Italian Judge Hands Down Extraordinary Rendition Convictions

(Associated Press) -- An Italian judge on Wednesday convicted 23 Americans in absentia of the 2003 kidnapping of an Egyptian cleric from a Milan street, in a landmark case involving the CIA's extraordinary rendition program in the war on terrorism.

Citing diplomatic immunity, Judge Oscar Magi told the Milan courtroom Wednesday that he was acquitting three other Americans.

Former Milan CIA station chief, Robert Seldon Lady, received eight years in prison. The other 22 convicted American defendants each received a five-year sentence.

The Americans, all but one identified by prosecutors as CIA agents, were tried in absentia as subsequent Italian governments refused or ignored prosecutors' extradition request.
In Washington, CIA spokesman George Little declined to comment on the convictions. He said,

"The CIA has not commented on any of the allegations surrounding Abu Omar," the kidnapped man.

Lawyers for the 23 convicted Americans said they would appeal the convictions. The Americans remain fugitives from Italian justice and prosecutor Armando Spataro said he was considering asking the government to issue an international arrest warrant on the strength of the conviction. The government of Silvio Berlusconi, a close ally of President George W. Bush, has previously refused.

Magi said he was acquitting five Italian defendants because an Italian high court ruled key evidence inadmissible as classified. Two of the Italian defendants were convicted as accomplices to kidnapping and received three-year sentences.

The verdict "sends a strong signal of the crimes committed by the CIA in Europe," said Joanne Mariner of Human Rights Watch. The crimes were "unacceptable and unjustified," said Mariner, who was in the courtroom for the verdict at the end of the nearly 3-year-long trial.

The Americans were accused of kidnapping Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, on Feb. 17, 2003, in Milan, then transferring him to U.S. bases in Italy and Germany. He was then moved to Egypt, where he says he was tortured. He has since been released, but has not been permitted to leave Egypt to attend the trial.

The trial is the first by any government over the CIA's extraordinary rendition program, which transferred suspects overseas for interrogation. Human rights advocates charge that renditions were the CIA's way to outsource the torture of prisoners to countries where it is permitted.
The Milan proceedings have been a sore spot in relations between the United States and Italy.

The CIA has declined to comment on the case, and Italy's government has denied involvement.
Among the Americans acquitted was Jeffrey Castelli, a former Rome CIA station chief, who prosecutors had alleged coordinated the abduction. The two other acquitted Americans were also assigned to the U.S. Embassy in the Italian capital and thus were covered by broad diplomatic immunity.

The trial continued despite obstacles that threatened to derail it, including Rome's refusal to cooperate with prosecutors.

In addition, Italy's highest court ruled some key evidence inadmissible because it is considered classified — including dossiers seized from the Rome apartment of an Italian intelligence agent and the testimony of a carabinieri officer allegedly at the scene of the kidnapping. That ruling was cited in the acquittal of the main Italian defendants, including the former head of military intelligence.

The government's will to enforce the verdict against the Americans, however, is unlikely to be tested any time soon. Sentences in Italy aren't served until all appeals are exhausted, a process that can take years.

The court also ruled that those convicted must pay 1 million euros to the Egyptian in damages and 500,000 euros to his wife.

For more on legal challenges to the CIA's extraordinary rendition program, see my piece Extraordinary Rendition on Trial in the February 2008 issue of In These Times.

More on Extraordinary Rendition:

+ Human Rights Watch Statement on the Italian Case

+ ACLU Fact Sheet on Extraordinary Rendition

+ Jane Mayer's 2005 New Yorker article on the case of Canadian citizen Maher Arar who was rendered in 2002 to Syria, where he was tortured, before being released a year later without being charged with anything.

Music to Torture By

R.E.M and Pearl Jam are leading a coalition of international musicians in an official Freedom of Information Act request for information about the use of music torture in Guantánamo Bay and around the world.

The coalition includes Trent Reznor, Jackson Browne, Rise Against, Rosanne Cash, Billy Bragg, the Roots and is backed by UK-based human rights group Reprieve.

Under the Bush administration, blasting music at detainees for weeks on end was commonplace in Guantánamo and at U.S. secret prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

The United Nations has banned the use of music as torture under the UN Convention Against Torture, although the Convention has gone largely unenforced, Reprieve said in a press release issued on October 22..

Lt Gen Ricardo Sanchez, the then U.S. military commander in Iraq, authorized it on September 14 2003, “to create fear, disorient … and prolong capture shock”.

Binyam Mohammed, whose case I wrote about for In These Times in February 2008, was rendered by the CIA in 2002 and held for months at the notorious “Dark Prison” in Afghanistan where, among other techniques, he was subjected to blaring music.

“There was loud music, (Eminem’s) Slim Shady and Dr Dre for 20 days. I heard this non-stop over and over,” he told his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith.

Mohammed was subsequently transferred to Guantánamo Bay and held there until February 2009, when he was released to the United Kingdom after charges against him were dropped.

The FOIA request aims to expose the widespread use of music torture by the U.S., and was orchestrated by the U.S. campaign group No More Guantánamos and supported by Reprieve. It was sent to the CIA, FBI, Department of Defense, U.S. Army Special Operations Command, U.S. Central Command, U.S. Southern Command, U.S. Joint Forces Command, Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Department of Army.

“At Guantanamo, the U.S. government turned a jukebox into an instrument of torture," said Thomas Blanton, executive director of the National Security Archive, a freedom of information organization that is assisting the musicians in seeking the documents. "The musicians and the public have the right to know how an expression of popular culture was transformed into an enhanced interrogation technique."

Guitarist Tom Morello (pictured above), whose music with the band Rage Against the Machine has been linked to torture tactics at the prison, said: “Guantánamo is known around the world as one of the places where human beings have been tortured – from water boarding, to stripping, hooding and forcing detainees into humiliating sexual acts - playing music for 72 hours in a row at volumes just below that to shatter the eardrums. Guantánamo may be Dick Cheney’s idea of America, but it’s not mine. The fact that music I helped create was used as a tactic against humanity sickens me – we need to end torture and close Guantánamo now."

The Global Justice Movement Evolves

From the November issue of In These Times

When activists from around the world took to the streets of Pittsburgh in late September to protest the gathering of the Group of Twenty nations (G-20), they were not only putting the new administration in Washington on notice that “change” is more than a campaign slogan. They were reaffirming their commitment to a world that represents the interests of the poor and disadvantaged over that of the powered elite.

The near collapse of the global economy in 2008—which exposed the failings of neoliberalism—has propelled the anti-globalization movement to a level of renewed relevance.

“Positions the movement had in the late 1990s—being against deregulation for example—are now becoming more popular,” Heather Gautney, an expert on global justice, said in an interview with Fordham University magazine In Focus. “Even mainstream politicians are saying ‘we didn’t regulate corporations and look what happened.’”

That’s quite a leap from 2001, when more than a few critics had written off the anti-globalization movement off as a relic of the ’90s and a victim of the shift in discourse that followed the terror attacks in New York and Washington. Following 9/11, to question American motives and actions was tantamount to defeatism, while the type of direct action associated with the so-called “Black Bloc”— the tell-tale black-clad anarchist youth, which for better or worse had for years served as the public face of anti-globalization—became unthinkable.

Writing in 2001, Murray Dobbin, an author and analyst with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, called for a “reassessment of our language and tactics” and the need to transition the movement from “anti-globalization” to “pro-democracy.”

Around the same time, Joshua Karliner, in the essay “Where Do We Go From Here?” published in the online magazine CorpWatch, warned that the movement risked becoming marginalized— "a mere footnote to an ongoing narrative of injustice and war”—if it didn’t “assert the relevance of our issues in a sophisticated and nuanced way.”

In the midst of this movement soul searching, in 2003 the United States invaded and occupied Iraq. For the next six years many domestic activists took a hiatus from confronting corporate globalization and pushed for an end to the killing in the Middle East.

“[T]he focus of progressive attention tends to shift in that period,” says Mark Engler, a senior analyst with Foreign Policy in Focus. “With the financial collapse you see a return to some of the attention given to these issues [of globalization]. There is definitely a tremendous amount of public outrage around the world about…neoliberal capitalism’s failure to support working people.”

That outrage was on display in the streets of Pittsburgh, where thousands of youth who cut their teeth protesting the Iraq War joined thousands more veteran activists in challenging the G-20 on issues ranging from trade to the environment.

Whether the larger coalition of groups protesting neoliberalism —which by 2002 had rejected the term anti-globalization in favor of “global justice”—will succeed in fully leveraging this momentum depends on the extent to which it has heeded the calls to evolve following 9/11.

Among the more persistent criticisms has been the movement’s emphasis on polemics over positing constructive alternatives to prevailing global policy. “There were so many negative things happening, we didn’t really have time to think about how the movement was unfolding,” Dobbin says. “In trying to enlighten people to what was wrong, we ended up telling them over and over how bad things were instead of telling people how it could be better.”

Eight years after he called for a movement-wide “reassessment,” Dobbin says the global justice movement has begun to articulate its vision and build the foundations necessary for realizing it. The World Social Forum (WSF) is an example of this, he says.

Held annually since 2001 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, the WSF was conceived as the antithesis of the World Economic Forum, which is held the same time each year in Davos, Switzerland. For one week each January, WSF brings together a diverse group of individuals and global justice organizations to debate policy and build solidarity.

The forum has emerged as the first global platform for discussing strategies of resistance to neoliberal globalization. More importantly, it has served as a model for similar gatherings like the U.S. Social Forum, which held its inaugural meeting in Atlanta in 2007.

Engler points to groups like the Stiglitz Commission, Global Unions and Global Trade Watch, which put forth viable, alternative models of global economic cooperation at the international level. “There is a very detailed set of demands; the problem is not that the ideas are not there, the problem is that [global leaders] don’t want to listen,” he says.

Then there’s the question of destructive behavior, which a majority of global justice activists say draws media attention away from more constructive voices. Though the “Black Bloc” remains a visible part of the global justice movement, in general there has been a shift away from indiscriminate violence and property damage.

During Pittsburgh’s G-20 protests, a handful of young people took it upon themselves to destroy property—mostly breaking windows at corporate-owned businesses—and their actions were mostly condemned by other protesters. By the end of the summit, Pittsburgh Police were blaming most of the property damage—a relatively paltry $50,000 worth—on a single protester from California, 21-year old David Japenga.

Gautney says the move away from destructive protest shouldn’t come as a surprise. “There are so many great projects these kids are working on—building squat communities and giving homes to illegal immigrants, organic farming, Food Not Bombs’ programs, feeding Katrina victims,” she says. “They are not just fighting in the streets.”

The global justice movement’s strength lies in its diversity and the fact that as a constantly evolving organism, it has the flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances and issues. “You can’t talk about a protest movement as a single thing because there are actually lots of different constituencies involved in this both globally and locally,” Engler says. “That’s why it’s called a ‘movement of movements.’"

G-20: A photo essay from Pittsburgh’s streets

R.I.P. Jim Carroll

The Elders' View Of the Middle East

By Jimmy Carter
The Washington Post (9/6/09)

During the past 16 months I have visited the Middle East four times and met with leaders in Israel, Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, the West Bank and Gaza. I was in Damascus when President Obama made his historic speech in Cairo, which raised high hopes among the more-optimistic Israelis and Palestinians, who recognize that his insistence on a total freeze of settlement expansion is the key to any acceptable peace agreement or any positive responses toward Israel from Arab nations.

Late last month I traveled to the region with a group of "Elders," including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former presidents Fernando Henrique Cardoso of Brazil and Mary Robinson of Ireland, former prime minister Gro Brundtland of Norway and women's activist Ela Bhatt of India. Three of us had previously visited Gaza, which is now a walled-in ghetto inhabited by 1.6 million Palestinians, 1.1 million of whom are refugees from Israel and the West Bank and receive basic humanitarian assistance from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. Israel prevents any cement, lumber, seeds, fertilizer and hundreds of other needed materials from entering through Gaza's gates. Some additional goods from Egypt reach Gaza through underground tunnels. Gazans cannot produce their own food nor repair schools, hospitals, business establishments or the 50,000 homes that were destroyed or heavily damaged by Israel's assault last January.

We found a growing sense of concern and despair among those who observe, as we did, that settlement expansion is continuing apace, rapidly encroaching into Palestinian villages, hilltops, grazing lands, farming areas and olive groves. There are more than 200 of these settlements in the West Bank.

An even more disturbing expansion is taking place in Palestinian East Jerusalem. Three months ago I visited a family who had lived for four generations in their small, recently condemned home. They were laboring to destroy it themselves to avoid much higher costs if Israeli contractors carried out the demolition order. On Aug. 27, we Elders took a gift of food to 18 members of the Hanoun family, recently evicted from their home of 65 years. The Hanouns, including six children, are living on the street, while Israeli settlers have moved into their confiscated dwelling.

Daily, headlines in Jerusalem newspapers say that certain areas and types of construction would be excluded from the settlement freeze and that it would, at best, have a limited duration. Increasingly desperate Palestinians see little prospect of their plight being alleviated; political, business and academic leaders are making contingency plans should President Obama's efforts fail.

We saw considerable interest in a call by Javier Solana, secretary general of the Council of the European Union, for the United Nations to endorse the two-state solution, which already has the firm commitment of the U.S. government and the other members of the "Quartet" (Russia and the United Nations). Solana proposes that the United Nations recognize the pre-1967 border between Israel and Palestine, and deal with the fate of Palestinian refugees and how Jerusalem would be shared. Palestine would become a full U.N. member and enjoy diplomatic relations with other nations, many of which would be eager to respond. Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad described to us his unilateral plan for Palestine to become an independent state.

A more likely alternative to the present debacle is one state, which is obviously the goal of Israeli leaders who insist on colonizing the West Bank and East Jerusalem. A majority of the Palestinian leaders with whom we met are seriously considering acceptance of one state, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. By renouncing the dream of an independent Palestine, they would become fellow citizens with their Jewish neighbors and then demand equal rights within a democracy. In this nonviolent civil rights struggle, their examples would be Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela.

They are aware of demographic trends. Non-Jews are already a slight majority of total citizens in this area, and within a few years Arabs will constitute a clear majority.

A two-state solution is clearly preferable and has been embraced at the grass roots.

Just south of Jerusalem, the Palestinian residents of Wadi Fukin and the nearby Israeli villagers of Tzur Hadassah are working together closely to protect their small shared valley from the ravages of rock spill, sewage and further loss of land from a huge settlement on the cliff above, where 26,000 Israelis are rapidly expanding their confiscated area. It was heartwarming to see the international harmony with which the villagers face common challenges and opportunities.

There are 25 similar cross-border partnerships between Israelis and their Palestinian neighbors. The best alternative for the future is a negotiated peace agreement, so that the example of Wadi Fukin and Tzur Hadassah can prevail along a peaceful border between two sovereign nations.

Texas May Soon Become First State to Admit Executing an Innocent Person

Reprinted from InnocenceProject.org

An exhaustive new investigative report shows that Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in Texas in 2004, was innocent. The report comes three years after the Innocence Project released analysis from some of the nation’s leading forensic experts who found that the central evidence against Willingham was not valid. The Innocence Project also obtained public records showing that Texas officials ignored this evidence in the days leading up to Willingham’s execution.

Willingham was convicted of arson murder in 1992 and was executed in February 2004. His three young children died at a fire in the family’s Corsicana, Texas, home. At Willingham’s trial, forensic experts testified that evidence showed the fire was intentionally set. A jailhouse informant also testified against Willingham, and other circumstantial evidence was used against him.

A 16,000-word report in the September 7 issue of the New Yorker deconstructs every facet of the case, finding that none of the evidence against Willingham was valid. Prior to the New Yorker’s investigative report, by David Grann, the forensic science had been debunked as completely erroneous (including in a 2004 investigative report in the Chicago Tribune), but the other evidence was never examined closely.

“The New Yorker’s investigation lays out this case in its totality and leads to the inescapable conclusion that Willingham was innocent. There can no longer be any doubt that an innocent person has been executed,” said Innocence Project Co-Director Barry Scheck. “The question now turns to how we can stop it from happening again.”

“As long as our system of justice makes mistakes – including the ultimate mistake – we cannot continue executing people,” Scheck said. “This case also highlights serious problems with forensic science in this country. The vast majority of forensic scientists are honest, capable, hard-working professionals, but we aren’t giving them the tools they need to do the job. Congress needs to create a National Institute of Forensic Science that can spark research to determine the accuracy of forensic disciplines and set standards for how our system of justice uses science.”

In May 2006, the Innocence Project (which is affiliated with Cardozo School of Law) formally submitted the Willingham case to the Texas Forensic Science Commission, along with information about another arson case and a request that the panel order a review of arson convictions across the state. In the other arson case, Ernest Willis was convicted of an unrelated arson murder and sentenced to death in 1987, and he served 17 years in prison before he was exonerated. The May 2006 filing included a 48-page report from an independent five-member panel of some of the nation’s leading arson investigators, who reviewed more than 1,000 pages of evidence, testimony and official documents in the two cases.

In the report, the arson experts – with a combined 138 years of experience in the field – say that neither of the fires which Willingham and Willis were convicted of setting were arson. The expert report notes that the evidence and forensic analysis in the Willingham and Willis cases “were the same,” and that “each and every one” of the forensic interpretations that state experts made in both men’s trials have been proven scientifically invalid.

In 2007, the Texas Forensic Science Commission announced that it had accepted the Innocence Project’s complaint and would launch an investigation. The commission contracted with Craig Beyler, a widely respected arson expert, to conduct an independent review of the evidence. Last week, Beyler filed his report with the commission, finding that the forensic analysis in Willingham’s case was wrong. The commission announced that it is reviewing Beyler’s report and will review other evidence before issuing its conclusion next year.

“The Forensic Science Commission is still looking at this case and the broader issue of arson convictions statewide. Members of the commission are clearly taking this very seriously, carefully and thoughtfully, and they should have the space to do their work,” Scheck said. “The Forensic Science Commission is not going to determine whether an innocent man was executed. The New Yorker has already done that. The commission will determine what went wrong with the forensic analysis, how widespread the problem is and how we can be sure similar analysis is more reliable in the future.”