Our highly politicised police have issued a statement claiming there is “No evidence” of extraordinary rendition flights using the UK while transporting prisoners. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/06/09/nflight109.xml This parrots the exact phraseology used by Jack Straw http://www.channel4.com/more4/news/news-opinion-feature.jsp?id=80 and Tony Blair http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1716238,00.html.

This careful coincidence of wording, together with the timing of the Association of Chief Polce Officers’ statement to coincide with the Council of Europe’s detailed and damning report on extraordinary rendition, shows just how NuLab has politicised the police.

The Council of Europe report is careful, detailed and stunning. http://assembly.coe.int:80/CommitteeDocs/2007/EMarty_20070608_NoEmbargo.pdf The author, Dick Marty, is a senior Swiss judge who has conducted important terrorism trials. He knows evidence when he sees it. I was a witness before his committee.

It is worth reporting his conclusions:

It is my sincere hope that my report this year will catalyse a renewed appreciation of the moral quagnire into which we have collectively sunk as a result of the US-led “War on Terror”. Almost six years in, we appear no closer to pulling ourselves out of this quagmire, partly because of the lack of factual clarity – perpetuated by secrecy, cover-up and dishonesty – about the exact practices in which the US and its allies have engaged, and partly because of a lack of urgency and political will on both sides of the Atlantic to unite around consensus solutions.

By clarifying some of the unspoked truths that have previously held us back in this exercise, I hope I have spurred right-minder Americans and Europeans alike into realising that our common values, in tandem with our common security, depend on our uniting to end the abusive practices inherent in US policies like the “High-Value Detainee” programme.

In the UK we are still stuck in

secrecy, cover-up and dishonesty

as witness the fact that the terse denial by ACPO got more, and more favourable, media coverage in the UK than the Swiss judge’s 368 paragraphs of carefully weighed evidence.

Of course, the reason the British police have “No evidence” is that they have steadfastly refused to look for any. When the CIA flights have landed for refuelling at British airports they were registered as normal civilian flights. On board sometimes were prisoners: held under no lawful authority, shackled, blindfold, beaten , drugged and tortured. Even when there were no prisoners, on board were shackles, weapons, drugs and other illegal equipment. The police had every lawful authority to search while these planes were on the ground in the UK (I used to be the number 2 in the FCO’s Aviation and Maritime Department).

Not only that, but on numerous occasions the police had the aircraft actually pointed out to them by protestors. Of the hundreds of documented occasions when the CIA torture flights came through the UK, not once – NOT ONCE – did a British police officer go on board to look. And now they say they have no evidence! It makes me sick.

I was a witness before the Council of Europe inquiry. I should have happily been a witness for the SOCPA enquiries, only of course they didn’t really make any.

From COE

Dick Marty presents his second report on secret detentions in Europe

Strasbourg, 04.06.2007 ‘ Following several months of additional investigation, Dick Marty (Switzerland, ALDE), rapporteur of the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly (PACE), is due to present his second report on ‘Alleged secret detentions and illegal inter-state transfers involving Council of Europe member states’ to the Assembly’s Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights in Paris on Friday 8 June 2007.

The meeting is closed to the press, but if the report is approved by the committee, it will be made public on this occasion. Mr Marty will also give a press conference at 2 p.m.

Commenting on the draft, Mr Marty said: ‘My first report focused mainly on illegal inter-state transfers and extraordinary renditions. This second report will focus mainly on the other part of my mandate ‘ secret detentions.’

The report, if approved, is scheduled for debate by the 318-member Assembly, bringing together parliamentarians from all 47 Council of Europe member states, on Wednesday 27 June 2007, during its June plenary session in Strasbourg.

From BBC Online

The first criminal trial over the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” of terror suspects has opened in Italy. Twenty-six Americans and six Italians are accused of kidnapping an Egyptian terror suspect and sending him to Egypt, where he was allegedly tortured.

The Americans – most believed to be CIA agents – will be tried in absentia. Italy has not announced if it will seek their extradition to the Milan trial. US President George W Bush will arrive in Italy hours after the trial opens.

Meanwhile, the head of a European investigation into the rendition process is due to present more findings on Friday.

Surprise witness

Italy’s government has asked the country’s highest court to set aside the rendition trial, saying prosecution documents will break state secrecy laws and damage relations with the CIA. The Constitutional Court is due to rule on that appeal by September, and defence lawyers are expected to ask that the trial be adjourned until the high court makes its ruling.

Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr – also known as Abu Omar – was snatched from a Milan street in February 2003. Italian prosecutors say Nasr was taken to US bases in Italy and Germany before being taken to the Egyptian capital of Cairo. Nasr says he was tortured during his four-year imprisonment in Cairo.

At the time of his arrest he was suspected of recruiting fighters for Islamic groups but had not been charged. He was released by Egypt earlier this year, his lawyer said.

A senior US official has said that the 26 Americans accused of Nasr’s kidnapping would not be sent to Italy even if Rome made an extradition request.

One of the surprise witnesses in the case will be Philip Morse – one of the minority owners of the US baseball team the Boston Red Sox, says the BBC’s Christian Fraser in Rome. It is alleged that his Gulfstream jet was used by the CIA to fly Abu Omar out of Italy, says our correspondent.

‘Web of abuse’

Also on Friday, Swiss senator Dick Marty, leading an inquiry on behalf of the Council of Europe, is due to release more of his findings. Last year, he accused 14 European nations of colluding with US intelligence in a “spider’s web” of human rights abuses, and specified Romania and Poland as suspected locations for CIA “black sites”, where terror suspects are secretly held.

President Bush acknowledged the existence of such centres last year, but did not say where they were. Mr Bush will arrive on Friday for talks with Pope Benedict XVI and Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi.

Mr Prodi has already said that the extraordinary rendition case will not be on the agenda.

The United Nations has held that “disappearance” of persons is in itself a form of torture, because of the mental anguish heaped both on the “disappeared”, and on their family. Yet the US continues to do it.

As Reuters reports, human rights groups have named 39 people “disappeared” while in US custody. Stephen Grey, author of the brilliant Ghost Plane, believes that the numbers disappeared by the USA might reach the hundreds. As Uzbekistan is one of the torture destinations for extraordinary rendition, experience would indicate that many of these will have been murdered and the bodies dumped or cremated.

Groups list 39 ‘disappeared’ in U.S. war on terror

Thu Jun 7, 2007

By Claudia Parsons

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Six human rights groups urged the U.S. government on Thursday to name and explain the whereabouts of 39 people they said were believed to have been held in U.S. custody and “disappeared.”

The groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, said they filed a U.S. federal lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act seeking information about the 39 people it terms “ghost prisoners” in the U.S. “war on terror.”

“Since the end of Latin America’s dirty wars, the world has rejected the use of ‘disappearances’ as a fundamental violation of international law,” professor Meg Satterthwaite of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University’s School of Law said in a statement.

The report said suspects’ relatives, including children as young as seven, had been held in secret detention on occasion.

CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano dismissed the report, saying the CIA acts in “strict accord with American law” and its counter-terrorist initiatives are “subject to careful review and oversight.” “The United States does not conduct or condone torture,” he said.

In September, U.S. President George W. Bush acknowledged the CIA had interrogated dozens of suspects at secret overseas locations and said 14 of those held had been sent to the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Bush strongly defended the secret detention and questioning of terrorism suspects and said the CIA treated them humanely. The program has drawn international outcry and questions about the cooperation of European governments.

Tens of thousands of people “disappeared” during Latin America’s so-called dirty wars in Chile, Argentina and several other countries where right-wing dictators used extra-judicial detentions to crush armed Marxist opposition.

The list of 39 people said to have been held in U.S. custody at some point was compiled using information from six rights groups, including London-based groups Cageprisoners and Reprieve and the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York. The detentions began shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks and include people said to be captured in locations including Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Somalia.

EVIDENCE OF DETENTIONS

The United States has acknowledged detaining three of the 39. The groups said, however, there was strong evidence, including witness testimony, of secret detention in 18 more cases and some evidence of secret detention in the remaining 18 cases.

Joanne Mariner of Human Rights Watch said it was unknown if the suspects were now in U.S. or foreign custody, or even alive or dead. “We have families who have not seen their loved ones for years. They’ve literally disappeared,” Mariner told Reuters.

Among the cases detailed in the report is the detention in September 2002 of two children, then aged seven and nine, of confessed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was later detained and is now held at Guantanamo. “According to eyewitnesses, the two were held in an adult detention center for at least four months while U.S. agents questioned the children about their father’s whereabouts,” the report said. The groups said the lack of information about the prisoners “prevents scrutiny by the public or the courts, and leaves detainees vulnerable to abuses that include torture.”

Bush said in September there were no prisoners remaining in custody in U.S. secret facilities at that time. But the report said the transfer of Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi from CIA custody to Guantanamo in April showed the system was still operating.

“Interviews with prisoners who have been released from secret CIA prisons indicate that low-level detainees have frequently been arrested far from any battlefield, and held in isolation for years without legal recourse or contact with their families or outside agencies,” the report said.

The groups urged the U.S. government to cease use of secret detention, provide information on those in custody, give access by the International Committee of the Red Cross to all detainees and either bring charges or release all prisoners.

(Additional reporting by Carol Giacomo)

The danger is we get so used to the idea of Guantanamo that we stop being shocked. This is another excellent article by the indefatigable Marjorie Cohn, which reminds us of the continuing horrors, both of brutality and of Kafkaesque procedure:

No Unlawful Enemy Combatants at Guant’namo

By Marjorie Cohn

June 6, 2007

http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/forumy/2007/06/no-unlawful-enemy-combatants-at.php

In 2002, Donald Rumsfeld famously called the detainees at Guant’namo “the worst of the worst.” General Richard B. Myers, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned they were “very dangerous people who would gnaw hydraulic lines in the back of a C-17 to bring it down.” These claims were designed to justify locking up hundreds of men and boys for years in small cages like animals.

George W. Bush lost no time establishing military commissions to try the very “worst of the worst” for war crimes. But four and a half years later, the Supreme Court decided in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that those commissions violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Geneva Conventions. So Bush dusted them off, made a few changes, and rammed his new improved military commissions through the Republican Congress last fall.

Only three detainees have been brought before the new commissions. One would expect the people Bush & Co. singled out for war crimes prosecutions would be high-level al-Qaeda leaders. But they weren’t. The first was David Hicks, who was evidently not so dangerous. The U.S. military made a deal that garnered Hicks a misdemeanor sentence and sent him back to Australia.

Salem Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni who used to be Osama bin Laden’s chauffeur, was the second. Hamdan, whose case had been overturned by the Supreme Court, was finally brought before a military commission Monday for arraignment on charges of conspiracy and material support for terrorism.

The third defendant was Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen, who appeared for arraignment the same day as Hamdan. Khadr was 15 years old when he arrived at Guant’namo. He faced charges of conspiracy, murder, attempted murder, spying, and supporting terrorism.

On Monday, much to Bush’s dismay, two different military judges dismissed both Hamdan’s and Khadr’s cases on procedural grounds.

The Military Commissions Act that Congress passed last year says the military commissions have jurisdiction to try offenses committed by alien unlawful enemy combatants. Unlawful enemy combatants are defined as (1) people who have engaged in hostilities or purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States or its allies; or (2) people who have been determined to be unlawful enemy combatants by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) or another competent tribunal. The Act says that a determination of unlawful enemy combatant status by a CSRT or another competent tribunal is dispositive.

But there are no “unlawful” enemy combatants at Guant’namo. There are only men who have been determined to be “enemy combatants” by the CSRTs. The Act declares that military commissions “shall not have jurisdiction over lawful enemy combatants.” In its haste to launch post-Hamdan military commissions, Bush’s legal eagles didn’t notice this discrepancy. That is why the charges were dismissed.

The Bush administration may try to fix the procedural problem and retry Khadr and Hamdan. But regardless of whether Guant’namo detainees are lawful or unlawful enemy combatants, the Bush administration’s treatment of them violates the Geneva Conventions. Lawful enemy combatants are protected against inhumane treatment by the Third Geneva Convention on prisoners of war. Unlawful enemy combatants are protected against inhumane treatment by Common Article Three.

Omar Khadr was captured in Afghanistan and brought to Guant’namo when he was 15 years old. In both places, he has been repeatedly tortured and subjected to inhumane treatment. At Bagram Air Base, Khadr was denied pain medication for his serious head and eye shrapnel wounds. At Guant’namo, his hands and feet were shackled together, he was bolted to the floor and left there for hours at a time. After he urinated on himself and on the floor, U.S. military guards mopped the floor with his skinny little body. Khadr was beaten in the head, dogs lunged at him, and he was threatened with rape and the removal of his body parts.

Khadr cried frequently. He has nightmares, sweats and hyperventilates, and is hypervigilant, hearing sounds that he can’t identify. When Khadr’s lawyer saw him for the first time in 2004, he thought, “He’s just a little kid.”

Why was Khadr treated this way? He comes from a family allegedly active in al-Qaeda. His charges stem from an incident where the U.S. sent Afghans into a compound where Khadr and others were located. The people inside the compound killed the Afghans and began firing at the U.S. soldiers. The Americans dropped two 500-pound bombs on the compound, killing everyone inside except Khadr. After Khadr threw a hand grenade which killed an American, the soldiers shot Khadr, blinding and seriously wounding him. Khadr begged them in English to finish him off. He was then taken to Baghram and later to Guant’namo.

According to Donald Rehkopf, Jr., co-chair of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers Military Law Committee, “The government has steadfastly refused to allow hearings on this alleged [unlawful enemy combatant] status because there are so many prisoners at GTMO that were not even combatants, much less ‘unlawful’ ones. Khadr is in an unusual situation because he has a viable ‘self-defense’ claim – we attacked the compound that he and his family were living in, and the fact that he was only 15 at the time.”

If Khadr were a U.S. citizen, he would not even be subject to trial by court-martial because of his age. When the Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that children under 18 at the time of their crimes could not be executed, it said that youths display a “lack of maturity and an underdeveloped sense of responsibility” that “often results in impetuous and ill-considered actions and decisions.” A juvenile, the Court found, is more vulnerable or susceptible to negative influences and his character is not as well-formed as that of an adult. “From a moral standpoint,” Justice Kennedy wrote for the majority, “it would be misguided to equate the failings of a minor with those of an adult, for a greater possibility exists that a minor’s character deficiencies will be reformed.” The Bush administration’s treatment of Omar Khadr flies in the face of the Court’s reasoning.

The United States may be able to retry Khadr and Hamdan. They have a few days to file an appeal. But the Court of Military Commissions Review hasn’t even been established yet, so it’s unclear where the appeals would be brought.

The Military Commissions Act, which denies basic due process protections, including the right to habeas corpus, is a disgrace. But an even bigger disgrace is the concentration camp the United States maintains at Guant’namo Bay, Cuba. The Act should be repealed and the Guant’namo prison should be shut down immediately.

Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, president of the National Lawyers Guild, and the U.S. representative to the executive committee of the American Associaiton of Jurists. Her new book, Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law, will be published in July. See http://www.marjoriecohn.com.