NEW YORK - On the heels of a
federal appeals court ruling that only the U.S. Congress and the
executive branch of government - not the courts - can interfere with
government-sponsored "extraordinary rendition", a U.S. citizen from New
Jersey is asking another court to tell the government it wasn't okay to
secretly imprison and abuse him in three different African countries
over a period of four months.
"Extraordinary rendition" is White
House-speak for kidnapping. Just ask Maher Arar. He's a Canadian
citizen who was "rendered" by the U.S. to Syria, where he was tortured
for almost a year.
NEW YORK - The long road to the proverbial day in court just got longer for five men who claim they were "disappeared" and tortured by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
The men, who say they were victims of the extraordinary rendition programme conducted during the administration of President George W. Bush, have been trying since 2007 to get their cases heard on the merits.
SAN FRANCISCO -
A federal appeals court granted the Obama administration's request
Tuesday to rehear a case over a Bay Area company's alleged
participation in CIA torture flights, setting the stage for a critical
test of government claims of secrecy and national security.
MILAN - An Italian prosecutor called on Wednesday for 26 Americans, all but one believed to be members of the CIA, to be jailed for between 10 and 13 years each for the kidnapping of a terrorism suspect in 2003.
Public Prosecutor Armando Spataro also asked a Milan court to sentence four Italians, including the former head of Italy's Sismi secret service, to up to 13 years in prison for the abduction of Muslim cleric Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr.
Two newly-obtained documents show how American diplomats during the
Bush administration worked tenaciously to incorporate what is commonly
known as the Nuremberg Defense into a new international convention
addressing enforced disappearances.
The rejection of the notion that government agents could avoid
liability for crimes by arguing that they were simply following orders
had been a bedrock principle of the American government ever since
shortly after the end of World War II, when that defense was employed
during the Nuremberg war-crimes trials.
A human rights group began legal action against the government today in a case involving two alleged victims of rendition to Afghanistan who may have been tortured.
The Obama administration is fighting on
multiple fronts - in courts in San Francisco, Washington and London -
to keep an official veil of secrecy over the treatment of a former
prisoner who says he was tortured at Guantanamo Bay.
The administration has asked a federal appeals court in San
Francisco to reconsider its ruling allowing Binyam Mohamed and four
other former or current prisoners to sue a Bay Area company for
allegedly flying them to overseas torture chambers for the CIA.
Ministers must explain why crucial documents relating to CIA "torture flights" that stopped on sovereign British territory were destroyed, a panel of MPs has said.
A damning appraisal by the influential foreign affairs select committee on Britain's role in the rendition of terror suspects and alleged complicity of torture condemns the government's lack of transparency on vital areas of concern.
