Tuesday,
March 20, 2007
Italy's Indictments of CIA Agents, Hostile
Act vs US or Asking Americans to Act Like Americans
The
ANNOTICO Report
The
Feb. 26 Wall Street Journal ("The Italian Job"): states "No one
seriously claims ... that the CIA agents were in
Excuse
me!!! Just because
To call the Italian government's insistence on redeeming its own rule of law
"a hostile act against the
By
Nat Hentoff
THE
Published
March 19, 2007
For
the first time, there will be a court trial of the CIA's "extraordinary
renditions" on kidnapping suspected terrorists and sending them to have
information extracted in countries known for their expertise in those techniques.
Defendants in this trial in
As revealed in Stephen Grey's heavily documented book
on CIA renditions, "Ghost Plane," one of the Egyptian interrogation
techniques was to "hang Nasr upside down and
apply live wires to apply electric shocks to the sensitive parts of his body,
including his genitals." On Feb. 11 of this year,
The CIA abductors left extensive evidence of their
involvement while executing the rendition in
But, as reported Feb. 28 by the Associated Press, John
Bellinger, legal adviser to Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice, did have something to say. He is concerned that these
inquiries may weaken
However, as is evident in the European press, citizens
of countries visited by CIA "ghost planes" increasingly are concerned
and angry. Says Kathalijne Buitenweg,
a Dutch member of the European Parliament unconvinced by Mr. Bellinger: "People are being imprisoned without being
tried first. That is unacceptable." But even Mr. Bellinger
has not gone as far as the lead editorial in the Feb. 26 Wall Street Journal
("The Italian Job"): "No one seriously claims ... that the CIA
agents were in
Part of the demands of
European citizens for more exposure of the CIA's violations of international
treaties these sovereign nations have signed are indeed strong indications of
collusion between CIA kidnappers and certain countries' intelligence services.
But to call the Italian government's insistence on redeeming its own rule of
law "a hostile act against the
And on our end, the CIA renditions are lawless, despite the unilateral "special powers"
the president has given the CIA to conduct renditions and to operate its own
secret prisons. (The continuation of this skewering of our rule of law is
permitted by the Military Commissions Act of 2006, signed into law by George W.
Bush.)
A 1998
Consider what our Secretary of State said in the Feb.
5, 2005, London Daily Telegraph: "There cannot be an absence of moral
content in American foreign policy. Europeans giggle at this, but we are not
European, we are American, an d we have different
principles." Not only Europeans have ceased extolling at our claiming
moral and legal principles despite the CIA's "extraordinary
renditions," our treatment of prisoners at
So it was that when, on Feb. 6, nations signed an
international treaty protecting terrorism suspects from being forced to
disappear from any country's streets and kept in secret detention, the
Will the June trial in
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ANNOTICO Reports Can be Viewed and are Fully Archived
at:
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