CIA removed terror suspects from Guantanamo to avoid due process: AP

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CIA removed terror suspects from Guantanamo to avoid due process: AP

August 6, 2010 11:24:39 am

[JURIST] The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) [official website] transferred several high-profile prisoners to Guantanamo Bay to await trial in 2003, only to transfer them back into the CIA’s network of secret prisons [JURIST news archives] so they would not be entitled to lawyers and access to US courts, the Associated Press reported [text] Friday. Among the suspects reportedly on the September 2003 flight were prominent al Qaeda [CFR backgrounder] members Ramzi Binalshibh and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, who aided in the planning of the 9/11 attacks, and Abd al-Nashiri, who planned the 2000 USS Cole bombing [JURIST news archives]. A commercial jetliner operated by one of the CIA’s several airline front companies removed al-Hawsawi from the “Salt Pit” in Kabul, Afghanistan, transferred alleged 9/11 conspirator Khalid Sheikh Mohammed [JURIST news archive] to “Britelite” in Bucharest, Romania, and picked up the others at a facility in Rabat, Morocco, before landing in Guantanamo Bay. The prisoners were transferred to await trial by a military tribunal, but US officials subsequently became concerned that the Supreme Court’s impending ruling in Rasul v. Bush [opinion, PDF; JURIST report] would require the government to grant access to lawyers and US courts to foreign-born terror suspects. In March 2004, the CIA transferred the prisoners back into various overseas prisons, allowing the agency to interrogate them without legal protections for two more years until then-president George W. Bush ordered the prisoners back to Guantanamo under pressure from media scrutiny of the extraordinary rendition program [JURIST news archive].

Also Friday, Warsaw-based human rights group Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights (HFHR) [advocacy website, in Polish] released documents [text, PDF; part 2, text, PDF] from the Polish Border Guard Office [official website, in Polish] detailing arrival, departure and passenger information for several flights by CIA front companies into and out of cities in Poland. HFHR reports [press release, PDF] that it secured records for seven flights in total spanning a period from December 2002 to September 2003, when the AP says the five-stop flight to Guantanamo Bay took place:

[B]etween 5 December 2002 and 22 September 2003 seven planes which are commonly associated with CIA front companies landed at Szymany airport. Five of them came to Poland with passengers, but at the time of departure only crew was present on board. The last plane noted flew to Szymany empty, and left Poland with five people on board

That entry, dated September 22, 2003, shows a flight arriving with no passengers in Szymany, reportedly site of the CIA prison where Mohammad had been held, according to the AP. It then departed with five passengers for Romania, home of “Britelite,” the prison to which the AP reports Mohammad was transferred around that time.

The US has come under fire for its use of CIA-operated secret detention facilities. In December, a Lithuanian parliamentary committee confirmed that the CIA had established two secret prisons for al Qaeda suspects, prompting a dispute that led to the resignation [JURIST reports] of the country’s foreign minister. On his third day in office last year, US President Barack Obama ordered the closure [JURIST report] of all CIA secret prisons. The European Parliament voted [JURIST report] in February 2007 to approve a report that condemned member states for cooperating with the CIA in operating secret prisons. In January 2007, the UK admitted knowledge of the CIA prison network, and then-president George W. Bush publicly acknowledged [JURIST reports] in September 2006 that these types of facilities existed. In June 2006, the Council of Europe released [JURIST report] a report [text, PDF] that 14 European countries collaborated with the CIA by taking an active or passive role in a “global spider’s web” of secret prisons and rendition flights. The existence of CIA prisons in Europe was first reported in November 2005.

Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail

On April 16, 1963, an incarcerated Martin Luther King, Jr. (arrested for demonstrating in defiance of a court order) wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail in response to a published statement by eight fellow clergymen from Alabama.

Part of the letter read: We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we stiff creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness" then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. Read the full text of the Letter.