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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...

Kiriakou, 47, was a source for stories by The New York Times and other news organizations in 2008 and 2009 about some of the agency’s most sensitive operations after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. ......... that the information Kiriakou supplied to journalists ... enabling defense attorneys there to obtain photographs of CIA operatives suspected of being involved in harsh interrogations. Some of the pictures were subsequently discovered in the cells of high-value detainees.

This image from the FBI website shows Anas al-Libi. Gunmen in a three-car convoy seizedNazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai, known by his alias Anas al-Libi, an al-Qaeda leader connected to the1998 embassy bombings in eastern Africa and wanted by the U.S. for more than a decade outside hishouse Saturday in the Libyan capital, his relatives said. (AP Photo/FBI) In a time when the current administration appears to favor kills over capture as well as "catch and release", last Saturday Abu Anas al-Libi (Zawahiri's man in Libya) survived President Obama's kill list to be captured instead of droned upon: Since President Obama stepped...

Four detainees held for more than a decade at the U.S. military detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have been transferred to Afghanistan, the Pentagon announced Saturday. The Afghan detainees were released late Friday at the request of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani — an indication, one senior administration official said, “of the confidence we have in the new government” in Kabul. Ghani’s request, the official added, was made in October, shortly after he was sworn into office. The United States and Afghanistan have not started serious discussions about repatriating the remaining eight Afghans still held at Guantanamo Bay, said the...

Obama’s Amazing AchievementsHis military intervention prompted some stunning reversals. By bombing Libya, President Obama has accomplished some things once thought absolutely impossible in America:(a) War-mongering liberals: Liberals are now chest-thumping about military “progress” in Libya. Even liberal television and radio commentators cite ingenious reasons why an optional, preemptive American intervention in an oil-producing Arab country, without prior congressional approval or majority public support — and at a time of soaring deficits — is well worth supporting, in a sort of “my president, right or wrong,” fashion. Apparently, liberal foreign policy is returning to the pre-Vietnam days of the hawkish “best...

The view from (some) on the right in regard to the Bin Laden news is: waterboarding is vindicated. One GOP Congressman tweeted: Wonder what President Obama thinks of water boarding now? The reason is that there's a direct line to be traced from the big news to data collected at GITMO -- data that was almost certainly collected under duress. Here's the key interrogation note regarding a courier going to Abottabad: Rest @ link

An appellate court in Milan upheld on Wednesday the conviction of 23 Americans charged with kidnapping an Egyptian cleric in 2003 and ordered even harsher sentences. All but one of the Americans are Central Intelligence Agency operatives.

ISLAMABAD: The government handed a foreigner to the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on Sunday. The suspect, Muhammad Haris, was wanted by the United States in a number of cases. His nationality was not revealed. Sources said Mr Haris had been arrested a while ago from an undisclosed location and was under trial in jail. The sources said he had been flown to the United States. The Interior Ministry refused to comment. Online

Ministers insisted that British secret agents would only be allowed to pass intelligence to the CIA to help it capture Osama bin Laden if the agency promised he would not be tortured, it has emerged. MI6 believed it was close to finding the al-Qaida leader in Afghanistan in 1998, and again the next year. The plan was for MI6 to hand the CIA vital information about Bin Laden. Ministers including Robin Cook, the then foreign secretary, gave their approval on condition that the CIA gave assurances he would be treated humanely. The plot is revealed in a 75-page report by...

Attorney General Eric Holder is reportedly mulling whether to investigate the Bush administration's alleged abuse of terrorist detainees. And CIA Director Leon Panetta is currently prodding lawmakers to investigate the Bush administration's alleged directive to the CIA to keep a secret counter-terrorism program hidden from congress. However, before the US Justice Dept. and Congress follow the marching orders of Eric Holder and Leon Panetta, proper protocol would dictate that they first investigate whether Mr. Holder and Panetta, while working in the Clinton administration, had any knowledge of the Clinton administration's extraordinary renditions program. Bear in mind that in 1993, Leon...

CIA Pick Panetta: No More Torture, Renditions Thursday, February 5, 2009 3:41 PM WASHINGTON — CIA Director nominee Leon Panetta says the Obama administration will not conduct the same kind of "extraordinary rendition" that were allowed under the Bush administration. Panetta told a Senate committee on Thursday that Obama forbids what Panetta called "that kind of extraordinary rendition — when we send someone for the purpose of torture or actions by another country that violate our human values." CIA Director Michael Hayden has said that the Bush administration moved secret prisoners between countries for interrogations and imprisonment, separate from the...

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 Bush could pardon officials involved in brutal interrogations -- but he may also face a sweeping investigation under the new president. WASHINGTON -- With growing talk in Washington that President Bush may be considering an unprecedented "blanket pardon" for people involved in his administration's brutal interrogation policies, advisors to Barack Obama are pressing ahead with plans for a nonpartisan commission to investigate alleged abuses under Bush. The Obama plan, first revealed by Salon in August, would emphasize fact-finding investigation over prosecution. It is gaining currency in Washington as Obama advisors begin to coordinate with Democrats in Congress on the...

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...

MANCHESTER, England - A city police chief who led an investigation into charges that Britain cooperated with secret CIA flights to transport terrorism suspects without formal proceedings has been found dead, his deputy said Tuesday. Manchester Chief Constable Michael Todd, 50, was found dead in Snowdonia, about 240 miles northwest of London, Deputy Chief Constable Dave Whatton said. He had been missing since going out for a walk Monday during his day off. Whatton said the body, which was found Tuesday afternoon, had not yet been formally identified but he believed it was Todd. He said a coroner's inquest would...

Bucharest and Brussels, 16 Nov. (AKI) - Romania, one two countries accused by Europe's top human rights watchdog of hosting secret CIA jails used to interrogate Islamist terrorism suspects, says it has written to the European Union executive denying the charges. The letter to the European Commission is a response to a request from EU justice and security commissioner Franco Frattini asking Romania and Poland - the other country implicated by the Council of Europe - for an explanation. A Romanian spokeswoman in Brussels, Doris Mircea, said that a committee of inquiry set up by the government concluded that the...

Prosecutors in Italy have issued three more arrest warrants over the kidnapping of an Egyptian imam based in Milan by a team of CIA agents. Among those wanted in connection with the operation, which led to the man - Abu Omar - being tortured in Egypt, is a 38-year-old female CIA agent who was working as a diplomat at the US embassy in Rome and is said to have led the operation. Betnie Medero, who was second secretary at the embassy until a few months ago, is one of 22 CIA agents now wanted by Italian police over the kidnapping,...

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...

CIA's 'secret prisons in Europe' By Henry Samuel in Paris Last Updated: 2:16am BST 09/06/2007 The CIA ran secret prisons in Poland and Romania to interrogate and even torture some detainees in its "war on terror" under a programme authorised by the countries' presidents, an official European inquiry concluded yesterday. Swiss senator Dick Marty said evidence of CIA-run detention facilities in Europe would stand up in court Swiss senator Dick Marty said Poland housed some of the CIA's most sensitive prisoners - so-called "high value" detainees - including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-professed mastermind of the September 11 attacks in...

For the second time in just over a month, the Italian government has asked a top court to stop a pending trial of 26 Americans, most of them CIA agents, in a case that could provide the first public examination of a secret U.S. program that targeted alleged terror suspects from foreign lands. The State Committee of Lawyers, a government advisory board, was asked to review the procedures that led to indictments handed down last month in connection with the abduction from Milan of a radical cleric named Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, also known as Abu Omar. The government sent...