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ABC News' Rachel Martin reports: The US intelligence gathering program known as “extraordinary rendition” was essentially put on trial for the first time - in Italy - and this week the court rendered a guilty verdict. Italian Judge Oscar Magi convicted 23 Americans of the 2003 kidnapping of an Egyptian cleric on a street in Milan, Italy. The cleric, known as Abu Omar, alleged that he was abducted by CIA operatives who then shuttled him between US bases in Europe and then moved him to Egypt where Omar says he was tortured. The Italian judge tried the Americans, all but...

A former CIA counterterrorism officer who is set to be extradited to Italy where she faces a four-year prison sentence in connection with the rendition of a suspected terrorist that took place in Milan in 2003 said Hillary Clinton is partially to blame for her ordeal. Sabrina De Sousa, two-dozen other CIA officers, and an Air Force colonel were convicted in absentia in 2009 in Italy on kidnapping and other charges in connection with the abduction of Osama Mustapha Hassan Nasr, better known as Abu Omar, a radical Egyptian cleric whose fiery anti-American speeches in the immediate aftermath of 9/11...

Goldsmith warns US on detainees By Joshua Rozenberg, Legal Editor (Filed: 18/09/2006) Terrorist suspects detained at Guantanamo Bay should not be subject to humiliating and degrading treatment, the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, warned the US government at the weekend. Speaking in Chicago, Lord Goldsmith told the Bush administration that it should not try to water down the standards in Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. This provision, he said, "prohibits outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment" of those detained in combat. It was "an international standard of very considerable importance and its content must be...

This is the first of two stories adapted from "Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency," to be published Tuesday by Penguin Press. EXCERPT: "The United States was at war with al-Qaeda, intelligence-gathering is inherent in war, and the Constitution appoints the president commander in chief. But they had not been asked to give their own written assessments of the legality of domestic espionage. They based their answer in part on the attorney general's certification of the "form and legality" of the president's orders. Yet neither man had been allowed to see the program's codeword-classified legal analyses [5], which were prepared by...

Liz Cheney said Sunday that some of the stories in print about her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, were "fantasies" cooked up by some of his old Bush administration rivals. Responding to a question about Dick Cheney's role in pushing for aggressive interrogations, Liz Cheney pointed to Lawrence Wilkerson, the chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, for spreading inaccurate information about her father. Wilkerson "has made a cottage industry of fantasies about the vice president," she said on ABC's "This Week." "It's important to look at the source" of media reports, Cheney said. "Nobody talking about...

Video only so far

Seven years after the release of shocking images of tortured prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the Supreme Court has turned back the appeal of 26 inmates from that infamous facility who wanted to sue two military contractors for damages. The military's official investigation revealed "numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses" committed by military personnel and civilian contractors who provided support services at the prison. More than two dozen soldiers were reprimanded or court-martialed for their conduct. But those who were tortured want to sue two firms that hired the civilians who helped the military with...

A former Islamic State hostage revealed Sunday that ISIS held a group of Western hostages in a compound near Aleppo in northern Syria where its British militant "Jihadi John" staged mock executions to replicate the prison in Guantanamo, Cuba, for jihadist combatants. The ISIS terror group, also known as ISIL, held about 22 European, American and Latin American journalists and humanitarian workers in a village north of Aleppo and repeatedly subjected them to mock executions by three militant guards, former hostage Javier Espinosa, a Spanish journalist, wrote in El Mundo newspaper Sunday. The trio included "Jihadi John," who has appeared...

Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour has been wounded in a gunfight at a meeting of militants in the Pakistani city of Quetta, reports say.

Italy orders arrest of CIA agents over Imams abduction 6/24/2005 10:45:00 PM GMT Italian authorities ordered the arrest of 13 CIA agents accused of kidnapping a Muslim leader Italian authorities ordered the arrest of 13 agents of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) accused of kidnapping a Muslim leader in northern Italy, an Italian newspaper reported on Friday. The arrest warrants were issued by Italian Judge Chiara Nobili at the request of the anti-terrorist division of the state prosecutor's office, the Corriere della Sera said. The 13 agents are suspected of kidnapping Osama Mustafa Hassan, also known as Abu Omar,...

A Muslim cleric has claimed to have been tortured with electric shocks, left in a cell where rats crawled on him and threatened with rape after he was allegedly kidnapped from a Milan street by CIA agents three years ago.The claims of Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, appeared in an affidavit provided to Milan prosecutors investigating his alleged abduction in February 2003, the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera reported yesterday. Prosecutors say that the cleric, who was formerly suspected of links to terrorism, was driven to the Aviano military air base and flown via Germany to...

Detailed allegations of psychological abuse, deprivation, beatings and deaths at U.S.-run prisons in Iraq (news - web sites) were met by public silence from the U.S. Army last October — six months before shocking photographs stirred world outrage and demands for action. AP Photo At the time, one ex-prisoner sensed that words might count for little. Instead, Rahad Naif told a reporter, "I wish somebody could go take a picture of Camp Bucca." These early accounts by freed prisoners, reported by The Associated Press last fall, told of detainees punished by hours lying bound in the sun; being attacked by...

An American soldier's video diary showing her disdain for Iraqi detainees who died in her charge is to be broadcast by a U.S. network on Wednesday in a further escalation of the prisoner abuse scandal that has shaken the Bush administration and provoked world outrage. CBS, which two weeks ago broadcast the first pictures of Iraqi prisoners being abused in Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, said on Tuesday its "60 Minutes II" program would show video footage depicting conditions there and at another U.S.-run prison in southern Iraq called Camp Bucca. Photographs of Iraqi prisoners being sexually humiliated, threatened by...

SNIPPET: "The detentions would be temporary."

In October Paula Broadwell told an audience that the CIA in Benghazi "had taken a couple of Libyan militia members prisoner" at its secret annex. The CIA flatly denied the claim, saying that the agency "has not had detention authority since January 2009, when Executive Order 13491 was issued. Any suggestion that the Agency is still in the detention business is uninformed and baseless." Marc Thiessen of the American Enterprise Institute points out that the denial is factually incorrect because while Obama ordered the closure of all CIA detention facilities (i.e. “Black Sites”), the order states that it "does not...

October 12 marks the 12th anniversary of the bombing of the USS Cole. The grim milestone comes as President Obama faces mounting questions about his administration's dereliction of duty during the murderous attack on our consulate in Benghazi, Libya. And it comes just a day after resurgent al-Qaida thugs pulled off the drive-by assassination of a top Yemeni security official who worked at the U.S. embassy in Sanaa. These are not "bumps in the road." These are gravesites on the blood-spattered path to surrender. Seventeen U.S. sailors died in the brutal suicide attack on the guided Navy missile destroyer as...

'Waterboarding broke al Qaeda captive in 35 seconds,' says former CIA agent defending tortureUse of the interrogation technique known as "waterboarding" was approved by the White House and gets results, a former CIA agent admitted yesterday. The technique - which simulates drowning - was used against Al Qaeda captives with success, John Kiriakou told a U.S. TV network. The one-time CIA interrogator is the first to speak out about the "torture" methods that have earned President George Bush's administration worldwide condemnation. The White House has denied torture is used on terror suspects, but Mr Kiriakou said waterboarding "broke" one stubbornly...

Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, whose real name was Ali Mohammed al-Fakheri, 46, took his own life in his prison cell, according to the Libyan newspaper Oea. Information gained from the interrogation of al-Libi was cited on several occasions by the Bush administration as justification for the war in Iraq. He told his CIA interrogators that al-Qaeda had sent two men to Iraq to seek training in chemical and biological weapons in December 2000. Classified documents added that the men did not return, so al-Libi did not know whether the training took place, and that, in any case, he was probably "intentionally...

A Senate Judiciary Subcmte. looks into the legal conduct of Justice Dept. lawyers who approved harsh interrogation techniques. One of the witnesses, fmr. FBI agent Ali Soufan, interrogated Guantanamo detainee Abu Zubaydah.

A source close to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi now confirms that Pelosi was told in February 2003 by her intelligence aide, Michael Sheehy, that waterboarding was actually used on CIA detainee Abu Zubaydah. ... This appears to contradict Pelosi's account that she was never told waterboarding actually happened, only that the administration was considering using it.... Some Republicans have called for Pelosi to testify at congressional hearings. The number two House Democrat -- Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Maryland -- said Tuesday, "I think the facts need to get out" regarding what members of Congress had been told about harsh interrogations....