Free Republic

ROME, Italy (AP) -- Italy's Constitutional Court has thrown out the charges against 26 Americans accused of involvement in the alleged CIA kidnapping of an Egyptian terror suspect in Milan in 2003.

Barack Obama's first major acts as US president may have received considerable praise but commentators are questioning the transparency of his administration and how whether it marks a complete departure from the Bush era. Upon taking office Mr Obama ordered the closure of the Guantanamo Bay prison camp and called for an end to harsh interrogation techniques, which some had described as torture. It has emerged since, however, that the CIA will still have the power to carry out renditions in which suspects are picked up and taken abroad for secret questioning. The practice caused considerable outrage in the EU...

The highly controversial anti-terror practice of rendition will continue under Barack Obama, it has emerged. Despite ordering the closure of Guantanamo and an end to harsh interrogation techniques, the new president has failed to call an end to secret abductions and questioning. In his first few days in office, Mr Obama was lauded for rejecting policies of the George W Bush era, but it has emerged the CIA still has the authority to carry out renditions in which suspects are picked up and often sent to a third country for questioning. The practice caused outrage at the EU, after it...

Oh how sweet it is. Obama is now finding out just what a difficult job it is to deal with those who with America harm. Or as Bush famously noted: "It's hard work". The libs screamed about the alleged abuses perpetrated by the evil Bush regime and turned all their hopes to BHO because he took a "courageous" stand against torturous tactics like waterboarding and playing the Barney song too loud.

I told you. I damned well told you. Rendition is back, you pro-torturing, posturing, hypocritical Leftist fools: -snip- When I say "back" I mean that it’s going to become the damned default option for detainees. You howled when we tried to go with an unlawful detainee designation to handle these cases; you shrieked when we set up Gitmo; and you’d whine if we shot them out of hand. The only thing left is to hand these sons of b!tches over to countries without our Bill of Rights and hope that this is enough. There’s a big hole in the ground...

Chicago Tribune  WASHINGTON -- The CIA's secret prisons are being shuttered. Harsh interrogation techniques are off-limits. And Guantanamo Bay will eventually go back to being a wind-swept naval base on the southeastern corner of Cuba. But even while dismantling these discredited programs, President Barack Obama left an equally controversial counterterrorism tool intact. Under executive orders issued by Obama last week, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, or the secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the U.S. Current and former U.S. intelligence officials said the rendition program is poised...

President Obama's executive order closing CIA "black sites" contains a little-noticed exception that allows the spy agency to continue to operate temporary detention facilities abroad. The provision illustrates that the president's order to shutter foreign-based prisons, known as black sites, is not airtight and that the Central Intelligence Agency still has options if it wants to hold terrorist suspects for several days at a time. Current and former U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition that they aren't identified because of the sensitivity of the subject, said such temporary facilities around the world will remain open, giving the administration the...

SNIPPET: "The detentions would be temporary."

WASHINGTON – Vice President Dick Cheney said Thursday that he sees no reason for President George W. Bush to pre-emptively pardon anyone at the CIA involved in harsh interrogations of suspected terrorists. "I don't have any reason to believe that anybody in the agency did anything illegal," he said. In an interview with The Associated Press, Cheney also said that Bush has no need to apologize for not foreseeing the economic crisis. "I don't think he needs to apologize. I think what he needed to do is take bold, aggressive action and he has," Cheney said. "I don't think anybody...

National Security: Does it make sense for a political operator such as Leon Panetta to head the CIA? Maybe. The flawed agency has a checkered history, and has had repeated run-ins with presidents of both parties.Obama's choice of Panetta — a former Clinton-era chief of staff, Democratic House Budget Committee chairman and Republican operative in the Nixon administration — is viewed as a strong signal of departure from the national security policies of President Bush. But when it came to making effective and innovative use of the spy agency, the president has succeeded tremendously. Terrorist plots were foiled and dozens...

In filling four senior Justice Department positions Monday, President-elect Barack Obama signaled that he intends to roll back Bush administration counterterrorism policies authorizing harsh interrogation techniques, warrantless spying and indefinite detentions of terrorism suspects. The most startling shift was Obama's pick of Indiana University law professor Dawn Johnsen to take charge of the Office of Legal Counsel, the unit that's churned out the legal opinions that provided a foundation for expanding President George W. Bush's national security powers. Johnsen, who spent five years in the Office of Legal Counsel during the Clinton administration and served as its acting chief, has...

A private jet that crash-landed almost one year ago in eastern Mexico carrying 3.3 tons of cocaine had previously been used for CIA "rendition" flights, a newspaper report said here Thursday, citing documents from the United States and the European Parliament. The plane was carrying Colombian drugs for the fugitive leader of Mexico's Sinaloa cartel, Joaquin "Chapo" Guzman, when it crash-landed in the Yucatan peninsula on September 24, El Universal reported. The daily said it had obtained documents from the United States and the European Parliament which "show that that plane flew several times to Guantanamo, Cuba, presumably to transfer...

A federal appeals court, in a major victory for federal officials in pursuing individuals suspected of terrorism, ruled on Monday that foreign nationals may not sue U.S. government officers for money damages for capturing them and sending them to foreign countries where they were tortured. The decision by the Second Circuit Court in New York City, in a high-profile case seen as a significant legal test of the U.S. program of “special rendition,” also barred a claim specific to this case that U.S. officials seriously mistreated the detained individual while he remained in this country before being sent abroad involuntarily....

British Nazi-Al Qaeda Links? They are unmistakable and definite The Independent reported on July 10, 2005 that Al Qaeda may have hired a gang of “white mercenary terrorists” to carry out the London bombings.The Daily Mirror reported on July 16, 2005 that the four bombers may have been “duped” into carrying their bomb-laden backpacks on to the Underground and a bus. There is also intelligence that points to Italian neo-fascist, Pentagon Task Force 121, and Balkan Islamic fundamentalist links to the London bombers. French counter-terrorism official have reported that Balkans or Eastern European-origin military grade explosives were used in the...

WASHINGTON: In a makeshift prison in the north of Poland, Al Qaeda's engineer of mass murder faced off against his Central Intelligence Agency interrogator. It was 18 months after the 9/11 attacks, and the invasion of Iraq was giving Muslim extremists new motives for havoc. If anyone knew about the next plot, it was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. The interrogator, Deuce Martinez, a soft-spoken analyst who spoke no Arabic, had turned down a CIA offer to be trained in waterboarding. He chose to leave the infliction of pain and panic to others, the gung-ho paramilitary types whom the more cerebral interrogators...

<p>A human rights group alleges the U.S. has operated detention facilities for terror suspects aboard Naval vessels, according to a published report in a European newspaper Monday.</p> <p>A study compiled by Reprieve says the U.S. may have used as many as 17 vessels as 'prison ships' where terror detainees were subjected to interrogation as part of the acknowledged rendition program operated since 2001, The Guardian reported.</p>

Politicians and human rights groups want to go on board US-registered planes that are believed to be carrying terror suspects when they land in Norway for refueling. Planes believed to be chartered by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have landed at the Sola Airport outside Stavanger as many as 15 times since 2003, reports local newspaper Stavanger Aftenblad. It's also believed that the planes, officially owned by Aviation Specialties Inc of the US, have landed for refueling at airports in Bergen and Evenes as well. A report to the European Parliament in 2006 claimed that Aviation Specialties is a...

Hundreds of Iraqis and Afghans captured by British and American special forces were rendered to prisons where they faced torture, a former SAS soldier said yesterday. Ben Griffin said individuals detained by SAS troops in a joint UK-US special forces taskforce had ended up in interrogation centres in Iraq, including the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, and in Afghanistan, as well as Guantánamo Bay. (BREAK) He said he had not himself witnessed torture or mistreatment. But he added: "I have no doubt in my mind that non-combatants I personally detained were handed over to the Americans and subsequently tortured."

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Bush administration is bracing for a diplomatic backlash after conceding it used British territory to transport suspected terrorists on secret rendition flights despite repeated earlier assurances the U.S. had not. U.S. officials have sought to quell the fallout by apologizing to Britain for what they said was an "administrative error." The admission, however, may reopen a bitter debate between the United States and its allies over how the fight against terrorism should be conducted and compromise future cooperation. "Mistakes were made in the reporting of the information," said Gordon Johndroe, National Security Council spokesman for President...

A federal judge on Wednesday tossed out a lawsuit that accused a Boeing Co. subsidiary of illegally helping the CIA secretly fly terrorism suspects to overseas prisons to be tortured. U.S. District Court Judge James Ware ruled that national security could be jeopardized if the lawsuit was allowed to go forward. CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden had earlier invoked the government's so-called "state secrets privilege," which lets intelligence agencies bar the use of evidence in court cases that jeopardize national security. In public and confidential statements filed with the court, Hayden urged the judge to dismiss the lawsuit filed by...