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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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July 17th,
2009 - Obama Plans ‘Rendition’ of Tunisians in Guantanamo to Italian Jail |
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Obama Plans
‘Rendition’ of Tunisians in Guantanamo to Italian Jail By Andy Worthington The Public Record July 17, 2009 On Wednesday, the British
Muslim support group Help The Prisoners stated that it had “received
notification from an inmate at Macomer prison” - an Italian high-security prison
on the island of Sardinia - that “three Tunisian inmates from Guantánamo Bay
will be transferred there.” This is disturbing news, because, as Help The
Prisoners note, “Macomer has been dubbed ‘Italy’s Guantánamo’ by inmates and
independent human rights organizations who have been campaigning for change
at the prison.” In 16 letters received by
Help The Prisoners, those held at Macomer allege that they have been
subjected to ill-treatment including “beatings, abuse of their religious
items, denial of medical treatment, [and] sexual humiliation.” Another
recently received letter adds further disturbing details, and it is,
therefore, no surprise that Help The Prisoners has stated that it intends to
“file a UN submission to the Special Rapporteur on Torture on the detainees’
behalf.” Why Italy’s Offer is a “Rendition” Proposal However, the news is not
entirely unexpected. Since June 15, when President Obama announced, following
talks with Silvio Berlusconi in Washington, “This is not just talk, Italy has
agreed to accept three specific detainees,” the Italian press has explained
that Berlusconi’s unexpected reversal of his previous opposition to accepting
cleared prisoners from Guantánamo was only agreed on the basis that the
Italian government would take prisoners who would subsequently be imprisoned
in Italy on the basis of criminal proceedings pending against them. According to a translation
of an article in La Repubblica that was sent to me, the US informally asked
the Italian government in April to take six or seven prisoners from
Guantánamo, and in the weeks that followed the Department of Public Security
and the Ministry of Justice compiled a list of Guantánamo prisoners who had
criminal proceedings pending against them in Italy. Sources in the United States
and Italy, with knowledge of the cases, explained that the Italian government
subsequently whittled the list down to three specific Tunisian prisoners -
Adel Ben Mabrouk, Abdul Ourgy and Riyad Nasseri - on the basis that all three
men would be transferred from Guantánamo to Italian jails, and it was
suggested that Roberto Maroni, the Minister of the Interior (and a member of
Italy’s notoriously right-wing Northern League), only approved their transfer
when he received reassurances that they would not be set free. This was
confirmed in an article in the Christian Science Monitor, in which reporter
Anna Momigliano wrote that Maroni, whose party was bluntly described as
“oppos[ing] the presence of Muslim immigrants” in Italy, stated, “I oppose
taking [the prisoners] in, as long as we are not sure they will be kept
behind bars.” La Repubblica added that the
prisoners would not receive “credit” for their seven years in Guantánamo, and
noted that, in 2007, the Milanese Public Prosecutor’s office had requested
extradition of two of the men, but the Ministry of Justice refused to forward
the extradition request to the US government because Guantánamo was “not US
territory.” As a result, it is understood that the US government’s transfer
of the men to Italian custody will not involve extraditing them, but rather
expelling them, and the Italian government can therefore treat them not as
prisoners who have already served a jail sentence, but as fugitives who are
obliged to serve a full term. As a source in the United
States explained, this novel approach to disposing of prisoners in Guantánamo
is actually a form of “rendition,” and, moreover, is particularly disturbing
for two reasons: firstly, because the men in question were approved for
transfer from Guantánamo (to the custody of their home governments, or to a
third country willing to take them) by a military review board at Guantánamo
under the Bush administration, which only happened because the military
concluded that they no longer represented a threat to the United States; and
secondly because, as they currently stand, the Italian proposals may actually
be worse than what would await the men if they were returned to Tunisia. Human rights abuses in Tunisia and Italy To put this in perspective,
it needs to be borne in mind that the men were not sent back to Tunisia from
Guantánamo because of well-documented problems with repatriation arrangements
negotiated between the US and Tunisian governments. In June 2007, two
Tunisians cleared for release from Guantánamo - Abdullah bin Omar and Lotfi
Lagha - were repatriated on the basis of a “diplomatic assurance” between the
two governments, which purported to guarantee that they would be treated
humanely. On their return, however, both men complained that they were
threatened in Tunisian custody, and they were subsequently sentenced to seven
and three years in prison, after trials that human rights observers condemned
as “show trials.” As a result, when the US
government attempted to repatriate a third Tunisian, Mohammed Abdul Rahman,
in October 2007, a District Court judge, Gladys Kessler, intervened to
prevent his return, ruling that he “cannot be sent to Tunisia because he
could suffer ‘irreparable harm’ that the US courts would be powerless to
reverse.” At the time of writing,
questions remain about the alleged crimes committed by the three Tunisians in
Italy, and what rights - if any - the Italian government plans to give them
to appeal the supposed evidence against them. According to various Italian
media reports, the arrest warrants issued in 2007 for Riad Nasseri (also
identified as Riadh Nasri) and Adel Ben Mabrouk (identified as Moez Fezzani)
were “for conspiracy to commit a crime, encouraging illegal immigration and a
number of crimes linked to terrorism,” including involvement in the Salafist
Group for Call and Combat (GSPC), a splinter group of Algeria’s notorious
Armed Islamic Group (GIA), and that Ourgy (identified as Abdul bin Mohammed
bin Ourgy) was “suspected of having had links in Milan with people who sought
volunteers to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan with Islamic insurgents.” This is a source of concern
not only because of long-standing claims that the Italian authorities have,
in common with most Western countries, taken the lead from the US since the
9/11 attacks in overreacting to perceived terrorist threats, implementing
punitive detention policies and, in June 2008, returning a Tunisian, Sami Ben
Khemais Essid, to his home country, “despite a request by the European Court
of Human Rights to suspend any measure to transfer Essid to Tunisia pending
their review of his case” (as Human Rights Watch explained), but also because
of the CIA’s notorious involvement, in February 2003, in the kidnap and
“extraordinary rendition” of Abu Omar. The Egyptian-born cleric was seized
from a Milan street in broad daylight and rendered to Egypt, where he was
tortured, before finally being released from custody in 2007, and many observers
believe that such an operation would have been inconceivable without the
close cooperation of the Italian government. Who are the three Tunisians? In Guantánamo, little
information has surfaced publicly regarding the activities of the three
Tunisians in Italy, or, for that matter, providing firm evidence of their
activities in Afghanistan. Adel Ben Mabrouk, who was 31 years old when he was
seized crossing from Afghanistan into Pakistan, worked in restaurants in
Naples and Rome, and as a barber in Milan, according to his lawyers, and
explained that he traveled to Afghanistan in early 2001, “because I became a
Muslim when I was in Europe. My country was very tough on the Muslims.
Afghanistan was a country where they were willing to take anybody, you don’t
need any money to live there, and they welcome all the Muslims.” In Guantánamo, he denied an
allegation that he was part of a terrorist network in Italy, and that he
“possibly” falsified passports “for fleeing al-Qaeda combatants who make it
to Europe” (that use of the word “possibly” generally indicating that even
the US military regarded the allegation as unreliable). He also refuted
allegations that he was an “extremist” in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the civil
war, and, to prove it, showed the tribunal the visa stamps in his passport,
which he requested as evidence. The information about his purported
activities in the former Yugoslavia was apparently provided by the Tunisian
government, which had sentenced him in absentia to 20 years in prison for allegedly
being a member of a terrorist organization operating abroad. Abdul Ourgy, who was 36
years old when seized crossing the Pakistani border, admitted being a drug
dealer in Italy from 1991 to 1995, but stressed, “I am not an Islamic
fanatic.” After stating that he was encouraged to clean up his life by a man
he met in Milan, “who taught him how to pray, gave him money” and encouraged
him to go to a training camp in Afghanistan, which, as he described it, was
run by veterans of the campaign against the Russians, who had nothing
whatsoever to do with al-Qaeda, he explained that he traveled to Afghanistan
in 1997, and married an Afghan woman in 2000. Explaining the circumstances
in which he was seized, he said that, after the fall of the eastern Afghan
city of Jalalabad, when Arabs were being killed by the Northern Alliance and
by other Afghans, his brother-in-law took his wife to safety in Pakistan, but
he stayed behind to pack up the household goods and then volunteered to go
through the mountains to Pakistan. “I couldn’t go through the main road
because I am an Arab,” he said. “That way, when he [the brother-in-law]
entered Pakistan with all these household goods there would be no problem.” A number of the allegations
against Abdul Ourgy came from “a senior al-Qaeda lieutenant,” and are,
therefore, extremely dubious, as they were probably extracted from one of the
“high-value detainees’ - including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah -
who were tortured in secret CIA prisons. According to this source, Ourgy “may
have travelled” to Tora Bora with the Emir of the Tunisian Combatant Group
and fought with al-Qaeda in Tora Bora, and was also “identified as Adel
al-Tunesi, an explosives expert for al-Qaeda.” It was also alleged that he
was responsible for the finances of the Tunisian Combatant Group (a group
opposed to the dictatorship of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, which was added to
the US State Department’s “Terrorist Exclusion List” in October 2002), and,
most alarmingly - for an allegation that was presented without any supporting
evidence - it was suggested that he was involved in the assassination of
Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance, who was killed,
reportedly by al-Qaeda agents, just two days before the 9/11 attacks. In the hearing at Guantánamo
for the last of the three, Riyad Nasseri, who was 35 years old when he was
seized (also crossing from Afghanistan to Pakistan), it was alleged that he
was “condemned” in Italy for forging money, and that he “had a warrant order
issued for terrorism-related crimes and subversion” (which sounds like a
direct translation of a document provided by the Italian authorities - or
perhaps nothing more a newspaper report). It was also alleged that he fought
in Bosnia (an allegation that may have been provided by the Tunisian
government, because it was also stated that, in absentia, he had been given a
ten-year sentence in Tunisia for being a member of a terrorist organization
operating abroad), and that he “led a band of thieves in Italy and Spain who cooperated
with Algerian terrorists,” although there was no indication of where this
rather fantastical-sounding allegation came from. In a plethora of other
unsubstantiated allegations, it was also claimed that he was a member of the
Tunisian Islamic Front (another Tunisian opposition group, but one that has
not been proscribed by the US government), that he was involved in
establishing the Tunisian Combat Group, and that he was a member of the GIA.
It was also alleged that he was “identified by a senior al-Qaeda lieutenant
as having trained at the Khaldan camp [run by Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, and not
connected to al-Qaeda] and that he eventually took over as the Emir of the
Tunisian Group in Afghanistan,” which may indicate that either al-Libi (the
CIA’s most famous “ghost prisoner,” who recently died in a Libyan prison) or
Abu Zubaydah (the gatekeeper of the camp, and the CIA’s most well-known
torture victim, along with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) may have made that
particular allegation. As with Abdul Ourgy, it was also alleged that he was
in Tora Bora, and, specifically, that he fled from Jalalabad to the Tora Bora
region after the area fell to the Northern Alliance, that he was injured
during the US bombing, and that he and others subsequently “arranged their surrender.”
Nasseri refused to take part in his hearing, but in the “Summary of Evidence”
against him, it was noted that he refuted all the allegations against him. Obama, beware! Where this leaves the men
is, at present, unknown, but the rumors from Macomer, and the comments
attributed to Roberto Maroni, the Minister of the Interior, indicate that
transferring them to Italy without firm assurances that they will receive a
fair trial on their arrival may indeed be no better than returning them to
Tunisia, and, as a result, President Obama needs to think carefully before
risking another Guantánamo-related scandal to add to those that have already
damaged his first six months in office - including his failure to act on
behalf of the Uighurs, and the feeble cases put forward before judges in the
habeas corpus hearings, which, most recently, led to humiliation in the case
of Abdul Rahim al-Ginco, a Syrian who was allegedly involved with al-Qaeda,
even though he had been tortured by al-Qaeda as a spy. External link: http://pubrecord.org/world/2391/obama-plans/ |