Germany (catch all, incl. terrorism)

[marct]

Another story from CBC.ca. We really don't need this type of operation going on...

Berlin issues warrants for 13 CIA agents in German kidnapping
Last Updated: Wednesday, January 31, 2007 | 5:51 AM ET
The Associated Press

Arrest warrants have been issued for 13 people in connection with the alleged CIA-orchestrated kidnapping of a German citizen, a Munich prosecutor said Wednesday.

Prosecutor Christian Schmidt-Sommerfeld said the warrants were issued in the past few days. He did not say for whom the warrants were issued, but indicated a statement would be issued later Wednesday.

Munich prosecutors have previously said that they had received from Spanish investigators the names of several U.S. secret agents believed to be involved in the kidnapping of Khaled al-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent.

Al-Masri says he was abducted in December 2003 at the Serbian-Macedonia border and flown by the CIA to a detention centre in Kabul, Afghanistan, where he was abused. Al-Masri says he was released in Albania in May 2004 after the CIA discovered they had the wrong person.

More...

[RTK]

Another story from CBC.ca. We really don't need this type of operation going on...

Throw this into the catagory of "Bad PR." I completely concur with Marc is that its stories like this that do very little for the greater common good. If true, it's a damning statement about the state of the intel community.

[tequila]

That el-Masri was released (apparently dumped off on some street in Albania, oddly) and that Chancellor Merkel feels comfortable stating that Condoleeza Rice told her that el-Masri was innocent should indicate that the man was obviously not someone who deserved to be taken to Bagram and beaten the crap out of.

Now whether or not CIA agents should be subject to arrest for this is another story. Frankly I am amazed that there is not some kind of program to make amends and hush money to people we have snatched up in error (see also this guy). What happens instead is that these folks sue in righteous outrage and expose lots of things that the U.S. would rather not see come to light.

[Stan]

Gentlemen, It gets worse.
Jane Fonda's little party raiser in DC is storming the Baltic press.
She even managed to keep her banner with their website in plain view. Go figure. The bad part is on their site.

http://www.unitedforpeace.org/

A solid majority of people in this country oppose the Iraq War. Imagine if, instead of sitting on the sidelines, all these millions joined the movement to bring the troops home. It's up to all of us to make the peace movement visible in our communities every day and to inspire others to get involved.

Together with this paragraph is a link for the attached T-shirt. Yep, for 20.00 bucks you get this T from "Good Storm dot com"

What a bunch of Bravo Sierra !

Regards, Stan

[120mm]

This is a disturbing trend: European nations or their citizens suing or charging with crimes folks who make "mistakes" (or not) in the prosecution of the "War on Terror."

Innocents are killed, detained or otherwise in war. There needs to be a mechanism to deal with this.

Guilty folks are also detained and later released, and being detained and released shouldn't be financially lucrative, whatever the compensation scheme.

I served as an Interrogator for a few years, and nowhere in my training was it considered "okay" to torture a subject. Are we just throwing around the word "torture" liberally here, or are there really CIA guys with cattle prods out there torturing people? Either scenario is unacceptable, by my view.

[Stan]

In yesterday's press:
http://www.epl.ee/artikkel/314720
Here's a brief translation (Slapout's still studying his Estonian :

The Finnish media quoted a Human Rights Watch report, which indicated that somewhere in the beginning of 2003, aircraft N313P was destined for Pärnu, Estonia.

Pärnu is Estonia's Summer resort town, 170 clicks south of the capital.

Estonia's Foreign Ministry Public Affairs Officer, referring to the US aircraft landing in Pärnu, replied "this was a USA/Estonian military and security police exercise, and the content of this cooperation is protected by the "State Secrets Act". The government has already reported that no kidnapped persons have been brought into Estonia by aircraft."

[tequila]

120mm, I think the main accusation in Maher Arar and Khaled el-Masri is that these men were kidnapped and then rendered to Syria and Afghanistan, respectively, where they both say they were tortured by foreign nationals for the CIA.

Not sure why you believe there should be no compensation. These men were innocent. They were summarily kidnapped, imprisoned for months at a time, and brutally tortured both mentally and physically, with no recourse to appeal or due process. Why should the government not compensate them for the government's error?

[120mm]

I'm sorry you misunderstood my post. I never wanted to even imply that there should be no compensation.

Note that I said there needs to be a mechanism for this. That mechanism would need to include compensation for real loss of income, inconvenience and may even be punitive in nature (accounting for pain/suffering).

On the other hand, when we pick up a bad guy and then return him/her into the wild for whatever reason, we need to avoid rewarding them for "not being prosecutable just yet."

I think the phrase "kidnapped" is being thrown around pretty loosely, here, as well.

[tequila]

I see --- so we are actually pretty much in total agreement about compensation, then.

I would not use the word "arrested" because these men were taken into a system that was explicitly extra-legal and were not accorded due process. Also, given the warrants issued in both Italy and Germany, it appears that the local and national authorities were not made aware (odd that this does not appear to have occurred in Canada, where the local authorities were complicit and have recently paid millions in compensation to Arar). "Detained" sounds, frankly, a bit too neutral given the ultimate fate of these and many other men. We did not take them to Syria for interrogation of the usual sort, for instance.