Europeans Investigate CIA Role in Abductions

JBK and Go Fig, say it isn't so.





Sounds like a Rumsfeld operation.

Gaston the Second

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Europeans Investigate CIA Role in Abductions
By Craig Whitlock
The Washington Post

Sunday 13 March 2005

Suspects possibly taken to nations that torture.

Milan - A radical Egyptian cleric known as Abu Omar was walking
to a Milan mosque for noon prayers in February 2003 when he was grabbed
on the sidewalk by two men, sprayed in the face with chemicals and
stuffed into a van. He hasn't been seen since.

Milan investigators, however, now appear to be close to
identifying his kidnappers. Last month, officials showed up at Aviano
Air Base in northern Italy and demanded records of any American planes
that had flown into or out of the joint U.S.-Italian military
installation around the time of the abduction. They also asked for logs
of vehicles that had entered the base.

Italian authorities suspect the Egyptian was the target of a
CIA-sponsored operation known as rendition, in which terrorism suspects
are forcibly taken for interrogation to countries where torture is
practiced.

The Italian probe is one of three official investigations that
have surfaced in the past year into renditions believed to have taken
place in Western Europe. Although the CIA usually carries out the
operations with the help or blessing of friendly local intelligence
agencies, law enforcement authorities in Italy, Germany and Sweden are
examining whether U.S. agents may have broken local laws by detaining
terrorist suspects on European soil and subjecting them to abuse or
maltreatment.

The CIA has kept details of rendition cases a closely guarded
secret, but has defended the controversial practice as an effective and
legal way to prevent terrorism. Intelligence officials have testified
that they have relied on the tactic with greater frequency since the
Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The Bush administration has received backing for renditions
from governments that have been criticized for their human rights
records, including Egypt, Jordan and Pakistan, where many of the
suspects are taken for interrogation. But the administration is getting
a much different reception in Europe, where lawmakers and prosecutors
are questioning whether the practice is a blatant violation of local
sovereignty and human rights.

There are many practical and legal hurdles to filing criminal
charges against U.S. agents, including the question of whether they are
protected by diplomatic immunity and the matter of determining their
identity. However, prosecutors in Italy and Germany have not ruled out
criminal charges. At the same time, the European investigations are
producing new revelations about the suspected U.S. involvement in the
disappearances of four men, not including the Egyptian, each of whom
claims they were physically abused and later tortured.

In Germany, a 41-year-old man, Khaled Masri, has told
authorities that he was locked up during a vacation in the Balkans and
flown to Kabul, Afghanistan in January 2004, where he was held as a
suspected terrorist for four months. He said that only after his
captors realized he was not the al Qaeda suspect they were looking for
did they take him back to the Balkans and dump him on a hillside along
the Albanian border. He recalled his captors spoke English with an
American accent.

German prosecutors, after several months of scrutinizing his
account, have confirmed several key parts of his story and are
investigating it as a kidnapping.

"So far, I've seen no sign that what he's saying is incorrect.
Many, many pieces of the puzzle have checked out," said Martin Hofmann,
a Munich-based prosecutor overseeing the investigation. "I have to try
to find out who held him, who tortured or abused him, and who is
responsible for this."

In Sweden, a parliamentary investigation has found that CIA
agents wearing hoods orchestrated the forced removal in December 2001
of two Egyptian nationals on a U.S.-registered airplane to Cairo, where
the men claimed they were tortured in prison.

One of the men was later exonerated as a terrorism suspect by
Egyptian police, while the other remains in prison there. Details of
the secret operation have shocked many in Sweden, a leading proponent
of human rights.

Although Swedish authorities had secretly invited the CIA to
assist in the operation, the disclosures prompted the director of
Sweden's security police last week to promise that his agency would
never let foreign agents take charge of such a case again.

"In the future we will use Swedish laws, Swedish measures of
force and Swedish military aviation when deporting terrorists," Klas
Bergenstrand, the security police chief, told reporters. "That way we
get full control over the whole situation."

Clues to a Mystery

In Milan, the Egyptian-born cleric attracted the attention of
counterterrorism police soon after arriving in Italy in 1997 from
Albania. Known as Abu Omar, his full name was Hassan Mustafa Osama
Nasr. He was 42, a veteran fighter from the wars in Bosnia and
Afghanistan and a wanted man in Egypt, where authorities had charged
him with belonging to an outlawed Islamic radical group.

Nasr frequently preached at two mosques in Milan that have long
attracted religious and political extremists, according to Italian and
U.S. officials. One of the mosques, a converted garage on Viale Jenner,
is classified as a financier of terrorism causes by the U.S. Treasury
Department, which has accused it of supporting "the movement of
weapons, men and money around the world."

Nasr reinforced the mosque's reputation by preaching angrily
against the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan and handing out vitriolic
pamphlets criticizing U.S. policy in the Middle East. Italian
counterterrorism police tapped his home telephone and kept him under
surveillance.

"He was the kind of person who, let's put it this way, did not
speak diplomatically," said Abdelhamid Shaari, president of the Islamic
Cultural Center at Viale Jenner, who denies that either the mosque or
the center sponsor terrorism or illegal activity. "When he attacked
America, he did not speak in half-measures. He got right to the point."


When Nasr vanished, his family and mosque leaders reported it
as a kidnapping, after a witness said she saw the abduction. The
witness, a recent immigrant, said she was scared to repeat her story to
the police, however, leading some investigators to speculate that Nasr
had disappeared on his own and gone to Iraq to fight U.S. forces.

Italian police opened a missing person investigation, but the
case stalled for more than a year. That changed in April 2004, when
Nasr's wife unexpectedly received a telephone call from her husband. He
told her he had been kidnapped and taken to a U.S. air base in Italy.
He said he was then flown to another U.S. base, before being taken to
Cairo.

The call was recorded by Italian police, who had kept the
wiretap on Nasr's home telephone in place. Although transcripts have
not been made public, Nasr's colleagues at the mosque said he reported
that he had been tortured and kept naked in subfreezing temperatures in
a prison in Cairo.

During the phone call, Nasr told his wife that he had been let
out of prison in Egypt but remained under house arrest. His relatives
have said they believe he was imprisoned again shortly afterward when
news of the recorded conversation was reported by Italian newspapers.

The existence of the wiretap is revealed in sealed Italian
court papers reviewed by The Washington Post. The documents, dated in
the spring of 2004, include a judge's authorization to continue the
wiretap and show that investigators were pursuing the theory that
covert agents - possibly from the United States, Italy or Egypt - were
behind the kidnapping.

Italian investigators have since determined that 15 agents,
some of them CIA operatives, were involved in Nasr's abduction,
according to reports in Corriere della Sera, a leading Italian daily.
Investigators were able to trace calls made by the agents by linking
calls made by the same phones near the mosque and Aviano Air Base on
the day Nasr vanished, the newspaper reported.

The investigation is being led by Armando Spataro, a well-known
counterterrorism prosecutor whose office has also built a hard-nosed
reputation for winning convictions in cases involving the Mafia and
political corruption. Spataro, who has worked closely with U.S.
officials in the past on terrorism cases, confirmed that he visited
Aviano last month but declined to comment further.

Capt. Eric Elliott, a U.S. military spokesman at Aviano, said
Spataro met at the base for several hours with Italian military
officials, who then forwarded a request for records to their American
counterparts. Elliott declined to describe the records being sought,
citing "an active investigation."

The U.S. Embassy in Rome declined to answer questions about
whether American agents were involved in Nasr's disappearance. "We do
not comment on intelligence matters," said Ben Duffy, an embassy
spokesman.

Italian opposition lawmakers have demanded answers from Prime
Minister Silvio Berlusconi's government on whether Italian agents or
intelligence services played a role. But government ministers have
remained tight-lipped.

Shaari, the director of the Islamic cultural center in Milan,
said some Muslims are worried they could be kidnapped, too.

"If they can take Abu Omar, then they can take anyone," he
said. "This is an extremely dangerous precedent, both for the Muslim
community and for Italy, as a democratic and free state."

Claims Corroborated

In late December 2003, Khaled Masri got into a bitter argument
with his wife in their home town of Ulm, Germany. They agreed he should
get away for a few days, so he bought a bus ticket for Skopje,
Macedonia.

At the Macedonian border on New Year's Eve, immigration
officials took a close look at his passport and detained him, without
explanation. Other agents later interrogated him and pressed him to
admit he was a member of al Qaeda, according to accounts Masri gave his
attorney and German prosecutors.

Masri protested his innocence, but was kept under guard in
Macedonia for three weeks. He said that one day in late January 2004,
he was beaten, stripped, shackled and put on a plane that took him to
Afghanistan. There, he was kept in a cell under dismal conditions,
deprived of water and repeatedly interrogated. Only after going on a
hunger strike, he said, did his captors relent; he was flown back to
the Balkans in May 2004.

He said he was released near an Albanian border checkpoint,
where guards returned his passport and cash. By the time he made it
home, even his wife was reluctant to believe his story, thinking he had
left her for another woman, according to his attorney.

German police have questioned Masri several times and said they
have found his version consistent and believable. Stamps in his
passport show he entered Macedonia and left Albania on the dates he
described. The bus driver on the route to Skopje confirmed to
investigators that Masri had been on board and was taken away by border
guards.

Investigators have conducted a chemical radioisotope analysis
of Masri's hair. They said the findings back up his story that he was
malnourished while in captivity.

Flight logs also support Masri's claim that he was flown out of
Macedonia by U.S. secret agents. Aviation records show a
U.S.-registered Boeing jet arrived in Skopje at 9 p.m. on Jan. 23,
2004, and departed about six hours later. Masri had provided German
investigators with the same time and date.

The flight plan shows the aircraft was scheduled to go to
Kabul, but later amended its route to include a stopover in Baghdad.
The existence of the flight logs was first reported by Frontal 21, a
news show on the German television network ZDF. A copy of the logs was
obtained by The Washington Post.

Records show the jet, with tail number N313P, was registered at
the time to a U.S. firm, Premier Executive Transport Services Inc.,
that records suggest is a CIA front company. The same firm owned
another aircraft, a Gulfstream jet, that has been used in other
rendition cases, including the one in Sweden.

Masri's attorney and investigators said they think he was
abducted because his name is similar to that of an al Qaeda suspect,
Khalid Masri, who allegedly played a crucial role in persuading the
members of the Hamburg cell that carried out the Sept. 11 attacks to go
to Afghanistan, where they first met Osama bin Laden.

Manfred Gnjidic, the lawyer, said he has asked the U.S. Embassy
in Berlin for an explanation of what happened, but has received no
response.

"We are quite sure that they were behind this," said Gnjidic.
"We are looking for punishment and to hold someone accountable."

Robert Wood, an embassy spokesman, declined to answer specific
questions about the case. "But our policy is pretty clear," he said.
"The United States does not transfer detainees to countries where we
believe it is more likely or not that they will be tortured."

Macedonian officials also had little to say. "Our answer is, no
comment," said Goran Pavlovski, spokesman for the Macedonian Interior
Ministry. "If the Germans want information, they should ask us about
it, and we will respond."

Under German law, prosecutors have the authority to investigate
any crime committed against a German citizen, even in foreign lands.

Hofmann, the Munich prosecutor, acknowledged that he has
limited powers to investigate cases outside Germany. But he said he is
preparing a formal request for legal help from the Macedonian
government, as well as from Albanian and Afghan officials.

"I'm confident that other information will be forthcoming," he
said. "This case has a considerable political meaning. There's a
certain amount of pressure on everyone involved."



Go to Original

Human Rights Observer Cites 2002 Abuse
The Associated Press

Saturday 12 March 2005

New York - Unreleased U.S. Army reports detailing the deaths of
two Afghan men who were beaten to death by American soldiers show that
military prison abuses began in Afghanistan in 2002, and were part of a
systematic pattern of mistreatment, a human rights representative said
Saturday.

More than two dozen American soldiers face possible criminal
prosecution - and one already is charged with manslaughter - in the
deaths at the main U.S. detention facility in Bagram, just north of the
Afghan capital of Kabul.

As documented by the Army's Criminal Investigation Command, the
men died a year before the photographed horrors at the Abu Ghraib
prison in Iraq, according to John Sifton, the Afghanistan researcher
for the New York-based Human Rights Watch.

In a phone interview, Sifton said his group had obtained 20
pages of electronically scanned Army reports.

The American Civil Liberties Union sued to obtain the case
files under the Freedom of Information Act, but the Army withheld
portions of the records because of an ongoing investigation and
possible charges.

On Saturday, a Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Jeremy Martin,
would say only that the cases from 2002 "were thoroughly investigated
and people were punished appropriately."

"The Bush Administration and the Pentagon describe the abuse
problems as isolated incidents, not systematic, not part of a plan. The
evidence shows otherwise," Sifton said. "Far from being isolated
incidents, these beatings were part of a pattern of abuse."

Members of the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion who set up
intelligence operations at the Bagram facility did the same at the Abu
Ghraib prison.

The two Afghan detainees died in December 2002 - a week apart -
as reported in Army memos, with updates detailing their fate after they
were captured by Afghan forces and handed to the U.S. military.

There were several other deaths of Afghans in American custody
before December 2002, Sifton said, "and we want more information."

"It's amazing," he said. "Nobody has been punished for this.
The command has recommended that 28 people be prosecuted for this, but
only two have been charged so far."

The unreleased Army documents detail U.S. military
investigations of the deaths of a man named Mullah Habibullah, about
30, and another identified only as Dilawar, a 22-year-old taxi driver
with a 2-year-old daughter, according to Sifton.

Under U.S. detention, the two men were chained to the ceiling
in standing positions, one at the waist and one by the wrists, while
their feet remained on the ground, according to the Army reports. One
of them was maimed over a five-day period, dying with his leg muscle
tissue destroyed from blows to his knees and lower body.

The Army has publicly acknowledged the two deaths and announced
in October that up to 28 U.S. soldiers face possible charges in
connection with what were ruled homicides.

Sifton said the Army documents show that U.S. military
investigators are accusing intelligence officers and police guards of
using severe, unapproved tactics on many prisoners at Bagram, not only
the two men.

Last month in a closed hearing at Fort Bliss, Texas, Pfc.
Willie V. Brand of the 377th Military Police Company was charged with
involuntary manslaughter in connection with Dilawar's death, one Army
document shows. Brand is accused of beating him to death over five
days.

An autopsy performed by a medical examiner and cited by the
Army showed that Dilawar's legs were so damaged by blows that
amputation would have been necessary.

Dilawar died from "blunt force trauma to the lower extremities
complicating coronary artery disease," according to an Army report
dated July 6, 2004.

Habibullah died of a pulmonary embolism apparently caused by
blood clots formed in his legs from the beatings, according to a June
1, 2004, military report.

Another member of the Cincinnati-based 377th Company, Sgt.
James P. Boland, was charged with assault, maltreatment and dereliction
of duty in Dilawar's death, and dereliction of duty in Habibullah's
death.

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