Former UN Mideast Envoy Says UN Subservient To U.S., Israel

Taken from Haaretz, Israel, 13/06/2007
By Reuters

A former UN Middle East envoy quit his job last month with bitter allegations that UN policy in the region had failed because it was subservient to U.S. and Israeli interests, a newly leaked document shows.

In a confidential end of mission report, Alvaro de Soto poured scorn on the Quartet negotiating group of the United States, Russia, European Union and United Nations, and suggested the world body should pull out.

De Soto, a Peruvian diplomat who formerly worked on El Salvador, Cyprus and the Western Sahara, spent two years on the Middle East before resigning in May, ending a 25-year UN career. He was replaced by Briton Michael Williams.



His scathing 53-page farewell, addressed to a handful of top UN officials made clear he left in frustration that he was not being listened to.

In the document dated May 5, he railed at restrictions he said were placed on him by UN headquarters against talking to the Hamas-led Palestinian government and to Syria.

De Soto condemned economic sanctions imposed by Israel, the United States and the EU on Hamas after it won Palestinian elections last year and said their effective endorsement by the Quartet had had "devastating consequences" for Palestinians.

"The steps taken by the international community with the presumed purpose of bringing about a Palestinian entity that will live in peace with its neighbor Israel have had precisely the opposite effect," he wrote.

"Even-handedness has been pummeled into submission in an unprecedented way since the beginning of 2007."

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De Soto sharply criticized the Islamist Hamas movement for its charter advocating the destruction of Israel, as well as Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, who opposes Hamas, for weak and ineffectual leadership.

But he also charged that Israeli policies seemed "perversely designed to encourage the continued action by Palestinian militants." The goal of parallel Israeli and Palestinian states could be slipping away, he warned.

De Soto blasted what he called "the tendency that exists among U.S. policy-makers ... to cower before any hint of Israeli displeasure and to pander shamelessly before Israeli-linked audiences."

But much of his criticism was directed at the United Nations itself, where, he said, "a premium is been put on good relations with the U.S. and improving the UN's relationship with Israel."

"I don't honestly think the UN does Israel any favors at all by not speaking frankly to it about its failings regarding the peace process," De Soto said.

The Peruvian diplomat said UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon should "seriously reconsider" continued membership in the Quartet, which he said had become a "side-show" and "pretty much a group of friends of the U.S."

De Soto said he regretted that his advice to UN headquarters had gone unheeded. "I concluded that my uphill effort was not going to succeed," he said.

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Dr de Soto is a good man, he is an honest man. He is on an endless list of current and former UN spokesmen to condemn Israel – that are left fuming by the lack of action taken place by it’s security members. In an article written in the UK newspaper The Guardian, on 13.06.07 he warned that international hostility to the Palestinian Hamas movement, now fighting in the bitterly escalating civil conflict in Gaza, could have grave consequences by persuading millions of Muslims that democratic methods do not work.

"The steps taken by the international community with the presumed purpose of bringing about a Palestinian entity that will live in peace with its neighbour, Israel, have had precisely the opposite effect," he wrote in his confidential internal memo. The US and Israel had both erred in seeing Hamas as a passing phenomenon, the envoy argued. "Hamas is deep-rooted, has struck many chords, including its contempt for the Oslo process, and is not likely to disappear," he wrote. "Erroneous treatment of Hamas could have repercussions far beyond the Palestinian territories because of its links to the Muslim Brotherhood, whose millions of supporters might conclude that peaceful and democratic means are not the way to go."

In a key passage that may already have been overtaken by the rapidly deteriorating situation, Mr De Soto wrote: "Hamas is in effervescence and can potentially evolve in a pragmatic direction that would allow for a two-state solution - but only if handled right. "If the Palestinian Authority passes into irrelevance or collapses (as now seems likely) calls for a one-state solution to the conflict "will come out of the shadows and enter the mainstream."

It would need a "Sherlockian magnifying glass," to find allusions to Israel's failure to comply with its "road map" obligations. "No amount of magnification" would find references to its responsibilities as an occupier to ensure the welfare of Palestinian civilians." On the UN and Israel he wrote: "We are not a friend of Israel if we allow it to fall into the self delusion that the Palestinians are the only ones to blame, or that it can continue blithely to ignore its obligations under existing agreements without paying an international diplomatic price in the short-term and a bitter price regarding its security and identity in the long-term."

Israel: Talking Of Peace, Preparing For War

Taken from The Guardian, UK, June 11, 2007
Conal Urquhart

In temperatures of more than 40 degrees, Israeli soldiers are moving in formation up the slopes of Mount Hermon in full battle dress, a few miles from the Syrian border.

Down on the main plateau of the Golan Heights, new army camps are being set up and there are more military than civilian vehicles on the roads that link old battlefields and new vineyards.


An Israeli tank takes part in a military exercise. Last week the Israeli army carried out a training attack on a mock Syrian village in the south of Israel. Photograph: EPA

Despite talk of peace, both Syria and Israel are preparing for war amid mutual distrust and confusion. "There has never been such a state of readiness since the 1980s and there is a great danger of a chain reaction if one sides makes a mistake in reading the other's intention," said Eyal Zisser, a strategic analyst at Tel Aviv University.

Both Israel and Syria are issuing contradictory signals. In August last year, President Bashar Assad of Syria said he was interested in peace with Israel but would consider war to regain the Golan Heights, lost by Syria 40 years ago.

Last week, Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, sent messages to Mr Assad that Israel was willing to give up the Golan in return for a peace deal. The messages were conveyed at the same time as the Israeli army carried out a training attack on a mock Syrian village in the south of Israel.

According to Mr Zisser, the confusion is caused by Israel's uncertainty over its own desires and the intentions of President Assad.

"We don't know how serious Assad is regarding war or peace. There is also confusion on the domestic implications for the government. Then there is also the question of the attitude of the United States, which is currently against negotiations with Syria," he said.

In the meantime the armies are training and maintaining a high state of readiness. "What you can see is military preparations on both sides. Armies have their own logic. If there is a possibility of war then they prepare for it," said Mr Zisser.

The 40,000 residents of the Golan continue with their work in farming and tourism, accustomed to living in a frontier province which is as marked by war as the fields of Flanders.

The Golan begins at 200 metres below sea level at the Sea of the Gallilee and rises to 2,800 metres at the top of Mount Hermon. Most of the land is a gently sloping plateau guarded by eight volcanic plugs that overlook Syria. Some of the plugs are fortified and others are crowded with antennae, radar and observation equipment to monitor Syrian activity.

Much of the west of the plateau is covered by Syrian minefields and every few miles there is a war memorial, old tank or derelict barracks. Half of the residents of the Golan are Druze; they retain their Syrian nationality and reject Israel's rule over them in theory, but cooperate with it in practice. Around 100,000 residents of the Golan left their homes during the 1967 war and were not allowed to return by Israel. The other half are Israeli settlers who continue to move to the Golan despite the common understanding that Israel will return it all to Syria in return for a peace deal.

Albert Hecht, a Golan resident originally from Glasgow, said that there was an obvious increase in Israeli military activity.

"You do sense there is a military build up going on. For years there was very little training here and now they are reopening camps that have been empty for years.

"We are in a constant state of readiness. We were hit by a few missiles last year from Lebanon and we all have bomb shelters. We are pretty sure that if things take a turn for the worse the army will be able to evacuate us very quickly," he said.

The residents of the Golan say that they live as if they will live here forever. "We have built home, businesses and vineyards here. No one told us to stop growing," said Mr Hecht.

The local council says that 1,500 families have moved to the region in the last five years and there is strong investment. The main town of Qatzrin has a newly built mall, featuring a micro-brewery, a winery and multimedia shows that offer a very partisan history of the Golan to tourists.

Moti Bar, the manager of the micro-brewery and restaurant, said that he did not expect the talk of war to deter tourists who make a major contribution to the local economy. "Israelis are used to this kind of atmosphere, they do not plan their holidays according to the news. They understand politics and that the things that appear in the news are not always as they seem. If we did not then we would have no life at all," he said.

Golan settlers, unlike their counterparts in the West Bank and Gaza, are not driven by religious conviction and admit that Israeli sovereignty over the Golan could be traded for peace. Both Mr Hecht and Mr Bar said they hoped that any peace deal would involve Israel leasing back the Golan from Syria for a period of 20 to 100 years.

However, the Druze residents who are clustered on the slopes of Mount Hermon in the north-east of the Golan, see the settlers' work in a different light. Ayman Abu Jabel, who served 12 years in an Israeli jail for throwing a grenade at an army base, had little sympathy for the settlers.

"The settlements must be destroyed and the settlers must leave. It is not their land. Everything they have is stolen," he said.

Mr Abu Jabel said there were economic advantages to living under Israeli occupation but added: "I would be happier to have the bad things of my own country rather than the good things of Israel."

U.S. Relies On Sudan Despite Condemning It

U.S. relies on Sudan despite condemning itThe nation accused of aiding the killings in Darfur provides spies in Iraq. In return, it gets access in Washington.

Taken from The LA Times, June 11, 2007
By Greg Miller and Josh Meyer

WASHINGTON — Sudan has secretly worked with the CIA to spy on the insurgency in Iraq, an example of how the U.S. has continued to cooperate with the Sudanese regime even while condemning its suspected role in the killing of tens of thousands of civilians in Darfur.

President Bush has denounced the killings in Sudan's western region as genocide and has imposed sanctions on the government in Khartoum. But some critics say the administration has soft-pedaled the sanctions to preserve its extensive intelligence collaboration with Sudan.

The relationship underscores the complex realities of the post-Sept. 11 world, in which the United States has relied heavily on intelligence and military cooperation from countries, including Sudan and Uzbekistan, that are considered pariah states for their records on human rights.

"Intelligence cooperation takes place for a whole lot of reasons," said a U.S. intelligence official, who like others spoke on condition of anonymity when discussing intelligence assessments. "It's not always between people who love each other deeply."

Sudan has become increasingly valuable to the United States since the Sept. 11 attacks because the Sunni Arab nation is a crossroads for Islamic militants making their way to Iraq and Pakistan.

That steady flow of foreign fighters has provided cover for Sudan's Mukhabarat intelligence service to insert spies into Iraq, officials said.

"If you've got jihadists traveling via Sudan to get into Iraq, there's a pattern there in and of itself that would not raise suspicion," said a former high-ranking CIA official familiar with Sudan's cooperation with the agency. "It creates an opportunity to send Sudanese into that pipeline."

As a result, Sudan's spies have often been in better position than the CIA to gather information on Al Qaeda's presence in Iraq, as well as the activities of other insurgent groups.

"There's not much that blond-haired, blue-eyed case officers from the United States can do in the entire Middle East, and there's nothing they can do in Iraq," said a second former CIA official familiar with Sudan's cooperation. "Sudanese can go places we don't go. They're Arabs. They can wander around."

The officials declined to say whether the Mukhabarat had sent its intelligence officers into the country, citing concern over the protection of sources and methods. They said that Sudan had assembled a network of informants in Iraq providing intelligence on the insurgency. Some may have been recruited as they traveled through Khartoum.

The U.S.-Sudan relationship goes beyond Iraq. Sudan has helped the United States track the turmoil in Somalia, working to cultivate contacts with the Islamic Courts Union and other militias in an effort to locate Al Qaeda suspects hiding there. Sudan also has provided extensive cooperation in counter-terrorism operations, acting on U.S. requests to detain suspects as they pass through Khartoum.

Sudan gets a number of benefits in return. Its relationship with the CIA has given it an important back channel for communications with the U.S. government. Washington has also used this channel to lean on Khartoum over the crisis in Darfur and for other issues.

And at a time when Sudan is being condemned in the international community, its counter-terrorism work has won precious praise. The U.S. State Department recently issued a report calling Sudan a "strong partner in the war on terror."

Some critics accuse the Bush administration of being soft on Sudan for fear of jeopardizing the counter-terrorism cooperation. John Prendergast, director of African affairs for the National Security Council in the Clinton administration, called the latest sanctions announced by Bush last month "window dressing," designed to appear tough while putting little real pressure on Sudan to stop the militias it is widely believed to be supporting from killing members of tribal settlements in Darfur.

"One of the main glass ceilings on real significant action in response to the genocide in Darfur has been our growing relationship with authorities in Khartoum on counter-terrorism," said Prendergast, a senior advisor to the International Crisis Group. "It is the single biggest contributor to why the gap between rhetoric and action is so large."

In an interview, Sudan's ambassador to the United States, John Ukec Lueth Ukec, suggested that the sanctions could affect his country's willingness to cooperate on intelligence matters. The steps announced by Bush include denying 31 businesses owned by the Sudanese government access to the U.S. financial system.

The decision to impose financial penalties "was not a good idea," Ukec said. "It diminishes our cooperation. And it makes those who are on the extreme side, who do not want cooperation with the United States, stronger."

But White House and U.S. intelligence officials downplayed the prospect that the intelligence cooperation would suffer, saying that it was in both countries' interests.

"The No. 1 consideration in imposing stiffer sanctions is that the Sudanese government hasn't stopped the violence there and the people continue to suffer," said Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for the National Security Council. "We certainly expect the Sudanese to continue efforts against terrorism because it's in their own interests, not just ours."

Sudan has its own interests in following the insurgency because Sudanese extremists and foreign fighters who pass through the country are likely to return and become a potentially destabilizing presence.

Sudan's lax controls on travel have made it, according to one official, a "way station" for Islamist militants not only from North Africa, but also from Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf states.
Some former U.S. intelligence officials said that Sudan's help in Iraq had been of limited value, in part because the country accounts for a small fraction of the foreign fighters, mainly at lower levels of the insurgency.

"There's not going to be a Sudanese guy near the top of the Al Qaeda in Iraq leadership," said a former CIA official who operated in Baghdad. "They might have some fighters there, but that's just cannon fodder. They don't have the trust and the ability to work their way up. The guys leading Al Qaeda in Iraq are Iraqis, Jordanians and Saudis."

But others say that Sudan's contributions have been significant because Sudanese frequently occupy support positions throughout Arab society — including in the Iraq insurgency — giving them access to movements and supply chains.

"Every group needs weapons. Every group needs a meeting place," said another former high-ranking CIA official who oversaw intelligence gathering in Iraq. "Sudanese could get involved in the support chain or smuggling channels from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait."

A State Department official said Sudan had "provided critical information that has helped our counter-terrorism efforts around the globe," but noted that there was an inherent conflict in the relationship.

"They have done things that have saved American lives," the official said. "But the bottom line is that they are bombing their people out the wazoo [in Darfur]. Dealing with Sudan, it seems like they are always playing both ends against the middle."

The CIA declined to discuss any cooperation with Sudan.

"The agency does not, as a rule, comment on relations with foreign intelligence organizations," CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said.

Ukec, the Sudanese ambassador, said "the details of what we do in counter-terrorism are not available for discussions." But he noted that the U.S. State Department "has openly said we are involved in countering terrorism," and that the assistance his country is providing "is not only in Sudan."

In the mid-1990s, the CIA's relationship with Sudan was severed. At the time, Sudan was providing safe harbor for Osama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders. But ties were reestablished shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, when the CIA reopened its station in Khartoum.
Initially, the collaboration focused on information Sudan could provide about Al Qaeda's activities before Bin Laden left for Afghanistan in 1996, including Al Qaeda's pursuit of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons and its many business fronts and associates there.

Since then, Sudan has moved beyond sharing historical information on Al Qaeda into taking part in ongoing counter-terrorism operations, focusing on areas where its assistance is likely to be most appreciated.

"Iraq," a U.S. intelligence official said, "is where the intelligence is going to have the most impact on Americans."

In 2005, the CIA sent an executive jet to Sudan to fly the country's intelligence chief, Maj. Gen. Salah Abdallah Gosh, to Washington for meetings with officials at agency headquarters.

Gosh has not returned to Washington since, but a former official said that "there are liaison visits every day" between the CIA and the Mukhabarat.

US Arms Sunni Dissidents In Risky Bid To Contain Al-Qaida Fighters In Iraq

Taken from The Guardian, UK, June 12, 2007
Ewen MacAskill

The US military has embarked on a new and risky strategy in Iraq by arming Sunni insurgents in the hope that they will tackle the extremist al-Qaida in Iraq.

The US high command this month gave permission to its officers on the ground to negotiate arms deals with local leaders. Arms, ammunition, body armour and other equipment, as well as cash, pick-up trucks and fuel, have already been handed over in return for promises to turn on al-Qaida and not attack US troops.


US commanders insist no weapons will be given to insurgents who have attacked US troops, but similar efforts in other wars backfired. Photograph: Maya Alleruzzo/AP

The US military in Baghdad is trying to portray the move as arming disenchanted Sunnis who are rising up in their neighbourhoods against their former allies, al-Qaida and its foreign fighters. But the reality on the ground is more complex, with little sign that the US will be able to control the weapons once they are handed over. The danger is that the insurgents could use these weapons against American troops or in the civil conflict against Shia Muslims. Similar efforts by the US in other wars have backfired, the most spectacular being the arming of guerrillas against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

Major General Rick Lynch, a senior US commander in Iraq, insisted no weapons would be given to insurgents who had attacked Americans. "We have not crossed that line," he said.

The US said it would use fingerprinting, retinal scans and other tests to establish whether insurgents had been involved in fighting against American troops.

But a reliable witness to a meeting this month between US forces and insurgents in the Sunni stronghold of Amadiya, in Baghdad, expressed scepticism about the strategy. Far from being a popular uprising against al-Qaida, only a handful of armed men turned up. The US handed over ammunition to them. The witness said that US soldiers watching the handover were dismissive, seeing it as a stunt.

The strategy was discussed in Baghdad this month between the new US commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, and his field commanders. They decided to leave it to each commander to decide locally.

The Pentagon insisted the latest strategy was not recognition that president George Bush's "surge" policy had failed. All of the extra 30,000 US troops ordered by Mr Bush in January to Baghdad and Anbar province, one of the centres of the violence, had only just been fully deployed and it was too early to judge it.

Initial successes of the surge in pacifying parts of Baghdad have now been reversed, with the death toll among US troops and Iraqi civilians last month among the highest since the 2003 invasion.

The US military first tested the strategy of arming its former enemies in Anbar province. Anbar is now relatively quiet, but that could be because the US has flooded the province with US troops.

The Anbar model is being extended to Amariya, as well as Diyala and Salahuddin provinces.

The US insists that the Sunni disenchantment with al-Qaida is because of the group's suicide bombings that have resulted in the deaths of thousands of Iraqi civilians.

The arming of the Sunni insurgents reflects US unhappiness with the slow progress of the Iraqi army, which it suspects of being too close to the Shia militias, and with the police, which is even more riddled with sectarianism. At a press conference, Gen Lynch said he was concerned about corruption within Iraq's police force and by interference from the national government in security issues, particularly in the release of suspected insurgents held by Iraqi security forces.

Part of the problem is that the US needs its security efforts to be accompanied by political progress but the Iraqi coalition government has so far been unable to reach agreement on the biggest divisive issues. In a further upset, Iraq's Shia-dominated parliament voted yesterday to remove the speaker, Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, a Sunni, over alleged scandals. His bloc, the Sunni Arab Iraqi Accordance Front, was asked to submit an alternative.

The manoeuvring came on another day of bloodshed across the country, which left 36 Iraqis and three US soldiers dead. In a separate attack, a suicide bomber destroyed a bridge over the Diyala river, north of Baghdad.

Changing tactics
1999: Operation Desert Crossing
A series of war games conducted by the US in 1999 by General Anthony Zinni, who concluded that a force of 400,000 troops would be needed to invade and pacify Iraq. The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, instead plans for 130,000 US troops and 45,000 from Britain and elsewhere.

2003: Operation Iraqi Freedom
Codename for the US invasion. Britain called it Operation Telic. In May, President George Bush, right, declares hostilities at end, with a banner behind him saying "Mission Accomplished". Paul Bremer, the US head of the provisional government, disbands the Iraqi army, sending tens of thousands of trained and armed men into unemployment and potentially into the insurgency. The US denies there is a resistance. Saddam Hussein is captured on December 13, 2003 on a farm near Tikrit in Operation Red Dawn.

2004: The US battles Shia militia in Najaf and mounts a full-scale assault on Falluja to root out Sunni insurgents and take revenge for the gruesome deaths of US contractors.

2005: Paul Wolfowitz announces that 15,000 US troops whose tours of duty had been extended in order to provide election security would be pulled out of Iraq by the spring. There is a temporary reduction in violence.

2006: Mr Bush points to the success of a US commander, Colonel HR McMaster, in Tal Afar, near the Syrian border, as "the outlines of the Iraq we've been fighting for". Col McMaster cut off Tal Afar, divided it into small neighbourhoods and established permanent posts in them instead of defeating insurgents and then leaving. In October the US military announces that Operation Together Forward has failed to stop violence in Baghdad. The Iraq Study Group, made up of former US politicians and officials, proposes a troop reduction.

2007: Mr Bush ignores the Iraq Study Group in favour of a 30,000-strong "surge" in US troops to pacify Baghdad and Anbar province. Tony Blair announces that following the success of Operation Sinbad in the British sector, the UK will reduce its military presence. Mr Bush appoints Lieutenant-General Douglas Lute to coordinate Iraq and Afghanistan. The surge, after an initial reduction of violence in Baghdad, has in the last two months had little impact, with the death toll last month one of the highest since the invasion. The US opts for arming its former enemies, Sunni insurgents, to try to split them from the more extremist al-Qaida in Iraq.

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The Bush administration has been claiming all week that they have evidence that Iranian arms have been smuggled into Iraq and Afghanistan, fighting the US troops as well as the Sunnis in Iraq. They believe that the quantities that have been smuggled suggest that the state of Iran is involved. So by arming the Sunnis are we trying to get equilibrium of the power in the civil war in Iraq? Has there been pressure from the Saudi Arabians to arm the Sunnis? Lets hope this does not backfire and our under resourced troops get targeted. Lets hope we don’t create another “database”.

A Failure to Protect Our Troops

Taken from The New York Times, Editorial Section
June 14, 2007

The Bush administration and military leaders in Washington are always claiming that they will do anything to support American troops fighting in Iraq. That makes it all the more infuriating to learn that, for more than two years, the Pentagon largely ignored urgent requests from field commanders for better armor-protected vehicles that could have saved untold lives and limbs.

Improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.’s, can blast through the flat underbelly of the military’s standard Humvees, maiming and killing the soldiers within. These devices, a low-tech response to America’s overwhelming military power, are now causing 70 percent to 80 percent of the American combat deaths in Iraq.

More than two years ago, according to newly disclosed documents, Marine commanders in Al Anbar Province, a center of the Sunni insurgency, submitted an urgent request for more than 1,100 Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicles, or MRAPs, that have V-shaped bottoms able to deflect blasts from below. For reasons yet to be satisfactorily explained, military officials initially sat on the request and then ordered relatively few.

Some, second-guessing the judgment of the battlefield commanders, apparently felt that Humvees with upgraded armor could do the job. Others may have been reluctant to invest billions of dollars in vehicles that might have little use after Iraq. Turf battles were probably also a factor, as a large-scale purchase might threaten future weapons programs. But Iraq is the war that Americans are fighting and dying in today.

Only now are Pentagon leaders, prodded by Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. and other critics on Capitol Hill, rushing to ramp up production. Congress has accelerated funding to buy more than 7,000 of the vehicles by early next year, and the military services are seeking some 21,000 in all, at a cost that could exceed $20 billion. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has declared his determination to “produce as many of these vehicles and get them into the field as fast as possible,” though the precise number needed has yet to be established.

Unfortunately, the MRAPs will remain vulnerable to the deadliest I.E.D.’s, known as “explosively formed penetrators,” which destroy vehicles from the side. The military is looking for ways to add armor to the MRAPs and is testing another new vehicle to counter that threat.

If the small companies that make these vehicles are not able to produce the quantities needed quickly, President Bush and Secretary Gates ought to make this a crash program and enlist major manufacturers.

There can be no excuse for failing to provide the best possible protection for American troops in this disastrous war.

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Billions are spent on creating WMD, Billions are spent on the space programmes, Billions are spent subsidising countries such as Israel, A Billion is expected to be spent on the forthcoming US election - Isn't it time that a billion is spent on military armour for the troops? This is not only an issue for the US but for allied troops as well, particularly in the UK where sometimes soldiers have privately purchased body armour because the UK ministry of Defence did not have the monies to finance all their troops to have them, nor did they have monies to upgrade military vehicles that would have prevented untold deaths to the troops. Maybe it’s economical for troops to be replaced than safety equipment to be provided.

We’re Here To Make A Difference, Say Contractors Who Risk Life In Baghdad

Taken from the Times, UK, June 4, 2007
By Deborah Haynes

Mortar bombs, rockets and the threat of kidnapping are daily risks faced by hundreds of Western consultants in Baghdad who offer advice and expertise to the fledgling Iraqi Government.

Far from the promise of a fat pay cheque at the end of each month, many of these people say they choose to do the job because they believe their input can make a difference.

The kidnappings last week of a British consultant and his four security guards serve as a grim reminder of the price paid by these experts pay when things go wrong.

“I am not here for the money, I am not here as a mercenary and I am not running away from a broken life somewhere else,” said one Western consultant, who offers government ministries advice on management skills such as how to create IT systems.

“I am concerned about the state of things and the impact on the Middle East and I am worried about US relations with this country. I felt a moral obligation to come because of my relevant expertise,” said the consultant, who has worked in the region for the past 15 years and unlike most lives in the city beyond the green zone.

Another consultant, a Briton who specialises in helping governments to learn basic project management skills and has lived in Baghdad’s fortified green zone for three years, said that his team “really feels we owe it to Iraq to help build back their country”.

He continued: “You are building a government from scratch and the bureaucracy to support that government . . . but it is small steps. It is hard enough to do that in a stable environment. When it is extremely unstable it magnifies the problem 100 per cent.”

Trips by foreign consultants into the “red zone” – namely the rest of Baghdad – have nearly always involved some form of security detail, but the escalating violence since 2004 has reduced the number of places they are able to visit.

Restrictions on movement will likely become tighter still after the abduction of the IT consultant and his security team, who were snatched in daylight from a Finance Ministry building last Tuesday.

“Since the events of last week we have taken additional security precautions. The situation is monitored daily and we take the advice of our security teams,” the British consultant said.

The security threat has slowed progress on training and consultancy projects at the ministries.

It has also prompted many educated Iraqis to flee the country in search of a safer life abroad.

Those Iraqis who continue to work at government offices face an even greater risk from an insurgent attack than their Western counterparts as they are more exposed and few have full-time protection.

“I have nothing but admiration for the resilience and moral strength of some of the Iraqis I work with,” the British consultant told The Times.

Western advisors have been helping with reconstruction in Iraq since the invasion. After ministries regained sovereignty in 2004 the consultants were kept on to implement reconstruction efforts funded by coalition governments and aid organisations.

As a result, trips to ministry offices to train staff or meet Iraqi officials are an important part of the job, despite the dangers.

Foreigners working in Iraq also have the burden of the emotional strain placed on family and friends at home.

The Western consultant said he would consider leaving if abductions became more frequent but added: “I am not going to give up yet. There have been a few occasions when I have been nervous but those are less than you might think. I wouldn’t be coming back if the risks were too high.”

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The rebuilding of Iraq is a must BUT when the rebuilding is done using Iraqi money by allied countries who destroyed Iraq in the first place then something smells really bad and to not call the employees of these private companies MERCENARIES will be unjustified. Lets get it straight - People are there for the money. If these people felt sorry for Iraq and wanted to rebuild it then they would do it for free through various humanitarian organisations. I doubt anyone would feel sorry for them if they met their end.

A lot of money has been invested in Iraq but have disappeared through administration. Most of the companies in Iraq have received favouritism to do the contractual work. Contractors have been given special immunity from prosecution that even the allied troops don't have. Oil has regularly been smuggled out of Iraq from positions guarded by these contractors - lets be honest - did we expect anything less?

Recommended reading:
Independent, UK - The security industry: Britain's private army in Iraq

Afghans Free US 'Bounty Hunter'

Taken from The BBC, Wednesday, 13 June 2007

A former US soldier jailed for running a private prison in Kabul and torturing Afghans has been freed, officials say.



Jack Idema was pardoned by President Karzai in March as part of an amnesty.

A senior prisons official said Idema left jail in early June and flew out of the country. He served less than three years of his original 10-year sentence.

Idema was jailed with two other US men, also since freed. He said his work was approved by the US and Afghan governments, which denied the claim.

The Pentagon said he was a bounty hunter.

'Unknown destination'
Jonathan "Jack" Idema was one of many former special forces soldiers working privately in Afghanistan - some to provide security, others acting as bounty hunters attracted by the millions of dollars in rewards offered for Osama Bin Laden and other top al-Qaeda suspects.

A senior prisons official in the Afghan justice ministry said the former soldier had been released at the start of June.

"We escorted him right to the airport and onto a plane", the official, Abdul Salam Asmat, told the AFP news agency.

Idema's Afghan lawyer, Rahim Ahmadzai, told the Associated Press news agency that Idema had been freed on 2 June. He said he did not know where he went.

A US embassy official quoted by the agency said that, according to court documents filed in Washington this week, Idema had left for an "unknown destination".

Idema had his sentence cut by half by a court in Afghanistan in March 2005, although it was not clear why.

His two US accomplices - Brent Bennett and Edward Caraballo - had their sentences cut from 10 years to three and eight years to two respectively.

They were released from Kabul's Pul-e Charkhi prison last year.

Nato 'duped'
The three men were arrested in July 2004 after Afghan forces raided a house in a Kabul neighbourhood and discovered eight Afghan men being held captive.

Some of the men later testified to having been tortured in the house.

Idema said his group was tracking down terror suspects with the co-operation of Afghan and US authorities.

The US said it had received one prisoner from Idema but the Pentagon denied any ties to him.

Nato forces also said they had been duped into helping the group on three occasions.

Correspondents say their trial was often chaotic and marred by poor translation.

Four Afghans working with the Americans were also found guilty and sentenced to between one and five years in jail.


-------------------------------------------------------
From AP - Edward P. Birsner, the consul at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, said in court documents filed in Washington this week that Idema had left for "an unknown destination." The documents were filed in a case in which Idema accused the FBI and State Department of ordering his torture and manipulating the Afghan judicial system. Idema's U.S. attorney, John Tiffany, would not say where Idema flew to but said he does not believe he was immediately heading to the United States. "At some point, he'd like to come back to the United States," Tiffany said. "He's an American. He loves his country."

Idema, who has maintained that his activities in Afghanistan were sanctioned by the U.S. government, claims to have fought with the Northern Alliance forces that toppled the Taliban regime in late 2001. He was featured in a book about the Afghan war called "Task Force Dagger: The Hunt for bin Laden." The U.S. military acknowledges accepting prisoners from Idema in Afghanistan in 2004 and the separate NATO-led force there helped him with raids near Kabul. However, the military soon denounced him as an impostor and he was arrested only a few months after entering the country.

Idema, who served three years in U.S. jail for fraud in the 1980s, told the AP by cell phone from Policharki last month that he had stayed in prison even after being freed because he risked arrest by Afghan intelligence agents. He said that departing would harm his chances of recovering documents, tapes and computer files that show his alleged relationship with U.S. officials.

The question still remains - Is he a bountry hunter or was he working for the US government? No doubt the full story will be hard to find.

We Got It Wrong, Says Former Torturer

Taken from The Sydney morning Herald, June 11, 2007
By Tim Shipman (of Cox Newspapers)

A FORMER US Army torturer has described the traumatic effects of American interrogation techniques in Iraq - on their victims and on the perpetrators themselves.

Tony Lagouranis said he conducted mock executions, forced men and boys into agonising stress positions, kept suspects awake for weeks on end, used dogs to terrify prisoners and subjected others to hypothermia.

But he said he was deeply scarred by the realisation that what he did had contributed to the plight of US forces in Iraq.

Mr Lagouranis, 37, said he suffered nightmares and anxiety attacks after returning to Chicago, where he works as a pub doorman.

Between January 2004 and January 2005, first at Abu Ghraib prison and then in Mosul, in northern Babil province, he tortured suspects, most of whom he said were innocent. He realised he had entered a moral dungeon when he found himself reading a Holocaust memoir, hoping to pick up torture tips from the Nazis.

Mr Lagouranis told The Sunday Telegraph: "When I first got back I had a lot of anxiety. I had a personal crisis because I felt I had done immoral things and I didn't see a way to cope with that."

Disturbingly for the British military, which has distanced itself from the worst excesses of Abu Ghraib, Mr Lagouranis says the Americans learnt much of their uncompromising approach from British interrogators.

"We heard about interrogators in Northern Ireland who were successful. Some of our interrogators went on the British interrogation course, which was tough. People wanted to emulate that, but we went too far."

Mr Lagouranis said he never beat a prisoner. "[But] these coercive techniques - isolation, dogs, sleep deprivation, stress positions, hypothermia - crossed a legal line because they violated the Geneva Conventions," he said.

His story raises disturbing questions about the effectiveness of enhanced interrogation techniques. British intelligence has used information supplied under torture in Uzbekistan, and the Government has been accused of turning a blind eye to suspects being abducted and sent to secret prisons where they could be tortured.

Mr Lagouranis, who has written a recently published book about his experiences, said these techniques were developed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War because they are successful in breaking a person's will and spirit. "That doesn't mean they work in terms of extracting intelligence," he said. "I didn't get actionable intelligence using the harsher methods; I got it using manipulation and lying and by promising them things I didn't deliver on."

Mr Lagouranis is scathing about a system in which inexperienced young interrogators copied what they saw in Hollywood and on television programs such as 24, whose lead character Jack Bauer regularly uses torture on terrorists.

In the book, Fear Up Harsh - a term for intimidating a prisoner by shouting at him - he says torture has cost the US its moral authority in Iraq by detaining innocent people and treating them badly.

"I could blame [President George] Bush and [former defence secretary Donald] Rumsfeld, but I would always have to also blame myself," he wrote.

The campaign group Human Rights Watch and two of Mr Lagouranis's fellow interrogators confirmed details of his account.

London Student’s Jungle War Escape Led To ‘Rendition’ Trap

Taken from The Times, UK, June 10, 2007
By Stephen Grey

A BRITISH student who was caught up in fighting in Somalia has described how he fled for his life only to be arrested as a suspected Al-Qaeda member and then rescued by a British consul from a secret operation to transfer terrorist suspects to Ethiopia for interrogation.

Reza Afsharzadagen, 25, from north London, was among hundreds of refugees forced to flee battles last December between Islamic radicals who had seized power in Mogadishu, the Somali capital, and Ethiopian soldiers trying to install a rival United Nations-backed government.

After dodging bombs from American warplanes deployed in support of the Ethiopians and trekking through jungle for 13 days, Afsharzadagen reached safety in Kenya. But there he was detained as a suspected terrorist and questioned for nearly a month without being charged.

He and three other British Muslims who were arrested - Shahajan Janjua, Hamza Chent-ouf, and Mohammed Ezzoueck, all from London - were eventually returned home and cleared of any suspicion of terrorist activity after the intervention of the Foreign Office.

But more than 85 other captives who had fled Somalia were flown back to the war zone and later interrogated for weeks at a prison in Ethiopia. Among those transferred were women, and children as young as seven months old, who were alleged to be from the families of militants.

The mass transfers in East Africa were the first case to come to light of an “extraordinary rendition” - the covert transfer of terrorist suspects to other countries for interrogation - involving children.

Afsharzadagen’s account, in an interview for Channel 4’s Dispatches programme tomorrow, emerged as arguments about the rendition programme intensified. The Council of Europe reported last Friday that the CIA had run secret prisons in Poland and Romania. The CIA said such claims were biased and distorted, and insisted it had operated lawfully.

Yesterday the Association of Chief Police Officers was accused by the human rights group Liberty of “spin” after it concluded in a separate inquiry that there was no evidence that British airports had been “used to transport people by the CIA for torture in other countries”.

Afsharzadagen says he travelled to Mogadishu last September after the radical Islamic Courts Union drove out war-lords who had ruled for 15 years. The US and other governments warned that the regime was establishing an extreme form of Islamic rule, sheltering Al-Qaeda members and creating jihadist training camps.

Some preachers in British mosques were urging young Muslims to travel to Somalia to help the Islamists. Afsharzadagen, who completed a computing degree at London Metropolitan University, claimed he had gone partly in search of “adventure” and partly to do voluntary work, teaching young Somalis computer skills.

When he arrived, he said, he found people revelling in their freedom to walk around the city for the first time in years without fear. “It wasn’t like the Taliban in Afghanistan,” he said. “There were women working and walking on the streets.”

Within three months, troops from Ethiopia entered Somalia with the aim of replacing the Islamic Courts Union with a government of national unity. As the bombs began to fall near Mogadishu, Afsharzadagen and many other foreigners fled.

Travelling south with convoys of refugees, he met the other Britons for the first time and they took a boat towards the Kenyan border. “It was like a big canoe - when we arrived we had to swim ashore - that’s when I lost all my money,” he said.

For several days they hid in the jungle as they watched US helicopters and warplanes seeking out Al-Qaeda fugitives and listened to the bombing. “We felt we were being hunted down.”
One morning Afsharzadagen woke to the sound of gunfire and explosions nearby. He was separated from his friends as they fled towards the Kenyan border. “I just got up and ran. I left my passport. I left my food rations. Everything.”

By the time the gunfire had died away he was lost in the jungle with 30 people, mostly strangers. As they trudged through the bush in search of help, they drank from puddles. By the 13th day many were close to collapse. Then someone heard a cock crow, indicating a settlement nearby.

The villagers gave them honey but Kenyan soldiers who turned up lashed out with kicks. “Some were telling us, ‘You’re Al-Qaeda, we’ve finally caught you’.” From the nearby town of Kiunga, where officers from Kenya’s counter-terrorism unit were waiting, they were flown to Nairobi, where they were held in crowded communal cells.

Afsharzadagen said he was asked if he had handled weapons or trained in a terrorist camp. “I said I hadn’t. But they would tell me, ‘You’re lying’.”

Requests to see a British diplomat were refused, but eventually Afsharzadagen and the others were taken to a hotel to meet some officers from MI5. The first one called himself Richard.
“He told me he was here to help me. But it wasn’t true. I knew they were there to trap us,” he said.

After returning to their cells, the Britons’ hopes of going home rose briefly when they were moved to the airport. Then they noticed cars and lorries carrying other prisoners.

Handcuffed and blindfolded, they were flown instead to an unknown city in Somalia and handed over to Ethiopian soldiers who locked them in a dark cell teeming with cockroaches.

But after two days, an official told them they were leaving. At the top of a flight of stairs, Afsharzadagen was introduced to a British consul who had flown to Somalia to bring them out.

An RAF plane took them from Kenya to Britain. No evidence was found of any terrorist connection to them.

For the other prisoners, including an American, a Frenchman and three Swedes, the ordeal was far from over. They were moved to Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, for interrogation. Among the 85 transferred, according to flight manifests, were at least 11 women accompanied by 11 children.

One of them was a 25-year-old Tanzanian, Fatma Chande. After her release she alleged the police in Kenya had threatened to strangle her. “They tried to make me admit my husband was a member of Al-Qaeda,” she claimed.

“When we arrived at the airport, we were handcuffed and our headscarves were pulled down over our eyes. The men were hooded. The children were crying all the time saying, ‘We want to go home’.”

The prisoners transferred to Ethiopia were questioned by Americans. “They’ve concealed their role, but you can assume the Americans were behind all these renditions,” said a senior western diplomat in Nairobi. “By sending prisoners to Ethiopia, they had a convenient place to interrogate people.”

Chinese Leave Guantánamo For Albanian Limbo

Taken from The New York Times, June 10, 2007
By TIM GOLDEN

TIRANA, Albania — Ahktar Qassim Basit says he is not angry about the four years he spent as an American prisoner at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, before his captors mumbled a brief apology and flew him to this drab Balkan capital to begin a new life as a refugee.

It is this new life in Albania, Mr. Basit and other former Guantánamo detainees say, that is driving them to desperation.




“We are like orphans: we have no place to go,” says Ahktar Qassim Basit, center rear, with four other former detainees who were sent to Tirana.

The men, Muslims from western China’s Uighur ethnic minority, were freed from their confinement in Cuba after they were found to pose no threat to the United States. They have now lived for more than a year in a squalid government refugee center on the grubby outskirts of Tirana, guarded by armed policemen.

The men have been told that they will need to get work to move out of the center, they said, but that they must learn the Albanian language to get work permits. For now, they subsist on free meals heavy with macaroni and rice, and monthly stipends of about $67, which they spend mostly on brief telephone calls to their families. But some of the men have already lost hope of ever seeing their wives and children again.

“We suffered very much at Guantánamo, but we continue to suffer here,” Mr. Basit said. “The other prisoners had their countries, but we are like orphans: we have no place to go.”

Mr. Basit and four other men here, who spent time at a hamlet in Afghanistan run by Uighur separatists, are still considered terrorist suspects by China’s Communist government. Only Albania’s pro-American government would give them asylum, but Albanian officials have since told the men they cannot afford to give them much else.

Things could be worse, the former prisoners note. At least 15 of the 17 Uighurs who remain at Guantánamo have also been cleared for release, but not even Albania will accept them — and neither will the United States. Instead, American diplomats say they have asked nearly 100 countries to provide asylum to the detainees, only to find that Chinese officials have warned some of the same countries not to accept them.

“The United States has made extensive and high-level efforts over a period of four years to try to resettle the Uighurs in countries around the world,” the State Department’s legal adviser, John B. Bellinger III, said in an interview. Its lack of success, he added, “has not been for lack of trying.”

Many American officials privately describe the Uighurs’ plight as one of the more troubling episodes of the Bush administration’s detention program. The case also provides a view of the remarkable difficulties Washington has encountered in trying to winnow the detainee population at Guantánamo in response to domestic and international criticism.

The refugees in Tirana seem to have little sense of how to influence the global chess game in which they have become involved. They spend most of their days behind the refugee center’s high, cinderblock walls, reading the Koran, studying Albanian and waiting for a turn on the center’s lone desktop computer. They avoid the gravelly soccer field because it reminds them of one they looked out on at Guantánamo.

With President Bush scheduled to visit Albania on Sunday, the Uighurs and three other former Guantánamo detainees here are also asking whether the United States, having flown them here in shackles, might do anything to help get them the housing, jobs and other support they have been told to expect.

One morning in mid-May, the five Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gurs) got permission to leave the refugee center, rode buses downtown and trooped to the offices of the Albanian prime minister, Sali Berisha. An aide said Mr. Berisha was too busy to see them, but promised to pass along their entreaties.

“We said, if you can’t deliver what you have promised, please ask George W. Bush to find another country for us,” another of the former prisoners, Abu Bakker Qassim, recalled.

Officials of the Albanian Interior Ministry, which is responsible for the refugees, declined to comment on their treatment.

The 22 Uighurs who ended up at Guantánamo were part of a group of about three dozen Uighur men who were staying at a hamlet in the White Mountains of eastern Afghanistan, not far from Tora Bora, when United States forces began bombing the area in October 2001.

Most of the five Uighurs in Tirana said they had left their homes in China’s far-western Xinjiang Province, an area the Uighurs call East Turkestan, to earn more money for their families and escape government harassment. They said they drifted into Afghanistan after travels through other Central Asian countries, and heard that the Uighur hamlet was a place where they could get free food and shelter while trying to figure out where to go next.

The youngest, Ayoub Haji Mamet, who was 18 when he was captured, had a quixotic plan to make his way across Europe and then fly to the United States to attend school.

International human rights groups have long accused the Chinese authorities of oppressing the roughly nine million Uighurs in Xinjiang, where there have been occasional acts of separatist violence. The State Department’s own 2006 human rights report for China describes ethnic discrimination, the suppression of Muslim religious freedom and the persecution of those thought to be separatists, many of whom have been executed.

Pentagon officials have described the Uighur hamlet in Afghanistan as a separatist training camp that was at least loosely aligned with the Taliban. Lawyers for the men dispute that characterization. But in interviews, the Uighurs in Albania described a tiny, primitive outpost run by secretive members of some sort of Uighur liberation group.

The men who arrived there were given chores to do and beans to eat. Most of them were assigned aliases and shown how to fire an old AK-47 assault rifle, the only weapon they saw. One American intelligence official said that some of the Uighurs still at Guantánamo received more extensive training. The leader of the hamlet, a man called Abdul Musin, told visitors that they could stay on if they wanted to “liberate” other Uighurs, the men said, but that they were also free to go.

“We do not know if he belonged to any group,” said Mr. Qassim, 38, the oldest of the five detainees. “We were not allowed to ask any questions.”

In mid-October of 2001, American planes bombed the Uighur hamlet, killing at least one man and sending the rest fleeing over the mountains into Pakistan. Villagers there sheltered and fed the Uighurs but then betrayed them to local security forces, which turned them over to the United States military.

By June 2002, nearly all the Uighurs had been sent from military detention centers in Afghanistan to Guantánamo. They described their imprisonment as bewildering and traumatic, punctuated by moments of the absurd. After they were cleared for release, they were able to watch cartoons and Harry Potter movies, until Mr. Mamet smashed the television because of what he said was the guards’ refusal to take him to a doctor. The set was replaced with one made in China, the men said dismissively; it broke after a week.

Several of the Uighurs said their most traumatic experience at Guantánamo was their interrogation by a team of Chinese security officials in September 2002. The Chinese “had all of our files from the Americans,” Mr. Qassim said, threatened them repeatedly and insisted that the prisoners return with them to China. They refused.

But American intelligence personnel at Guantánamo soon began to doubt that most of the Uighurs represented a real terrorist threat, officials who served there said. By late 2003, senior national security officials in Washington cleared most of the Uighurs for release — 14, by one official’s count.

Some officials at the Pentagon advocated sending the Uighurs back to China, and the State Department eventually sought and received assurances from the Chinese that they would treat the men humanely. But senior officials finally decided not to repatriate them, citing China’s past treatment of the Uighur minority.

The State Department began approaching both Muslim countries like Turkey and those with small Uighur communities, like Germany and Sweden. However, the search was interrupted in September 2004, when the Pentagon set up panels at Guantánamo to decide whether the prisoners there, including the 22 Uighurs, were being rightfully held. Although most of the Uighurs had already been cleared for release, the review panels found that all but six were in fact enemy combatants.

The boards were told to review the Uighur cases again, officials said. This time, they found that only five could be freed. (Subsequent annual reviews have cleared 15 of the 17 remaining detainees.)

The State Department then began casting its net more widely. One prospect was the west African republic of Gabon, which has a small Muslim minority. Gabon’s long-ruling president, Omar Bongo, said he was open to accepting the Uighurs. But according to two officials, he wanted not only compensation for resettling the refugees, but support for international loans to his government and a meeting with President Bush at the White House. He had already had one such meeting just months earlier, on May 26, 2004.

American diplomats said they had contacted governments from Angola to Switzerland to Australia. Increasingly, though, they have seen the shadows of their Chinese counterparts.

“The Chinese keep coming in behind us and scaring different countries with whom they have financial or trade relationships,” said one administration official, who insisted on anonymity in discussing diplomatic issues.

A spokeswoman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington said her government would not discuss its specific diplomatic efforts regarding the Uighurs. But in a statement, the embassy described the Uighurs at Guantánamo as “suspects of the ‘East Turkestan’ terrorist forces which constitute part of international terrorist forces,” and it said they should face justice in China.

Beijing’s ambassador to Albania has met at least three times with Mr. Berisha, the prime minister, to demand the Uighurs’ repatriation, Albanian officials said. Albania has since told Washington it cannot accept any more of the Uighur detainees.

“But we helped as much as we could,” the Albanian foreign minister, Lulzim Basha, said in an interview.

American officials said China has also been active in Germany, which has heard appeals about the Uighurs from high-level White House and State Department officials, as well as international human rights groups.

“One of the problems we’ve encountered is that they say, why doesn’t the U.S. take some of these people?” said Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, who has lobbied European governments to accept some of the Uighurs and other Guantánamo detainees.

American officials said they considered that idea. But two officials said it was shot down in 2005 by the Department of Homeland Security, which argued that the men would be barred from entering the United States under the Immigration and Nationality Act because they had been linked to a terrorist group or received “military-type training” from a group that engaged in terrorism.

Although American officials said they had compensated the Albanian government generously for taking the refugee, American diplomats in Tirana have paid little attention to the fate of the five Uighurs and the three other former Guantánamo detainees here, an Egyptian, an Algerian and an Uzbek.

“We’ve never talked to them,” said an American official who insisted on anonymity because she was not authorized to discuss the matter. “We don’t monitor them. They’re not our citizens, and there is no reason for us to.” The official attributed the shortcomings of the Albanian resettlement effort to “routine bureaucratic problems.”

The Tirana representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, which has helped to organize and finance the refugee program in Albania, sounded more frustrated with the slow pace of resettlement.

“The government of Albania agreed to provide asylum to these people,” the official, Hossein Kheradmand, said. “We are not talking about 5,000 or 6,000 people; we are talking about eight people.”

The detainees have tried to fend for themselves. Mr. Mamet, the only one of the Uighurs who is single, found a young Albanian Muslim woman to marry but the arrangement collapsed when he could not move out of the refugee center. The others seem torn between longing for their families, who may never be able to leave China, and hope that they might someday start over.

After what they said had been endless promises of help from Albanian officials, they asked late last year to be moved to another country. They were told that because they were in a “safe” country, the United Nations could not relocate them. And anyway, no other country would have them. Lately, they have considered a hunger strike, a protest method they sometimes used in Cuba.

“After four and a half years, we thought we had escaped from Guantánamo, but we are still living under that shadow,” Mr. Qassim said. “Sometimes we think it would be better to go die in our homeland than to stay here.”

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LATEST NEWS: A group of lawyers representing Guantanamo detainees on Friday criticized a US decision to transfer a group of former inmates to Albania. Timed to coincide with President George W. Bush's visit to Tirana on Sunday, the statement by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) said at least 30 prisoners held at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are designated as ready for release. But the prisoners cannot be repatriated, the CCR said, because they could face abusive treatment in their home countries. The center referred to the case of 15 prisoners from the Uighurs Muslim minority in western China, who had sought refuge in Afghanistan and were detained in Pakistan shortly after the 2001 US invasion of Afghanistan. At present, only Albania, has accepted some detainees - five Uighurs, one Algerian, an Uzbekh and an Egyptian - released from Guantanamo, the CCR said.

Referring to the remaining group of detainees in Guantanamo, CCR lawyer Shayana Kadidal said: "The US admits it has no reason to hold these men, but the inaction of the international community has left them stranded. "The prolonged detention of these men is unconscionable," she said, calling on the US government, the UN High Commissioner on Refugees, and countries who traditionally welcome refugees to act quickly to resolve the plight of the Guantanamo men.

Judges At Guantanamo Throw Out 2 Cases

Taken from Yahoo News, Tue Jun 5
By ANDREW O. SELSKY, Associated Press

With one word — "unlawful" — the only two war-crimes trials against Guantanamo detainees fell apart in a single day, marking a stunning setback to Washington's attempts to try dozens of detainees in military court.

Two military judges dismissed charges Monday against a Guantanamo detainee accused of chauffeuring Osama bin Laden and another who allegedly killed a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan.

Salim Ahmed Hamdan of Yemen and Omar Khadr, a Canadian who was 15 when he was arrested on an Afghan battlefield, were the only two of the roughly 380 prisoners at Guantanamo charged with crimes under a reconstituted military trial system.

Monday's rulings stand to complicate efforts by the United States to try other suspected al-Qaida and Taliban figures in military courts.

Defense attorneys and legal experts blamed the rush by Congress and President Bush last year to restore the war-crimes trials after the U.S. Supreme Court threw out the previous system, declaring it unconstitutional. In a remarkable coincidence, it was Hamdan's lawsuit that wound up in the Supreme Court.

In both of Monday's cases, the judges ruled that the new legislation says only "unlawful enemy combatants" can be tried by the military trials, known as commissions. But Khadr and Hamdan previously had been identified by military panels here only as enemy combatants, lacking the critical "unlawful" designation.

"The fundamental problem is that the law was not carefully written," said Madeline Morris, a Duke University law professor. "It was rushed through in a flurry of political pressure from the White House ... and it is quite riddled with internal contradictions and anomalies."

Prosecuting attorneys in both cases indicated they would appeal the dismissals. But the court designated to hear the appeals — known as the court of military commissions review — doesn't even exist yet, said Marine Col. Dwight Sullivan, chief of military defense attorneys at Guantanamo Bay.

Army Maj. Beth Kubala, spokeswoman for the Office of Military Commissions that organizes the trials, said "the public should make no assumption about the future of military commissions."

She said they will continue to operate openly and fairly and added that dismissals of the charges "reflect that the military judges operate independently."

She declined to comment on how the Office of Military Commissions planned to respond to the setbacks, saying she didn't want to speculate.

Military prosecutors declined to appear before reporters after their cases collapsed.

The distinction between classifications of enemy combatants is important because if they were "lawful," they would be entitled to prisoner of war status under the Geneva Conventions.

A Pentagon spokesman said the issue was little more than semantics.

Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon said the entire Guantanamo system deals with people who act as "unlawful enemy combatants," operating outside any internationally recognized military, without uniforms or other things that make them party to the Geneva Conventions.

"It is our belief that the concept was implicit that all the Guantanamo detainees who were designated as 'enemy combatants' ... were in fact unlawful," Gordon said.

But Morris said the Military Commissions Act defines a lawful enemy combatant, in addition to a uniformed fighter belonging to a regular force — as "a member of a militia, volunteer corps or organized resistance movement belonging to a state party engaged in such hostilities and who meets four additional criteria."

The dismissals of the cases do not spell freedom for Khadr or Hamdan.

"It is very difficult when practical conditions for him don't change," said Joseph McMillan, one of Hamdan's attorneys.

Still, Hamdan's military attorney, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, said his client "is relieved" by Allred's ruling.

"He hopes he gets a fair trial and, like the rest of us, is patiently waiting for it," Swift told reporters.

Sullivan, the chief of military defense attorneys at Guantanamo Bay, said the dismissal of Khadr's case could spell the end of the war-crimes trial system. He said none of the detainees held at this isolated military base in southeast Cuba has been found to be an "unlawful" enemy combatant.

"It is not just a technicality; it's the latest demonstration that this newest system just does not work," Sullivan told journalists. "It is a system of justice that does not comport with American values."

Sullivan said reclassifying detainees as "unlawful" would require a time-consuming overhaul of the Combatant Status Review Tribunals that first classified them as enemy combatants. But Gregory McNeal, a law professor at Pennsylvania State University, said nothing prevents the Defense Department from reconvening the hearings for detainees headed to trial and declaring them to be "unlawful" combatants.

Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond, said a retrial is possible because Brownback dismissed Khadr's case without prejudice. Hamdan's case also was dismissed without prejudice.

U.S. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, said he plans to hold hearings on the Military Commissions Act, which he said is "riddled with problems and created a process that operates outside the rule of law — it has crippled our ability to deal with the real criminals still being held at Guantanamo."

The only other detainee charged under the new system, Australian David Hicks, pleaded guilty in March to providing material support to al-Qaida and is serving a nine-month sentence in Australia. Sullivan said the dismissal of the Khadr case raised questions about the legitimacy of Hicks' conviction.

But Hicks' lawyer, David McLeod, said Tuesday that his client was unlikely to challenge his conviction now that he had the certainty of a release date.

"I don't think it's helpful to go down that path at the moment for David," McLeod told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio. "He has chose a route and he proposes to continue down that route."

Hicks' father Terry Hicks agreed with the lawyer, adding that his son could he ordered to serve the suspended six years and three months balance of his sentence if he appealed and lost.

In Italy, Trial Of CIA Agents Begins

In the first prosecution of a disputed counter-terrorism tactic, 26 Americans are tried in absentia in the abduction of a cleric.

Taken from The LA Times, June 9, 2007
By Tracy Wilkinson

MILAN, ITALY — As President Bush headed for Italy on Friday, a Milan court opened the trial of a group of CIA agents accused of kidnapping a radical Egyptian cleric — the first legal prosecution of one of the administration's most controversial counter-terrorism tactics.

Twenty-six American defendants, including two CIA station chiefs and an Air Force colonel, are being tried in absentia in the 2003 abduction from a Milan sidewalk of the cleric known as Abu Omar.

The tactic under scrutiny in the case is called extraordinary rendition. It involves the capture of a terrorism suspect in one country and his transfer not to the U.S. but to a third for interrogation, without court orders or judicial oversight. In many cases, including this one, the suspects have said they were tortured. Human rights officials accuse the Bush administration of using scores of extraordinary renditions to "outsource" torture, an allegation Washington denies.

The 26 Americans left Italy before the first arrest warrants were issued two years ago, and none is expected to cooperate with the Milan proceedings.

This gave a sort of virtualreality feel to Friday's court session.

Judge Oscar Magi opened the trial, reading the indictment and ticking off the Americans' names, repeating 26 times:

"Fugitive."

"Fugitive."

"Fugitive."

Court-appointed defense attorneys for each of the American defendants filled the courtroom, but the metal cages along the walls that usually contain suspects were empty. Most of the defense attorneys have never met or communicated with their clients, and in many cases don't even know their real names. (The agents allegedly used aliases in the Abu Omar operation.)
Seven Italians are also charged, including the country's former top spymaster and his No. 2, who are accused of sanctioning or aiding in the kidnap.

The Milan prosecution, along with similar cases in Germany and Switzerland, exposed the policy of renditions, which Bush was eventually forced to acknowledge. Only in Italy, however, has such a case gone to trial, a public forum that threatens to further illuminate the actions of CIA operatives and the long-denied complicity of their European counterparts.

"We want to punish terrorists — but in the courtroom," Milan's lead prosecutor, Armando Spataro, said in commenting on the significance of the landmark trial. The war on terrorism, he said, should be waged "within the full respect of the laws of our Western democracies."

In an uncomfortable coincidence for American officials that highlighted the ongoing strain in U.S.-Italian relations, the trial started just hours before Bush arrived in Italy for a day-and-a-half visit following the Group of 8 summit in Germany.

Also Friday, a new European watchdog report documented the existence of secret CIA prisons in Poland and Romania where terrorism suspects were allegedly subjected to harsh treatment.

It was the latest in a series of revelations exposing widely criticized aspects of Washington's counter-terrorism campaign.

Inside a cavernous marble building that serves as Milan's main courthouse, the trial was adjourned until June 18 while Judge Magi decides whether to suspend the proceedings pending a constitutional challenge to the case.

The Italian government has asked the constitutional court, the highest in the land, to void the indictments because of concern that prosecutors will use state secrets to make their case. A challenge initiated by the center-right government of Silvio Berlusconi, a loyal Bush ally, has been continued by the center-left government of his successor, Prime Minister Romano Prodi.

The two governments apparently shared a fear that courtroom exposure would embarrass Italy's intelligence agencies and lay bare their practices, including secret wiretaps against the defendants.

"It is in our interest to have a fast trial," defense attorney Titta Madia said, "but it is also important to understand what evidence can be used and what cannot be used."

Madia represents Nicolo Pollari, the former head of Italy's military intelligence and the highest-ranking Italian defendant. Pollari, who was not in court Friday, has argued that national security shields his actions; he says he knew about, but did not condone, the abduction of Abu Omar.

The trial dealt mostly with procedural matters, including a defense motion to disallow papers filed on Abu Omar's behalf because of questions over their authenticity. The motion was denied.

Judge Magi also allowed Abu Omar and his wife, Nabila Ghali, to be listed as injured parties in the case, which allows their lawyers to question witnesses with the prosecution.

Abu Omar, whose full name is Hassan Osama Nasr, remains in Egypt, where he spent more than three years in prison after CIA operatives allegedly abducted him and flew him to Cairo on a private plane that took off from the U.S.-run part of Aviano Air Base in northern Italy.

He has said that while imprisoned he was beaten, threatened with rape, shocked with electricity, tied to a wet mattress and left in a tiny cell crawling with rats. He continues to suffer from permanent injuries, including a back injury and loss of hearing in both ears, according to his lawyer, Montasser Zayat.

Zayat traveled to Italy this week and appeared at Friday's hearing. Through an interpreter — an imam at a Milan Islamic center — Zayat said Abu Omar would like to attend the trial but was reluctant because he faced arrest. And Egyptian authorities have barred him and his wife from leaving the country, Zayat said.

"He wants to come and testify even though he could face legal action," Zayat said. "His presence is important to confirm what he has alleged happened to him."

At the time Abu Omar was picked up by the Americans, Italian law enforcement officials were building a case against him, alleging that he recruited Islamic fighters for Afghanistan and Iraq.

Italian investigators have said they were about to arrest and indict him when the rendition blew their efforts out of the water.

Abu Omar, in a telephone interview with Al Jazeera television Friday night, said he hoped the trial would "show the world the truth" about the "No. 1 terrorist," Bush, and his government's actions.

The only defendant who showed up for Friday's hearing was Luciano di Gregori, a veteran agent with the military intelligence service headed by Pollari. He is accused of helping to organize the abduction.

"I have nothing to hide," Di Gregori told reporters. "I've done this job for the last 33 years with my head held high and in the full light of day."

U.S. officials have made it clear that the accused American men and women will not be made available to Italian authorities, even if extradition orders are issued.

The U.S. strategy has evidently been one of ignoring the trial and refusing the court's jurisdiction.

One of the defendants, Robert Seldon Lady, who was the CIA station chief in Milan, initially hired an attorney and filed a number of motions. But he abruptly dropped the lawyer early this year and, like the other American defendants, began eschewing any contact with the court.

Lady, who has retired from the CIA, said in the March edition of GQ magazine that he was following instructions. "The agency has told me to keep quiet and let this blow over," he said.

It is extremely rare for a government friendly to the U.S. to attempt to prosecute its secret agents.

Spataro and other Italian law enforcement officials said they were able to build the case after the operatives involved in the Abu Omar operation spoke carelessly on easily traceable cellular telephones, left behind photocopies of their passports and driver's licenses, and ran up bills of tens of thousands of dollars at some of Milan's best hotels.

Because of its groundbreaking potential, the trial is being watched closely by human rights experts around the world.

"It is really the only time, so far, where we are actually getting to the merits of the rendition program and trying to hold someone accountable," said Meg Satterthwaite, law professor with New York University's Center for Human Rights and Global Justice.

A trial, she said, "requires a testing of evidence, in a court, that represents a whole different level of credibility and proof beyond what we have had until now."

Police Reject UK Rendition Claims YET Picture Proves 'Torture Flights' Are STILL Landing In The UK

On the day Tony Blair lectured Vladimir Putin about human rights, democracy and the Litvinenko murder, his own government was accused of colluding in breathtaking lawbreaking. The report said the CIA ran secret prisons in Poland and Romania for two years. Britain provided logistical support by letting the agency’s aircraft use UK civilian and military airports dozens of times....

Taken from The Mail, UK, 10th June 2007
By GLEN OWEN

The row over CIA 'torture flights' using British airports has deepened following fresh evidence that a plane repeatedly linked to the controversial programme landed in the UK just days ago.

The plane was logged arriving at RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk last weekend, and watching aviation experts said the aircraft, piloted by crew clad in desert fatigues, was immediately surrounded on the runway by armed American security forces.


This flight was spotted landing at a UK airport - proof that 'rendition ' flights are still taking place

Its registration number, clearly visible on the fuselage, identifies it as a plane which the European Parliament says has been involved in 'ghost flights' to smuggle terrorist suspects to shadowy interrogation centres abroad.

Records show the plane is owned by Blackwater USA, a CIA contractor described as "the most secretive and powerful mercenary army on the planet". An eyewitness, who previously worked as an RAF electronic warfare expert, said that as the plane - a CASA-212 Aviocar - taxied to a stop on the runway it was met by a US military Humvee.

The vehicle contained four US security policemen armed with M16 assault rifles, who accompanied the camouflaged crew to the airport terminal.

The man, who did not want to be identified, added: "I thought it was curious that they would give a civilian plane an armed guard."

Another spotter, who took the picture of it landing, recorded it touching down at 4.36pm on Saturday.

The disclosure follows damning findings by the Council of Europe human rights organisation, which accused Tony Blair on Friday of colluding in a CIA operation to run secret prisons in Poland and Romania by allowing the agency to use UK airports.

The study was contradicted on the same day by a report from the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), which concluded that there was no evidence to support the claims.

But the director of the human rights group Liberty revealed that ACPO had admitted it restricted its inquiry to a review of media reports on the issue.

She accused them of rushing out their ‘cursory’ findings as part of a politically-motivated 'spin' operation.

The US plane's arrival was also logged by Touchdown News, a group of enthusiasts who record the movements of military aircraft at RAF Mildenhall and RAF Lakenheath.

The group said the plane used its civilian call sign when talking to air traffic control and took off again early on the morning of Sunday June 3, flying east.


The path that the 'torture flight' took

A report last November by a European Parliament committee placed the plane - registration number N964BW - on a list of "companies and aircraft used by the CIA for extraordinary rendition flights". The plane was previously registered with the Bolivian army, and has been pictured on the ground in the Afghan capital Kabul within the past year.

The American Federal Aviation Authority lists the plane as being operated by two companies, Aviation World Wide Services and a sister company, Presidential Airways.

The European Parliament report describes these as shell companies operating as subsidiaries of Blackwater USA, "an important contractor for the CIA and the US military" which bases the planes in Malta.

Research by a further group, The American Centre for Media and Democracy, claims that flight-tracking internet technology shows the plane landed at least twice in the first six months of 2006 at Camp Peary, the U.S. naval reservation in Virginia known as The Farm and widely alleged to be a CIA training facility.

Tracking technology shows that the plane was en route from Canada to Greenland two days before it was sighted at Mildenhall: the internet software does not extend beyond American airspace, but the expert explained that its route would be consistent with a refuelling stop in the Arctic - it only has a range of about 2,000 miles - followed by a further refuel in East Anglia, before heading to Malta.

From there it could 'leapfrog' from US bases in the the former Soviet states bordering Afghanistan on to Kabul.

A recent book on Blackwater by Jeremy Scahill, an American author, described the company as the world's "most secretive and powerful mercenary firm", carrying out quasi-military operations on behalf of the U.S. government in Iraq, Afghanistan and within the U.S.

It was founded in 1997 by Erik Prince, a former elite Navy Seal and fundamentalist Christian millionaire who bankrolls far-Right causes.

This newspaper first cast doubt on the Government's claim to have no knowledge of the CIA’s activities 18 months ago when we published pictures of three planes at Scottish airports which had been linked by human rights activists to rendition.

Flight records showed the planes had been given landing rights by the MoD, despite there being no record of passenger lists or details of the purpose of the flights.

The Council of Europe dossier, compiled by Swiss senator Dick Marty, said the U.S. had used Britain's help to establish a "global spider's web" of jails and airports to pursue a war on terror without rules.

It claimed the secret centres had been set up so it could use interrogation techniques amounting to torture which are illegal in the US.

These include "waterboarding" – the dunking of blindfolded suspects so they believe they are drowning – solitary confinement, shackling in confined cells and exposure of naked captives to extremes of heat, cold and noise.

Separately, the Washington Post newspaper has reported that mercenaries working for Blackwater were at the centre of an infamous firefight in Iraq in April 2004 when guarding the U.S. headquarters in Najaf - despite never having applied to operate as a private security company in the country, The report said that in the battle, footage of which circulated on the internet, the troops had opened fire on Shia Iraqi civilians protesting outside, unleashing rounds so rapidly they had to pause every 15 minutes to allow their gun barrels to cool down.

In his book, Scahill claims that the Blackwater employees in the country are using "experimental ammunition' made of 'blended metal, which shatter on impact to create untreatable wounds".

Shami Chakrabati, the director of Liberty, alleges that 210 CIA flights carrying terrorist suspects for possible torture have entered Britain since 2001.

She called for a full investigation, claiming the ACPO probe was unsatisfactory.

"ACPO have admitted to me in a private letter that their investigation amounted to little more than a cursory review of reports on the issue – which they issued, 18 months after I requested it, to coincide with the Council of Europe’s report," she said.

"Maybe now The Mail on Sunday has produced this photographic evidence they will conduct a proper inquiry."

An ACPO spokeswoman said: "These planes could be empty - there is no evidence that prisoners were on board."

She denied Liberty’s claim that their inquiry had been limited and driven by spin.

"There has been a full examination to see if there was any evidence to suggest criminal activity, and there wasn't," she said.

A Foreign Office spokeswoman said: "We have been through the records, and there is no evidence of detainees being rendered through the UK since 1997."
No one at RAF Mildenhall was available for comment.

European Report Gives Details on CIA Prisons

NATO Pacts Exploited, European Probe Finds

Taken from The Washington Post, June 9, 2007; A01
By Molly Moore

The CIA exploited NATO military agreements to help it run secret prisons in Poland and Romania where alleged terrorists were held in solitary confinement for months, shackled and subjected to other mental and physical torture, according to a European investigative report released here Friday.

PDF: Dick Marty's second report on secret detentions and illegal transfers [532KB]

Some of the United States' highest-profile terrorism suspects, including Khalid Sheik Mohammed, considered the prime organizer of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, were detained and interrogated at the facility in Poland, according to the 72-page report completed for the Council of Europe, the continent's human rights agency.

Dick Marty, a Swiss lawyer hired by the council, said the CIA conducted "clandestine operations under the NATO framework," providing military intelligence agencies in member countries -- including Poland and Romania -- the cover to assist the agency in disguising the use of secret flights, operations and detention facilities from the days immediately following the Sept. 11 attacks until the fall of last year.

Officials speaking on behalf of the CIA, NATO, Poland and Romania on Friday criticized the report's findings. Both Poland and Romania have denied that the CIA established secret prisons on their soil.

"The CIA's counter-terror operations have been lawful, effective, closely reviewed, and of benefit to many people - including Europeans - by disrupting plots and saving lives," CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said. "Our counter-terror partnerships in Europe are very strong." He described the report as "biased and distorted."

Disclosure of the existence of CIA prisons in Eastern Europe, but not the specific countries where they were located, by The Washington Post in 2005 triggered widespread anger in Europe. The Council of Europe commissioned Marty to find out all he could about the program.

In the report, Marty expressed deep disapproval of U.S. practices with the prisoners. "We must banish forever the Bush Administration mindset that effectively says, 'if it is illegal for us to use such a practice at home or on our own citizens, let us export or outsource it so we will not be held to account for it,' " the report concluded.

The report was also critical of European governments for having allowed the prisons or the transport of prisoners through their airspace. Many did not cooperate with the investigation, the report said, nor did NATO or the United States.

Investigators relied primarily on sources they did not identify in the report, but Marty said they spoke to more than 30 serving or retired members of intelligence services in the United States and Europe as well as civilians performing contract work for intelligence agencies.

The report provided new details about the CIA's purported methods of operation, detention tactics and detainees in the secret facilities. The report said evidence indicated that in order to bypass civilian authorities the CIA used emergency provisions approved by the NATO alliance after the Sept. 11 attacks to partner with European military and intelligence agencies.

"The CIA's clandestine operations in Europe - including its transfers and secret detentions of HVDs [high-value detainees] - were sustained and kept secret only through their operational dependence on alliances and partnerships in what is more traditionally the military sphere," the report said.

The secret "high-value" prisoner program was given the NATO classification of "Cosmic Top Secret," according to the report.

The report said the NATO-oriented arrangement was particularly effective with two of the alliance's newest members, Poland and Romania, which were eager to assist the United States and strengthen their ties with Washington.

A facility at Poland's Stare Kiejkuty intelligence training base was used to detain and interrogate the most important CIA suspects, including Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, a suspected senior al-Qaeda operative, the report said. By its account, both men were "held and questioned using 'enhanced interrogation techniques,' " described in the report as a euphemism for torture.

The report said that based on flight documents and information provided by intelligence sources, "it is likely" that Mohammed, who was arrested in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, on March 1, 2003, was transferred to Kabul, then flown on March 7 to the Szymany military airport in Poland.

Sources told investigators that when a CIA flight approached the Szymany airfield, Polish operatives would order all Polish personnel to leave the area of the runway. An American "landing team" usually waited at the end of the runway "in two or three vans with their engines often running."

When the aircraft came to a stop, the vans would race toward the plane. American officials would board the craft, then hustle the detainee into one of the vans, usually out of the line of sight of the Polish control tower.

The vans would then speed through the airport's front security gates, using high beams that blinded Polish guards, then drive down a paved road "lined by thick pine forests on both sides" and follow an unpaved road along a lake, eventually reaching the entrance to the Stare Kiejkuty intelligence training base, where prisoners were held and questioned, the report said.

The report went on to describe conditions in the CIA secret detention cells, based on interviews with "former or current detainees, human rights advocates, or people who have worked in the establishment or operations of CIA secret prisons." The report said the descriptions were not based on a single prisoner or cell, but on a compilation of accounts. It did not specify which country's prison was being described.

According to those accounts, detainees were often kept naked in their cells for several weeks and endured up to four consecutive months of "solitary confinement and extreme sensory deprivation in cramped cells, shackled and handcuffed at all times." Temperatures in the cells were often kept at extreme levels: "sometimes so hot one would gasp for breath, sometimes freezing cold."

The Council of Europe is Europe's official human rights watchdog. It has limited power to enforce human rights regulations.