CIA heeft hier carte blanche?

[Dr. Marc-Alexander Fluks]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Bron:  The Washington Post
Datum: March 13, 2005


U.S. role in abductions investigated
------------------------------------
3 European nations looking at cases in which alleged terror suspects
were taken.

MILAN, Italy -- In February 2003, a radical Egyptian cleric known as Abu
Omar was walking to a Milan mosque when he was grabbed by two men,
sprayed in the face with chemicals and stuffed into a van. He hasn't been
seen since.

Milan investigators, however, appear to be close to identifying his
kidnappers.

Italian authorities suspect the Egyptian was the target of a
CIA-sponsored operation known as rendition, in which terror suspects are
forcibly taken for interrogation to countries where torture is practiced.

The Italian probe is one of three official investigations that have
surfaced in the past year into renditions believed to have taken place in
Western Europe.

Although the CIA usually carries out the operations with the help or
blessing of friendly local intelligence agencies, law enforcement
authorities in Italy, Germany and Sweden are examining whether U.S.
agents might have broken local laws by detaining terrorist suspects on
European soil.

The CIA has defended the controversial practice as an effective and legal
way to prevent terrorism.

The Bush administration has received backing for renditions from
governments criticized for their human rights records, including Egypt,
Jordan and Pakistan, where many of the suspects are taken for
interrogation.

But the administration is getting a much different reception in Europe,
where lawmakers and prosecutors are questioning whether the practice is a
blatant violation of local sovereignty and human rights.

There are many practical and legal hurdles to filing criminal charges
against U.S. agents, including the question of whether they are
protected by diplomatic immunity and the matter of determining their
identity. However, Italian and German prosecutors have not ruled out
criminal charges.

In Germany, a 41-year-old man, Khaled Masri, has told authorities that he
was locked up during a vacation in the Balkans and flown in January 2004
to Kabul, Afghanistan, where he was held as a suspected terrorist for
four months.

He said that only after his captors realized he was not the al-Qaida
suspect they were looking for did they take him back to the Balkans. He
recalled his captors spoke English with an American accent.

In Sweden, a parliamentary investigation has found that CIA agents
wearing hoods orchestrated the forced removal in December 2001 of two
Egyptian nationals on a U.S.-registered airplane to Cairo, where the men
claimed they were tortured in prison.

One of the men was later exonerated as a terrorism suspect by Egyptian
police, while the other remains in prison there.

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(c) 2005 The Washington Post

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