|
The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings, Torture and Big Money |
|
September 7th, 2006 - President Moves
14 Held in Secret to Guantánamo News
article by the New York Times |
|
President Moves 14 Held in
Secret to Guantanamo New York Times By Sheryl Gay Stolberg September 7, 2006 Washington, Sept. 6 -
President Bush said Wednesday that 14 high-profile terror suspects held
secretly until now by the Central Intelligence Agency - including the man
accused of masterminding the Sept. 11 attacks - had been transferred to the
detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to face military tribunals if
Congress approves. The suspects include Khalid
Shaikh Mohammed, thought to be the Sept. 11 mastermind, and other close
associates of Osama bin Laden. Mr. Bush said he had decided to “bring them
into the open” after years in which the C.I.A. held them without charges in
undisclosed sites abroad, in a program the White House had not previously
acknowledged. The announcement, in the
East Room of the White House, was the first time the president had discussed
the secret C.I.A. program, and he made clear that he had fully authorized it.
Mr. Bush defended the treatment the suspects had received but would not say
where the so-called “high-value terrorist detainees” had been held or what
techniques had been used to extract information from them. The transfer of the
high-level suspects to Guantánamo Bay effectively suspended the extraordinary
program, in which the intelligence agency became the jailer and interrogator
of suspects counterterrorism officials considered the world’s most wanted
Islamic extremists. The government says the 14
terror suspects include some of the most senior members of Al Qaeda captured
by the United States since 2001, including those responsible for the bombing
of the destroyer Cole in 2000 in Yemen and the 1998 attacks on American embassies
in Kenya and Tanzania. Most of the detainees have been interviewed
extensively and are believed to have little remaining intelligence value. With the transfer of the
suspects to Guantánamo, which is run by the Defense Department, the
International Committee of the Red Cross will monitor their treatment, Mr.
Bush said. He used the East Room appearance to urge Congress to authorize new
military commissions to put terror suspects on trial, replacing rules
established by the administration but struck down in June by the Supreme
Court. “As soon as Congress acts to
authorize the military commissions I have proposed, the men our intelligence
officials believe orchestrated the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans on Sept.
11, 2001, can face justice,” Mr. Bush said, to an audience that included
family members of the victims. He added, “To start the process for bringing
them to trial, we must bring them out into the open.” To that end, the president
sent Congress legislation proposing new rules for the commissions and
detailing specific standards for the humane treatment of detainees. Yet the
proposal hews closely to the old commission model, and it retains several
provisions the court found troublesome, including language that permits
defendants to be excluded from their own trials. At the same time, the
Pentagon released a new Army Field Manual that lays out permissible
interrogation techniques and specifically bans eight methods that have come
up in abuse cases. Among the techniques banned is water-boarding, in which a
wet rag is forced down a bound prisoner’s throat to cause gagging;
intelligence officials have said Mr. Mohammed was subjected to that treatment
while in C.I.A. custody. Although the C.I.A. has
faced criticism over the use of harsh techniques, one senior intelligence
official said detainees had not been mistreated. They were given dental and
vision care as well as the Koran, prayer rugs and clocks to schedule prayers,
the official said. They were also given reading material, DVD’s and access to
exercise equipment. Administration officials
said the timing of Mr. Bush’s decision to bring the terror suspects to trial
was driven not by politics but by the need to respond to the Supreme Court’s
decision and the fact that the suspects were no longer regarded as sources of
valuable intelligence. On Capitol Hill, some
Republicans reacted warily. But even those who criticized the proposal said
it was imperative for Congress to pass legislation setting up tribunals soon. “I do not believe it is
necessary to have a trial where the accused cannot see the evidence against
them,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, a former
military prosecutor who has played a central role in the debate. But Mr.
Graham said he believed his differences with the White House “can be
overcome.” Mr. Bush’s speech was the
third in a series he is delivering on the war on terror in the days before
the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, and it carried potential
political benefits for a White House that is intent on maintaining Republican
control of Congress this November. The address helped put a
face on the enemy, reminding Americans that while Osama bin Laden - to whom
Mr. Bush referred repeatedly in a speech on Tuesday - is still at large, many
terrorists have been captured. Five years after the attacks, Mr. Bush gave
the families of Sept. 11 victims something to cheer about, and those in the
audience did, as he announced he wanted to put the suspects on trial. By moving the high-profile
suspects to Guantánamo just two months before the midterm elections, the
administration is putting intense pressure on lawmakers to act before
adjourning to campaign. If Democrats try to thwart legislation to try senior
members of Al Qaeda, they will risk being labeled weak on national security,
a label they can ill afford in an election that may turn on the question of
which party is better suited to keep Americans safe. “This is certainly a logical
and very sound step both substantively and politically,” said David Rivkin,
who served in the White House counsel’s office under the first President Bush
and is sympathetic to this administration’s approach. “It’s reminding the
country and the world of the folks we are fighting against. Nobody can say
these are just pitiful foot soldiers; these are pretty senior guys.” The C.I.A. program, though
officially a secret, has been the subject of numerous news reports in recent
months. By speaking publicly about it for the first time, Mr. Bush hopes to
build support for it on Capitol Hill, and in the public. The White House released
biographies of the 14 suspects and details of the accusations against them.
They include such well-known Qaeda operatives as Abu Zubaydah, who the
administration said was trying to organize a terrorist attack in Israel at
the time of his capture, and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who the authorities say
helped facilitate the Sept. 11 attacks. Despite the new information,
human rights organizations were critical of Mr. Bush’s announcement. “It’s wonderful that at last
the United States has acknowledged that these detention sites exist,” said
Larry Cox, executive director of Amnesty International U.S.A. But Mr. Cox
described the program as “a form of torture,” and said the United States should
suspend it. In his speech, Mr. Bush
fiercely resisted that characterization. “I want to be absolutely clear with
our people, and the world,” he said. “The United States does not torture.
It’s against our laws, and it’s against our values. I have not authorized it -
and I will not authorize it.” A senior intelligence
official said there had been fewer than 100 detainees in the C.I.A. program
since its inception shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks. Beyond the 14, the
remainder have either been turned over to the Defense Department as so-called
unlawful enemy combatants, returned to their countries of origin or sent to
nations that have legal proceedings against them. The official described the
C.I.A. detainees as the government’s “single largest source of insight into
Al Qaeda,” saying they accounted for 50 percent of everything the authorities
had learned about the terrorist network. But, he said, “Some of these people
have been held for a considerable period of time, and their intelligence
value has aged off.” Mr. Bush said the C.I.A.
would not relinquish its capability to detain and question terrorism
suspects, and the senior intelligence official said the administration
intended that the program would continue. But agency officials - who feared
employees might be subject to lawsuits or criminal prosecution - welcomed the
hand-off of the detainees and the prospect that the C.I.A.’s role would be
limited in future cases. “I am confident that this
will be greeted with relief by agency employees,” said Jeffrey H. Smith, a
former general counsel for the C.I.A. “Many of them were uncomfortable with
their role as jailers.” Military justice experts say
that if Congress passes the legislation, trials of some terror suspects at
Guantánamo could begin relatively quickly, in three to four months. But the
trials of the 14 high-value suspects, who are held in a special high-security
facility separate from other detainees, might not begin for at least a year,
because the government would have to build its case . One expert who has been
critical of the administration’s plan, Eugene R. Fidell, predicted that the
proposal would attract a lawsuit. “Going the way they have
done this is in fact quite unfair to the very families of 9/11 victims who
President Bush had at his meeting today,” Mr. Fidell said, “because those
people need closure and in fact what he’s done is guarantee further
protracted delay because of the inevitable litigation.” On Capitol Hill, Democrats
were also critical. Representative Jane Harman of California, the senior
Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said Mr. Bush should have
disclosed the program years ago and called his speech “the opening salvo in
the fall campaign.” David Johnston and Mark
Mazzetti contributed reporting for this article. Copyright 2006 The New York
Times Company External link: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/07/us/07detain.html Secret World of Detainees
Grows More Public By Dan Eggen and Dafna Linzer Washington Post Thursday, September 7, 2006; A18 The secret interrogation of
senior al-Qaeda aide Abu Zubaida provided U.S. authorities with the clues
they needed to capture the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks
and other key terrorism suspects around the world, according to new accounts
provided yesterday by President Bush and administration officials. In announcing the transfer
of Zubaida and 13 other "high value" terrorism suspects to the U.S.
military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Bush disclosed new details about
some of the detainees subjected to what he called "tough" interrogation
methods, which human rights advocates have condemned as torture. Bush
defended an "alternative set of procedures" for interrogations that
he said offered critical information about links between suspected terrorists
and helped thwart eight plots aimed at killing Americans. The group of suspects is an
apparent who's who of al-Qaeda and its affiliates, including alleged Sept. 11
mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and the Indonesian extremist leader known as
Hambali, who is blamed for bombings in Bali and the Philippines. Officials
said the group also includes those suspected in the bombing of the USS Cole
in Yemen in 2000 and the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in
1998. "These are dangerous
men with unparalleled knowledge about terrorist networks and their plans for
new attacks," Bush said. Bush asserted that
information provided by some of the 14 detainees not only helped with the
capture of others, but led to the unraveling of an al-Qaeda effort to
manufacture anthrax spores; a plot to attack Marines at a base in Djibouti
with an explosives-laden water tanker; a plan to attack the U.S. consulate in
Karachi, Pakistan, with car and motorcycle bombs; and a plan to fly passenger
jets into Heathrow Airport or Canary Wharf in London. Bush called the interrogations
by specially trained CIA officers "safe and lawful and necessary"
and said the information gleaned from the detainees had allowed the CIA to
"make sense" of seized documents and computer records, to identify
voices on tape recordings of intercepted telephone calls, and to interpret
what terrorist suspects had said to one another. He said the information was
corroborated by other sources, but he did not give details about those
sources. "It's the rogue's
gallery of al-Qaeda, the crown jewels of who we have," said Bruce
Hoffman, a terrorism expert and Georgetown University professor. "But in
attempting to resolve their status, the last thing you want is to give any
impression that it's going to be a kangaroo court." Intelligence officials said
the suspects were transferred in secret over the past several days. But the
prisons in which they were held, while now empty, are not closed, and
officials said CIA staff members are continuing to maintain a presence at the
facilities. The public confirmation of
the 14 men completes a list of all known detainees in U.S. custody, following
the disclosure in May of others being held at Guantanamo Bay. Overall, nearly 100
detainees had been held in the secret CIA prisons, officials said. Most were
either transferred to jails in other countries, where they could be
interrogated and held without trial, or set free, intelligence officials
said. In a series of
"biographies" and other documents released by the director of
national intelligence (DNI) yesterday, authorities provided startling new
details about the CIA prison program, which had been wrapped in secrecy. At
the same time, the information was carefully edited and included little if
any information on how the detainees were arrested, how information was
gathered and assessed, and where the prisoners were held or moved. The 14 detainees can be
roughly divided into two groups: those allegedly associated with al-Qaeda and
the Sept. 11 attacks, and those suspected of having ties to Hambali and
Jemaah Islamiyah, a Southeast Asian extremist group linked to al-Qaeda. The alleged Sept. 11
conspirators in the group include Mohammed, Zubaida, lead operative Ramzi
Binalshibh and financier Mustafa Ahmad Hawsawi. The list also includes Majid
Khan, a Pakistani national who worked at a family gas station in Baltimore
and allegedly was selected by Mohammed to blow up gas stations and
participate in other plots in the United States. The DNI documents portray
the capture and intermittent interrogations of Zubaida as crucial to unraveling
much of what the government knows about the Sept. 11 attacks and the internal
operations of al-Qaeda. But some of the portrayal appears to be at odds with
other published reports, and intelligence sources indicated yesterday that
Zubaida's case is more complicated than the administration let on. Zubaida "was wounded in
the capture operation" in Pakistan in March 2002, and "likely would
have died" if the CIA had not provided medical attention, according to
the documents. During an initial interrogation, he provided information
"that he probably viewed as nominal," but which included
identifying Mohammed as the Sept. 11 mastermind who used the nickname
"Mukhtar," the documents say. The information "opened up new
leads" that eventually resulted in Mohammed's capture, the documents
say. But in his recent book,
"The One Percent Doctrine," Ron Suskind reported that a tipster led
the CIA directly to Mohammed and subsequently collected a $25 million reward.
Intelligence sources said yesterday that Suskind's description is correct but
that Zubaida's information was also helpful. What the DNI documents also
do not mention is that the CIA had identified Mohammed's nickname in August
2001, according to the Sept. 11 commission report. The commission found that
the agency failed to connect the information with previous intelligence
identifying Mukhtar as an al-Qaeda associate plotting terrorist attacks, and
identified that failure as one of the crucial missed opportunities before
Sept. 11. When Zubaida refused to
provide further information, the CIA designed a new interrogation program
that would be "safe, effective and legal," the DNI documents say,
leading to "accurate and highly actionable intelligence" that led
to the capture of Binalshibh. The DNI document outlines
Mohammed's alleged role in launching a series of other plots before his
capture in Rawalapindi, Pakistan, in March 2003. One involved having South
Asian terrorists associated with Jemaah Islamiyah hijack an airliner over the
Pacific and crash it into a West Coast skyscraper. Another was to use
Pakistanis in early 2003 to smuggle explosives into New York City and hit gas
stations, railroad tracks and a bridge. Mark Lowenthal, who was a
senior adviser to then-CIA Director George J. Tenet when the detention
program began, said there was little thought about what would happen to the
group being held in the secret prisons. "The main concern was
that these people needed to be off the street, and I don't think people
thought beyond that initially," he said. "What do you do afterward
and how long do you hold them for? We don't try prisoners of war. We try war
criminals, and we do that at the end of a war. This one doesn't look like
it's ending so fast." Other CIA veterans who would
discuss the matter only on the condition of anonymity said they thought
trials were inevitable. "The question was when," said one former
official. "How long are they valuable for? One year, two or three or
more? It's hard to say." Staff writers Glenn Kessler,
Walter Pincus, Thomas E. Ricks, R. Jeffrey Smith and staff researcher Julie
Tate contributed to this report. © 2006 The Washington Post
Company External link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/06/AR2006090602142.html European states urged to
come clean on CIA jails By Darren Ennis Reuters Sep 7, 2006 5:57 PM BST Strasbourg, France (Reuters)
- European lawmakers demanded on Thursday that their governments reveal the
location of secret CIA prisons after U.S. President George Bush admitted
Washington held terrorist suspects in jails abroad. Bush said on Wednesday the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had interrogated dozens of suspects at
undisclosed overseas locations and the last 14 of those held had been sent to
the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay. But top administration officials
said the jail programme would stay open. EU member Poland and
candidate country Romania, accused of hosting secret CIA detention centres by
an investigator for Europe's chief human rights watchdog, the Council of
Europe, issued fresh denials, but EU lawmakers were not satisfied. "The location of these
prison camps must be made public," said German lawmaker Wolfgang
Kreissl-Doerfler, a member of a European Parliament committee investigating
the allegations. "We need to know if
there has been any complicity in illegal acts," he added. Warsaw said the Polish
president Lech Kaczynski had no knowledge of detention centres in Poland at
this stage. "If the issue continues
to come up and if there is international pressure, the president will ask
appropriate services to investigate the issue once again," Kaczynski's
foreign policy adviser, Andrzej Krawczyk, told Reuters. Romania has repeatedly
denied having hosted secret prisons. "Romania's position on the matter
of CIA prisons remains unchanged," government spokeswoman Oana Marinescu
said. EU counterterrorism
coordinator Gijs de Vries hoped Bush's disclosure would be a first step to
finally shutting Guantanamo, "which has diminished America's moral
authority in the world and provided a stumbling block in winning hearts and
minds". Of signs the United States
plans to keep running the CIA jail programme, he told a news briefing in
Brussels: "Detention without trial is illegal. It is like torture." “Dirty Nature” The head of the Council of
Europe's parliamentary assembly, Rene van der Linden, said Bush's statement
vindicated his body's long investigation, which had "flushed out the
dirty nature of this secret war". The Council of Europe and
the European Parliament both launched probes after the Washington Post
reported last year that the CIA had run secret prisons and flown suspects to
states where they could be tortured. The executive European
Commission is tipped to recommend letting Bulgaria and Romania join the EU
next year, but a senior EU lawmaker said Romania first needed to answer the
allegations of complicity with CIA abuses. "If this is not
clarified now and ... we find out afterwards that they were involved, then
the EU would have a major crisis on its hands," parliament's foreign
affairs committee chairman Elmar Brok told Reuters. EU lawmakers are set to
travel to Bulgaria and Romania as well as Britain and Germany, as part of
their investigations, British MEP Sarah Ludford said. "Bush exposes not only
his own previous lies. He also exposes to ridicule those arrogant government
leaders in Europe who dismissed as unfounded our fears about extraordinary
rendition," she said. © Reuters 2006. All rights
reserved. External link: http://indiaenews.com/2006-09/21491-european-states-cia-camps.htm |