December 3, 2013 - The secret network of black site prisons across Europe that the CIA used to interrogate terror suspects is getting a rare public hearing Tuesday at Europe's human rights court.Lawyers for two terror suspects currently held by the U.S. in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, accuse Poland of human rights abuses. They say they fell victim to the CIA's program to kidnap terror suspects and transfer them to third countries, and allege they were tortured in a remote Polish prison.
The case marks the first time Europe's role in the CIA's "extraordinary rendition" of terror suspects reaches Europe's human rights court.
One of the cases concerns 48-year-old Saudi national Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who currently faces terror charges in the U.S. for allegedly orchestrating the al Qaeda attack on the USS Cole in 2000; a bombing in the Yemeni port of Aden that killed 17 sailors and wounded 37.
The second case involves 42-year-old Abu Zubaydah, a Palestinian.
A declassified report released in 2009 showed the CIA deemed al-Nashiri and Zubaydah as "high value detainees" meaning they are held under ultra-secure conditions in a secret section of Guantanamo known as Camp 7. read more>>>
Nov 27, 2013 - The ACLU filed the suit on Tuesday under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) demanding the Central Intelligence Agency release two reports about its post-9/11 “program of rendition, secret detention, and torture of detainees”
“This illegal program was devised and authorized by officials at the highest levels of government, and five years after it officially ended, the American public still doesn't have the full story about some of the most devastating rights violations committed in its name,” the ACLU said in a statement.
The organization wants access to a report compiled by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence which it described as “the most comprehensive review of the CIA's torture program to date.”
Led by its chairwoman, Senator Dianne Feinstein, the Senate panel reviewed more than six million pages of CIA documents and other records on the agency’s controversial programs over the course of three years.
At the end of 2012, the Senate committee approved its study of “the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program,” which spans over 6,000 pages and includes approximately 35,000 footnotes. read more>>>
November 26, 2013 - The ACLU has filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit demanding the CIA release two reports about its post-9/11 program of rendition, secret detention, and torture of detainees. The first is a 6,000-page report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which was adopted by the committee in December 2012. The second is a CIA report in response, defending the agency's actions.The SSCI report is the most comprehensive account of the torture program to date. It took three years to complete at a cost of $40 million, and is based on the review of millions of CIA and other records, although the CIA refused to let Senate investigators interview its employees. SSCI Chair Senator Dianne Feinstein stated that the report "uncovers startling details about the CIA detention and interrogation program and raises critical questions about intelligence operations and oversight ... [T]he creation of long-term, clandestine 'black sites' and the use of so-called 'enhanced-interrogation techniques' were terrible mistakes."
According to media reports, the report found that the CIA misled Congress, the Justice Department, and President George W. Bush about the "effectiveness" of torture methods such as waterboarding, shackling in painful positions, and slamming detainees against walls. The report also reportedly found that those abuses did not help locate Osama bin Laden or thwart any terrorist plots, and were in fact counterproductive. read more>>>
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