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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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August 6th,
2010 - CIA Flight Carried Secret From Gitmo News article from the Associated
Press |
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CIA Flight Carried Secret From
Gitmo By Matt Apuzzo & Adam Goldman Associated Press August 6, 2010 Washington - A white,
unmarked Boeing 737 landed in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, before dawn on a CIA
mission so secretive, many in the nation's war on terrorism were kept in the
dark. Four of the nation's most
highly valued terrorist prisoners were aboard. They arrived at Guantanamo
on Sept. 24, 2003, years earlier than the U.S. has ever disclosed. Then,
months later, they were just as quietly whisked away before the Supreme Court
could give them access to lawyers. The transfer allowed the
U.S. to interrogate the detainees in CIA "black sites" for two more
years without allowing them to speak with attorneys or human rights observers
or challenge their detention in U.S. courts. Had they remained at the
Guantanamo Bay prison for just three more months, they would have been
afforded those rights. "This was all just a
shell game to hide detainees from the courts," said Jonathan Hafetz, a
Seton Hall University law professor who has represented several detainees. Removing them from
Guantanamo Bay underscores how worried President George W. Bush's
administration was that the Supreme Court might lift the veil of secrecy on
the detention program. It also shows how insistent the Bush administration
was that terrorists must be held outside the U.S. court system. Years later, the program's
legacy continues to complicate President Barack Obama's efforts to prosecute
the terrorists behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The arrival and speedy
departure from Guantanamo were pieced together by The Associated Press using
flight records and interviews with current and former U.S. officials and
others familiar with the CIA's detention program. All spoke on condition of
anonymity to discuss the program. Top officials at the White
House, Justice Department, Pentagon and CIA consulted on the prisoner
transfer, officials said. "The so-called black
sites and enhanced interrogation methods, which were administered on the
basis of guidance from the Department of Justice, are a thing of the
past," CIA spokesman George Little said. The American Civil Liberties
Union renewed its call for a broad criminal investigation into the detention
program Friday. "Secret detention
constitutes a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions, and the officials who
authorized the CIA's secret prisons and torture program should be held
accountable," Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU's deputy legal director said. At least four admitted
al-Qaida operatives, some of the CIA's biggest captures to date, were on the
plane to Guantanamo: Abu Zubaydah, Abd al-Nashiri, Ramzi Binalshibh and
Mustafa al-Hawsawi. Binalshibh and al-Hawsawi
helped plan the 9/11 attacks. Al-Nashiri was the mastermind of the 2000
bombing of the USS Cole. Zubaydah was an al-Qaida travel facilitator. They
had spent months overseas enduring some of the harshest interrogation tactics
in U.S. history. By late summer 2003, the CIA
believed the men had revealed their best secrets. The agency needed somewhere
to hold them, but no longer needed to conduct prolonged interrogations. The U.S. naval facility at
Guantanamo Bay seemed a good fit. Bush had selected the first six people to
face military tribunals there, and a federal appeals court unanimously ruled
that detainees could not use U.S. courts to challenge their imprisonment. And the CIA had just
constructed a new facility, which would become known as Strawberry Fields,
separate from the main prison at Guantanamo Bay. The agency's overseas prison
network, meanwhile, was in flux. A jail in Thailand known as Cat's Eye closed
in December 2002, and in the fall of 2003 the CIA was preparing to shutter
its facility in Poland and open a new one in Romania. Human rights
investigators and journalists were asking questions. The CIA needed to
reshuffle its prisoners. The prisoner transfer
flight, outlined in documents and interviews, visited five CIA prisons in
Afghanistan, Poland, Romania, Morocco and Guantanamo Bay. The flight plan was
so poorly thought out, some in the CIA derisively compared it to a five-card
straight revealing the program to outsiders: Five stops, five secret
facilities, all documented. The flight logs were
compiled by European authorities investigating the CIA program. The flight started in Kabul,
where the CIA picked up al-Hawsawi at the secret prison known as the Salt
Pit. The Boeing 737 then flew to Szymany, Poland, where a CIA team picked up
professed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and took him to Bucharest,
Romania, to the new prison, code-named Britelite. Next it was on to Rabat,
Morocco, where the Moroccans ran an interrogation facility used by the CIA. At 8:10 p.m. on Sept. 23,
2003, the Boeing 737 took off from a runway in Rabat. On board were
al-Hawsawi, al-Nashiri, Zubaydah and Binalshibh. At 1 a.m. the following day,
the plane touched down at Guantanamo. The existence of a CIA
prison at Guantanamo was reported in 2004, but it has always been unclear who
was there. Unlike the overseas black sites, there was no waterboarding or
other harsh interrogation tactics at Strawberry Fields, officials said. It
was a holding facility, a place for some of the key figures in the 9/11
attacks to await trial. Not long after they arrived,
things began unraveling. In November, over the administration's objections,
the Supreme Court agreed to consider whether Guantanamo Bay detainees could
sue in U.S. courts. The administration had
worried for several years that this might happen. In 2001, Justice Department
lawyers Patrick Philbin and John Yoo wrote a memo saying courts were unlikely
to grant detainees such rights. But if it happened, they warned, prisoners
could argue that the U.S. had mistreated them and that the military tribunal
system was unlawful. "There was obviously a
fear that everything that had been done to them might come out," said
al-Nashiri's lawyer, Nancy Hollander. Worse for the CIA, if the
Supreme Court granted detainees rights, the entire covert program was at
risk. Zubaydah and al-Nashiri could tell their lawyers about being
waterboarded in Thailand. Al-Nashiri might discuss having a drill and an
unloaded gun put to his head at a CIA prison in Poland. "Anything that could
expose these detainees to individuals outside the government was a
nonstarter," one U.S. official familiar with the program said, speaking
on condition of anonymity to discuss the government's legal analysis. In early March 2004, as the
legal documents piled up at the Supreme Court, the high court announced that
oral arguments would be held in April. After that, a ruling could come at any
time, and everyone at the island prison - secretly or not - would be covered. On March 27, just as the sun
was setting on Guantanamo, a Gulfstream IV jet left Cuba. The plane landed in
Rabat the next morning. By the time the Supreme Court ruled June 28 that
detainees should have access to U.S. courts, the CIA had once again scattered
Zubaydah, al-Nashiri and the others throughout the black sites. Two years later, after The
Washington Post revealed the existence of the program, Bush emptied the
prison network. Fourteen men, including the four who had been at Guantanamo
Bay years earlier, were moved to the island prison. They have remained there
ever since. The four men who were making
their second journey to Guantanamo Bay received what they nearly obtained
years earlier, before they were spirited away. "The International
Committee of the Red Cross is being advised of their detention and will have
the opportunity to meet with them," Bush said in a White House speech
Sept. 6, 2006. "Those charged with crimes will be given access to
attorneys who will help them prepare their defense, and they will be presumed
innocent." Copyright © 2010 The
Associated Press. External link: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hYo75CGJL898aYND1OJ1t91PSAJgD9HE62700 |