Security - new material (26)
01 July 2007
"CIA in azione, Boeing sotto accusa", Claudio Gatti, Il Sole 24 ore, 30.5.07. Article unravelling the investigations leading to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filing a lawsuit for participation in the kidnappings of five people by the CIA: Italian citizen Abou Elkassim Britel, German citizen Khaled El-Masri, two Egyptian asylum seekers abducted in Sweden and an Ethiopian who suffered the same fate in Macedonia (see Statewatch' Observatory on CIA rendition and detention for details of these cases). The charges have been brought against two companies, one of them a subsidiary company of Boeing, Jeppesen Data Planning, for servicing rendition flights. ACLU lawyer Steven Watt argues that "The evidence collected leads [one] to believe that Jeppesen played an important role in the entire extraordinary rendition programme". He added that flight data shows that it serviced at least 15 of the flights investigated by the European Parliament's Temporary Committee on the alleged use of European countries by the CIA for the transport and illegal detention of prisoners (TDIP) commission. Britel's lawyer Francesca Longhi claimed that these flight servicing activities constitute illegal acts that contravene international instruments for human rights and prohibiting torture. Details are provided of the nine-hour rendition flight carrying Britel, hooded and handcuffed, from Islamabad to Rabat in May 2002, reconstructing the way in which strings of flight data made it possible to link little-known civil companies used by the CIA to run the flights, with the flight planning and support services provided by Jeppesen and Houston-based company Air Routing International. Investigations into rendition flights in Spain, Portugal, Italy and Great Britain support these findings, and indicate that the same aircraft were serviced by the same companies. A spokesmen for the two companies denied allegations of their knowing involvement in renditions.
Off the Record: US responsibility for enforced disappearances in the "war on terror". Amnesty International, CagePrisoners, Human Rights Watch, Reprieve, Center for Human Rights and Global Justice and the Centre for Constitutional Rights, 2007, pp 21. This important briefing paper reveals aspects of the CIA's secret - and illegal - detention programme that the US government, ably assisted by its British and European allies, has attempted to keep secret. Highlighting the locations where prisoners may have been held and the abuse that they have suffered it identifies 39 individuals who have been imprisoned by the United States in secret custody at its black sites and whose current whereabouts are still unknown. The paper also includes details of their relatives, some of them mere children, who were also detained in secret prisons beyond the purview of any legal or social system. The "disappeared" include nationals from countries including Egypt, Kenya, Libya, Morocco, Pakistan and Spain. The former Guantanamo political prisoner and spokesman for the CagePrisoners organisation, Moazzam Begg, has said: "Representing individuals detained by the world's most powerful democracy has become more of an exercise in chasing ghosts than it is about providing justice. Concepts such as habeas corpus bear no meaning to those being detained in black sites or even more sinister holes. For many of those detained, simply gaining the right to speak the truth unhindered by the need to escape the signing of a false confession means more than the fact that they have been detained." The full report can be accessed on the Statewatch website: http://www.statewatch.org/news/2007/jun/us-disappeared.pdf
"We come on behalf of the Spanish government", José María Irujo, El País, 20.5.07, p 43. Article featuring testimony from Hamed Abderramán, a Spanish citizen from the Spanish north African enclave of Ceuta who was arrested in Kandahar in 2002 and spent two years detained at Guantánamo Bay, where he was tortured and interroga