of London and I was in Washington just after Sept. 11. I sat down on a sofa in an office on Capital Hill in the office of Porter Goss, who was then the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and later became head of the CIA. It was he for the first time who actually told me the term "rendition." I was asking about what the CIA had been doing to capture Osama Bin Laden, and I said, "Could he have been kidnapped?" And he said, "It's called rendition. Have you heard of that?" And I said, "No I haven't." And he said it's a way of bringing people to a kind of justice.

So I was very intrigued to hear about this kind of concept. And that really was the start of what had become many years of inquiries to try to get to the bottom of it.

Many in the U.S. might think that this so-called rendition policy is a new weapon to pursue terrorists. But, in fact, it's been around for a number of years. Can you speak about this?

Rendition itself -- which basically means sending people across to another country without any trial, legal process, or treaty -- that's been going on since the 1880s. It started off with the case of someone being picked up in Peru by the Pinkerton Detective Agency, quite an early example of a contractor operating under presidential authority. But the point was that this kind of rendition involved bringing people back to trial in the United States, in other words before an open trial, before a judge and jury. And as such, although laws are broken abroad, it was ruled to be legal in the U.S. And that's been going on for a very long time.

I don't suppose many people would have much to protest about that. But what I'm writing about in the book is the program of extraordinary rendition. That began as a systematic program used against suspected Islamic terrorists in the 1990s under Bill Clinton, specifically in 1995. And its been going on ever since. Although, I have to say that while this program started under Clinton, it expanded dramatically after Sept. 11.

In the book you write about Canadian citizen Maher Arar. The U.S. sent him to Syria. Before he was sent there he was interrogated for quite some time by the U.S. When Arar found out that he would be sent to Syria, where he is originally from, he pleaded with the U.S. agents not to send him there because he was certain that he would be tortured. The Bush administration has repeated that it doesn't torture. But, in fact, it is at the very least outsourcing torture when it sends people off to places like Syria, Egypt, or Uzbekistan. More to the point, the U.S. have been involved directly with interrogations that have involved torture, most notably Abu Ghraib. I was wondering if you might comment more on this?





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Sure, the basic problem for the U.S. is that the laws prohibit torture and no one can be directly involved in it. So the mechanism of sending people to another country does certainly allow interrogations to take place, which wouldn't be allowed if carried out by U.S. agents themselves. And, you know, initially when President Bush first commented about rendition he said, "We don't send people to countries that torture." And they had to revise that because I think the lawyers pointed out that, in fact, America does.

And there are lots of countries that send their people to other countries to be tortured. Funnily enough the best evidence, if you want to read about torture in Syria, is to look at publications by the U.S. government that show, in very great detail, the kind of torture reserved for people who upset the state in Syria, and in particular people who are accused of being Islamic militants face the worst kind of torture.

It's not just a matter of getting people off the street, keeping them out of harm's way. I mean, Maher Arar could have been flown back to Canada; in fact he was on his way home to Canada. There was a deliberate choice to send him to a country where, it was believed, he would be properly interrogated. And when he arrived he wasn't wanted by Syria; Syria had no interest in him. He was sent with a list of questions attached. He was asked about the threat that he posed to the U.S. and to Canada. He wasn't asked about Syria. So this is a very clear example of outsourcing, of getting other people to do your dirty work for you.

I read something in the book that I found disturbing. The pilots who flew the planes were issued fake IDs and licenses by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Can you speak more on this?

It's quite striking that these people are able to fly around the world with control and knowledge of many government agencies that they're using false documents and false names. And it's involved the FAA, it's involved state offices who issue fake driver's licenses, it involves private contractors down in San Jose. You have a major subsidiary of Boeing called Jefferson Data Plan, which is a private company that is involved in organizing private flights all around the world. And they work directly with the CIA in organizing these trips, which involve rendition. There was a quite interesting interview in the New Yorker where someone who actually worked for that company said that they were quite aware that these planes were being used for the outsourcing of torture. So there were a lot of people who had knowledge of this and I suppose everybody thinks it's someone else's job to work out whether this is right or wrong.

Maher Arar was not known to have any significant links to terrorists. The CIA admit that on occasion they target the wrong person. Can you talk about this more?

Well I do believe that when they pick these people up they don't deliberately target someone who's innocent. They really do suspect that they are capturing someone and try to get him out of the way.

But there seems to be a kind of recklessness about finding out the truth here, and Khaled El-Masri, who is a German citizen for example, he was picked up by people in the CIA who thought he was somebody else. But as Khaled himself said, to verify a passport just takes a few weeks. He was held for five months in solitary confinement. And he wasn't even questioned for months at a time. Essentially he was forgotten in this jail and he wasn't really that important to try to sort out the truth.

Likewise, Maher Arar was questioned on the flimsiest of evidence. He knew somebody, went for a walk with somebody who himself was under investigation. It's amazing through these intelligence reports how you can link someone to terrorism on these small pieces of evidence. But he was completely cleared. Maher Arar was judged by an official Canadian inquiry to be a man with no connections whatsoever with terrorists. And it just highlights secret detentions, secret intelligence and no opportunity to test this intelligence in a courtroom, have a lawyer try to challenge what you're accused of, is a system that is bound to end up locking up and mistreating people who are innocent. Because there is no safety valve to really check whether we're doing to this to other people who really have got something that they're guilty of.

And Maher Arar was compensated for his treatment by the Canadian government and issued a public apology, correct?

That's right he's been compensated, the head of the Royal Mounted Police has resigned, the government has apologized. Although there was poor evidence linking him to Al Qaeda, which turned out to be wrong, they have apologized for that. What should be said is that Canada played no role in the decision to send him to Syria. So whatever wrong intelligence they had and supplied to U.S., ultimately it was the U.S. that decided to send him to be tortured.

And what's really striking is that, although the administration continues to state publicly that it's against torture and that there are all kinds of laws that prohibit torture and ensure that people that take part in torture are prosecuted, there appears to be no way from him to complain in the U.S. He tried to file a lawsuit, and it's been judged that it can't go ahead because if it did it might reveal state secrets. So, there's been no avenue given to these people to actually get their day in court and find justice at last.



Christopher Brown is an independent journalist living in San Francisco, Ca. He produces and hosts a podcast entitled, Crossing The Line: Life in Occupied Palestine (http://ctl.libsyn.com). Stephen Grey's website is www.stephengrey.com.

US warns against EU rendition investigations

The probe is uncovering the fact that several European countries co-operated with the CIA in renditions. If that sort of co-operation is damaged by the investigation surely that is all to the good!


U.S. warns against EU's CIA flight probe
JAN SLIVA
Associated Press
BRUSSELS, Belgium - A senior U.S. administration official on Wednesday warned that ongoing inquiries into secret CIA activities in the European Union may undermine intelligence cooperation between the United States and European nations.

The European Parliament accused Britain, Poland, Italy and other nations in mid-February of colluding with the CIA to transport terror suspects to clandestine prisons in third countries.

In a report that concluded a yearlong investigation, the parliament identified 1,254 secret CIA flights that entered the European airspace since the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks on the United States.

It said that these flights were against international air traffic rules and suggested some of them may have carried terror suspects on board in violation of human rights principles.

John Bellinger, legal adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, called the European Parliament report "unbalanced, inaccurate and unfair" and called on the EU governments to challenge the suggestion that Europeans need to be concerned about secret CIA flights.

"I can understand concerns about specific incidents but we should not somehow suggest that all intelligence activity is something illegal or suspicious," he said.

Germany, Italy and several other EU countries have been carrying out their own inquiries into secret CIA activities in Europe, probes Bellinger said "have not been helpful with respect to necessary cooperation between the United States and Europe."

"I do think these continuing investigations can harm intelligence cooperation, that's simply a fact of life," Bellinger told reporters after meeting legal advisers to EU governments in Brussels.

EU parliamentarians have rejected Bellinger's criticism and called on the United States to address concerns that some flights have carried kidnapped terror suspects.

"People are imprisoned without being tried first. That is unacceptable. (The U.S.) should open up to us and tell us where they're flying and who they're carrying," said Kathalijne Buitenweg, a Dutch member of the European Parliament.

The EU legislature has given no direct proof that the CIA ran secret prisons in Europe, an accusation that prompted the inquiry in November 2005. Bellinger refused to comment on reports that Poland and Romania housed clandestine detention centers, but said a lot of allegations concerning U.S. intelligence activities have been "just rumors."

Bellinger also said the United States would refuse any Italian extradition request for CIA agents indicted in the alleged abduction of an Egyptian cleric in Milan, one of the cases the European Parliament focused on in its inquiry.

"We've not got an extradition request from Italy. If we got an extradition request from Italy, we would not extradite U.S. officials to Italy," he said.

Milan prosecutors want the Italian government to forward their request for the extradition of the 26 Americans, mostly CIA agents. The previous government in Rome - led by Silvio Berlusconi - refused, and Premier Romano Prodi's center-left government has indicated it would not press Washington on the issue. The Americans all have left Italy, most before prosecutors sought their arrest.

Their trial opens in June. It will be the first criminal trial stemming from the CIA's extraordinary rendition program to secretly transfer terror suspects to third countries, where critics say they may have been tortured.

Bellinger also said the U.S. government was keen on closing the Guantanamo detention center in Cuba but has not yet figured out what to do with the inmates.

The base began receiving terror suspects in 2002, and its treatment of the detainees has come under strong criticism from human rights groups. The EU has repeatedly called for immediate closure of Guantanamo.

"We have not seen Europe has been willing to help. We have seen many statements from European governments saying Guantanamo must be closed immediately. It's not clear how Guantanamo would be immediately closed. Europe has been prepared to criticize ... but has not been prepared to offer a constructive suggestion," Bellinger said.

He added that the United States has been looking to Europe for help with inmates from the Middle East who cannot, for various reasons, return to their home countries, but has not received any offers from European countries to accept these people.

CIA rendition planes used Canadian airline callsign

So it seems there is no penalty for using a bogus call sign. You would think that the ICAO authorities would be a bit upset that someone is misusing the call sign of a bankrupt Canadian airline.


From The Sunday TimesFebruary 19, 2006

US military planes criss-cross Europe using bogus call sign
Jon Swain and Brian Johnson-Thomas in Rome
THE American military have been operating flights across Europe using a call sign assigned to a civilian airline that they have no legal right to use.
Not only is the call sign bogus — according to the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) — so, it appears, are some of the aircraft details the Americans have filed with the air traffic control authorities.

In at least one case, a plane identified with the CIA practice of “extraordinary rendition” — transporting terrorist suspects — left a US air base just after the arrival of an aircraft using the bogus call sign.

The call sign Juliet Golf Oscar (JGO) followed by a flight number belongs, says the ICAO, to a now bankrupt Canadian low-cost airline called Jetsgo of Montreal.

But for several years and as recently as last December it has been used selectively by both the American air force and army to cover the flights of aircraft to and from the Balkans.

These range from Learjet 35 executive jets to C-130 transport planes and MC-130P Combat Shadows, which are specially adapted for clandestine missions in politically sensitive or hostile territory.

A Sunday Times analysis of flight plans and radio logs has placed these aircraft at locations including Tuzla in Bosnia, Pristina in Kosovo, Aviano, the site of a large joint US-Italian military air base in northern Italy, and Ramstein in Germany, the headquarters of the US Air Forces in Europe (USAFE).

On December 11, 2004, USAFE in Ramstein filed a flight plan for a Learjet 35 to fly from Tuzla to Aviano. The flight plan was copied to 15 addressees including Tuzla airport, Aviano airport and a mysterious recipient labelled “xxxxxxxx”.

The aircraft’s identity was given as JGO 80, the flight was a Learjet 35 operated by the Department of Defence and the registration was 99999E.

The status of the flight was given as “humanitarian”. But it was also given as “state”, which means government, and as “protected”, which means diplomatic.

During the time the plane was in the air, USAFE changed some of the flight plan timings and at the same time the registration changed. The aircraft metamorphosed into 40112E but continued to be a Learjet 35 and was still JGO 80 and a humanitarian, government and diplomatic flight.

While the Learjet was on the ground at Tuzla, an Ilyushin 76 was loading a cargo of 45 tons of surplus weapons and ammunition sold off by the Bosnian military and destined for Rwanda in defiance of a UN embargo.

The Ilyushin left Tuzla, flew over Italy and headed south in the direction of Africa. The American Learjet took off 55 minutes later.

In a report exposing arms trafficking to war-torn central Africa, Amnesty International has suggested that “US security authorities were engaged in a covert operation to ferry arms to Rwanda in the face of political opposition from the European Union”.

Another interesting convergence of flights occurred in February 2004. On February 24, an MC-130P Combat Shadow using the call sign JGO 50 took off from Aviano for an unknown destination.

Two days later, on February 26, the aircraft left Pristina for Tuzla. A short while after that, a Gulfstream 5 executive jet, call sign JGO 47, flew from Tuzla to Aviano, arriving at 23.11 GMT. The next day, a Learjet 35 using the call sign SPAR 92 left Aviano for an unknown destination.

SPAR is short for Special Air Resources, an American military airlift service that transports senior military officers and civilian VIPs.

However, SPAR 92 has been identified as the aircraft which was used by the CIA secretly to transport a Muslim preacher who was kidnapped by CIA agents in Milan in 2003.

A USAFE spokesman last week said American aircraft using the JGO call sign were performing “Joint Guard Operations” for the Nato/European peacekeeping mission in the Balkans.

However, inquiries have shown that the military operation called “Joint Guard” ended in 1998. They also show that none of the US aircraft deployed in it match ones using the JGO call sign.

A spokesman for the ICAO said: “Our records indicate that the designator JGO is still assigned to Jetsgo and the ICAO does not assign the same code to two operators.”


Additional reporting: Peter Danssaert