Evidence

In a landmark case, twenty-three Americans, mostly CIA operatives, have been convicted in Italy for kidnapping a Muslim cleric from the streets of Milan in 2003. They were all tried in absentia after the United States refused to hand them over. The convictions turn them into international fugitives who risk arrest abroad. The case marks the first time any American has been convicted for taking part in a so-called “extraordinary rendition.” We go to Rome to speak with the Italian prosecutor who brought the case, Armando Spataro, and get comment from international law and human rights attorney Scott Horton. [Includes rush transcript].

Justice Denied After Seven Years of Pain and Struggle
By Stephen Rohde | Bill of Rights Defense Committee

Imagine it’s September 2002 and you are at JFK Airport changing planes on your way home to Canada, after a vacation in Tunisia. To your surprise, you are detained by U.S. authorities and interrogated for…13 days. The Bush administration labels you a suspected member of Al Qaeda and sends you against your will to Syrian intelligence authorities renowned for torture. You are tortured, interrogated and detained in a tiny underground cell for nearly a year before the Syrian government releases you, stating they had found no connection to any criminal or terrorist organization or activity. An exhaustive investigation by the Canadian government finds you innocent of terrorism or other wrongdoing and that government apologizes for its minor role. Arar v. Ashcroft, No 06-4216-cv. Wouldn’t you expect American law to afford you due process and a judicial forum in which to hold those who committed these outrageous violations of your constitutional rights fully accountable?

That’s what Maher Arar, a 39-year old Canadian citizen, expected when he was subjected to these outrages. But as of this week, the doors of American justice have been slammed in Arar’s face.

On Monday, a sharply divided federal Court of Appeals, by a vote of 7 to 4, dismissed Arar’s case, concluding that it raised too many sensitive foreign policy and secrecy issues to permit any relief. Read more.

EXCLUSIVE: Convicted CIA Spy Says "We Broke the Law"
Sabrina deSousa Says U.S. "Betrayed" Her and Others Found Guilty in Kidnapping of Muslim Cleric in Italy
By Matthew Cole, Avni Patel, and Brian Ross | ABC News

"Everything I did was approved back in Washington," she said. deSousa says she was on a ski trip on the actual day of the kidnapping....A State Department spokesman said the Obama administration was "disappointed" by the verdict.

One of the 23 Americans convicted today by an Italian court says the United States "broke the law" in the CIA kidnapping of a Muslim cleric Abu Omar in Milan in 2003.

"And we are paying for the mistakes right now, whoever authorized and approved this," said former CIA officer Sabrina deSousa in an interview to be broadcast tonight on ABC's World News with Charles Gibson.

DeSousa says the U.S. "abandoned and betrayed" her and the others who were put on trial for the kidnapping. She was sentenced in absentia to five years in prison.

Representative Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), a member of the House Intelligence Committee told ABC News that the trial was a disaster for CIA officers like DeSousa on the frontline.

"I think these people have been put out there. They've been hung out to dry. They're taking the fall potentially for a decision that was made by their superiors in our agencies. It's the wrong place to go." Read more.

Italian court convicts 23 Americans in CIA rendition case
By Craig Whitlock | Washington Post

An Italian court on Wednesday convicted 22 CIA operatives and a U.S. Air Force colonel of orchestrating the kidnapping of a Muslim cleric in Milan in 2003 and flying him to Egypt, where he said he was later tortured.

The judge in the case, Oscar Magi, said three other Americans, including the former Rome station chief for the CIA, were covered by diplomatic immunity.

The Americans were all tried in absentia. A Milan prosecutor said his office would seek to have them extradited from the United States, but a formal decision will be made later by the Italian Justice Ministry.

The case is the only instance in which CIA operatives have faced a criminal trial for the controversial tactic of extraordinary rendition, under which terrorism suspects are seized in one country and forcibly transported to another without judicial oversight. Read more.

Cheney Failed to Answer 72 FBI Questions | CBS
Documents from Interview in Valerie Plame Case Show Vice President was Unclear on Many Points, Big and Small

Federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald famously declared in the Valerie Plame affair that "there is a cloud over the vice president." Last week's release of an FBI interview summary of Dick Cheney's answers in the criminal investigation underscores why Fitzgerald felt that way.

On 72 occasions, according to the 28-page FBI summary, Cheney equivocated to the FBI during his lengthy May 2004 interview, saying he could not be certain in his answers to questions about matters large and small in the Plame controversy.

The Cheney interview reflects a team of prosecutors and FBI agents trying to find out whether the leaks of Plame's CIA identity were orchestrated at the highest level of the White House and carried out by, among others, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's chief of staff.

Among the most basic questions for Cheney in the Plame probe: How did Libby find out that the wife of Bush administration war critic Joseph Wilson worked at the CIA? Read more.

By Sherwood Ross

Even though Barack Obama, the candidate, pledged to end “the practice of shipping away prisoners in the dead of night to be tortured in far-off countries,” his FBI has been rendering kidnap victims to the U.S. The practice is still kidnapping, however; and it’s still illegal.

Unlucky victim No. 1 was Raymond Azar, 45, flown from Afghanistan to Alexandria, Va., not to a foreign country. The construction manager for Sima International, a Lebanese outfit that did work for the U.S. military, Azar said he was tortured by his abductors. He might just as well have been flow to Egypt under the Bushies.

Interestingly, Azar was never charged as a dangerous terrorist, only with conspiracy to commit bribery for wiring $106,000 in kickbacks to a U.S. employee’s bank account in hopes of getting $13 million in unpaid bills okayed.

Posted here.

Nobody who works for our government had the decency to leak this. Remember that.

Cheney was represented (at our expense) by the same law firm that Obama's White House Counsel worked for, the same one that defended Clinton. But Cheney consulted or pretended to consult his own staff lawyer David Addington when he wanted to avoid incriminating Bush.

22 things Cheney said he could not recall.

How did Cheney's lawyer remember falsehoods to leak to the press on a topic Cheney refused to address?

Cheney hung Libby out to dry.

Summarized here.

Dissected here.

Posted here.

Reviewed by NY Times here.

Raw Story has this raw story.

BBC

The US has been warned that its use of drones to target suspected terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan may violate international law.

UN human rights investigator Philip Alston said the US should explain the legal basis for attacking individuals with the remote-controlled aircraft.

He said the CIA had to show accountability to international laws which ban arbitrary executions.

Drones have killed about 600 people in north-west Pakistan since August 2008.

Mr Alston, the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions, told the BBC: "My concern is that these drones, these Predators, are being operated in a framework which may well violate international humanitarian law and international human rights law.

"The onus is really on the government of the United States to reveal more about the ways in which it makes sure that arbitrary executions, extrajudicial executions, are not in fact being carried out through the use of these weapons."

Increased use

By Dave Lindorff

Next time you see a junkie sprawled at the curb in the downtown of your nearest city, or read about someone who died of a heroin overdose, just imagine a big yellow sign posted next to him or her saying: “Your Federal Tax Dollars at Work.”

Kudos to the New York Times, and to reporters Dexter Filkins, Mark Mazzetti and James Risen, for their lead article today reporting that Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother of Afghanistan’s stunningly corrupt President Hamid Karzai, a leading drug lord in the world’s major opium-producing nation, has for eight years been on the CIA payroll.

By Ann Wright

Journalists Pascale Bourgaux and Mercedes Gallego in their trips to Iraq as war correspondents were stunned to hear from military women in Iraq that they should be very careful working in military units due to sexual assault and rape.

When they left Iraq they decided to investigate the issue of rape in the U.S. military. In 2007, they filmed the stories of four military women who had been raped and made a documentary, “Rape in the Ranks: The Enemy Within.” The documentary was shown for the first time in the United States on October 26 at the New York Independent Film Festival.

It's happening here.

Cheney falsely accuses Obama of ‘libel’ against CIA over torture
By Ron Brynaert | Raw Story

Torture is not torture, according to former Vice President Dick Cheney, and to refer it to as such should be considered libelous. Even if it doesn't actually qualify as libel.

The Washington Times' Amanda Carpenter reports, "Maintaining his stature as one of the most forceful defenders of the Bush Administration's defense policies former Vice President Dick Cheney accused President Obama of committing 'libel' against CIA interrogators on Wednesday" during a speech at the Center for Security Policy.

"In the speech, Mr. Cheney charged that President Obama has 'filled the air with vague and useless platitude' when talking about torture and by calling enhanced interrogation techniques 'torture" he has committed 'libel' against CIA interrogators whom Mr. Cheney described as 'dedicated professionals who acted honorably and well, in our country’s name and in our country’s cause,'" Carpenter adds.

Cheney's full comments Wednesday:

"In short, to call enhanced interrogation a program of torture is not only to disregard the program’s legal underpinnings and safeguards. Such accusations are a libel against dedicated professionals who acted honorably and well, in our country’s name and in our country’s cause. What’s more, to completely rule out enhanced interrogation in the future, in favor of half-measures, is unwise in the extreme. In the fight against terrorism, there is no middle ground, and half-measures keep you half exposed."

As Salon's Glenn Greenwald noted last June, "The U.S. has prosecuted those acts as torture in the past. Multiple media outlets and even the U.S. Government have routinely described those acts as “torture” when used against Americans, rather than by Americans. The tactics are ones we copied from manuals designed to inure our own troops to the torture techniques used by some of the world’s worst tyrants. They resulted in numerous deaths. Until the Bush administration decided to call it something other than 'torture' so that they could do it, nobody had any questions about whether this was 'torture.'" Read more.

Cheney: Obama seems 'afraid' to make decision on Afghanistan
By Alexander Mooney | CNN

The former vice president forcefully reasserted himself in the center of the national security debate Wednesday, declaring, "There will always be plenty of us willing to stand up for the polices that have kept this country safe."

Cheney vigorously defended what he called the Bush administration's "enhanced interrogation techniques," which Obama has denounced as ineffective and a potential incentive for terrorists.

"Such accusations are a libel against dedicated professionals who acted honorably and well, in our country's name and in our country's cause," Cheney said. "What's more, to completely rule out enhanced interrogation in the future, in favor of half-measures, is unwise in the extreme. In the fight against terrorism, there is no middle ground, and half-measures keep you half-exposed."

Cheney appeared most enraged with the Justice Department's announcement it is considering leveling charges against CIA officials who engaged in the "enhanced interrogation" tactics.

"We cannot protect this country by putting politics over security and turning the guns on our own guys," he said to the rousing crowd.

After dialing back his attacks on President Obama's foreign policy, former Vice President Dick Cheney says the administration has damaged U.S. ties with key allies, dangerously wavered in Afghanistan, undermined progress in Iraq and sabotaged the Bush administration's national security legacy.

In a hard-hitting, wide-ranging speech Wednesday for a conservative gathering, Cheney targeted the administration's decision-making process on how to proceed in Afghanistan, saying Obama has failed to give troops on the ground a clear mission or defined goals and appeared "afraid to make a decision."

"The White House must stop dithering while America's armed forces are in danger," Cheney said at the Center for Security Policy. "Make no mistake, signals of indecision out of Washington hurt our allies and embolden our adversaries." Read more.

Lithuanian President Announces Investigation into CIA Secret Prison
Investigation a result of ABC News.com report on CIA 'Black Site' in Lithuanian Capitol
By Matthew Cole | ABC News

The president of Lithuania called for an official investigation Tuesday into an ABC News.com exclusive report in August that the CIA housed a secret prison for al Qaeda suspects in Lithuania for more than a year beginning in 2004.

"If this is true," President Dalia Grybauskaite said, "Lithuania has to clean up, accept responsibility, apologize, and promise that it will never happen again."

At a press conference with the Council of Europe Human Rights Commission, Grybauskaite announced the investigation after it was clear a previous attempt by the Lithuanian Parliament was insufficient, according to a Council of Europe official. Read more.

By Dave Lindorff

How absurd is it that we have the government on the one hand pulling back from using a hollowed out mountain in Nevada to store nuclear waste because of a fear (legitimate I grant) that hundreds or thousands of years hence, some earthquake or other catastrophe could cause the stored waste to leak into the water table, while on the other hand we have this same government deliberately taking some of the most dangerous waste--the actual uranium from the used fuel rods--and putting it into bombs, shells and bullets to be splattered and burned all across the landscape?

And I should note that it's not just remote places like Iraq and Kuwait and Afghanistan that are being covered in super toxic and radioactive uranium dust--and I'm not just talking about the stuff that gets picked up in the wind and carried around the globe, or the stuff that gets inhaled by our troops and carried home internally, bad enough as that is.

By Dave Lindorff

The horrors of the US Agent Orange defoliation campaign in Vietnam, about which I wrote on Oct. 15, could ultimately be dwarfed by the horrors caused by the depleted uranium weapons which the US began using in the 1991 Gulf War (300 tons), and which it has used much more extensively--and in more urban, populated areas--in the Iraq War and the now intensifying Afghanistan War.

Election Monitor Claims 1M Tainted Karzai Votes
Afghan Showdown Adds Pressure to Obama Strategy Decision
By Chris Cuomo, Nick Schifrin and Devin Dwyer | ABC News

More than 1 million votes - most of them for Afghan President Hamid Karzai - were thrown out by election monitors in the disputed presidential election, a decision that the Afghan president has already indicated he will reject.

The ruling by the U.N.-backed Electoral Complaints Commission would reduce the president's total from the 54 percent he has claimed to 48.3 percent. Anything under 50 percent is supposed to trigger a runoff between Karzai and his main challenger Abdullah Abdullah.

Over the weekend, Afghan election officials indicated they would not accept the possibility of a second vote.

Democracy International reported that the EEC has determined that 1.3 million votes were fraudulent, and about 1 million of those tainted votes were for Karzai. Another 200,000 votes for Abdullah were also thrown out, with the remainder for a handful of other candidates.

Those figures were confirmed to ABC News by election officials. Read more.