Reykjavik Transit

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said he had not read the report on a software engineer exonerated of involvement in terrorism, but said, "We were not responsible for his removal to Syria,” adding, “I’m not aware that he was tortured." here The CIA had no comment. Gonzales said Arar's removal was a deportation and not rendition. "Even if it were a rendition, we understand as a government what our obligations are with respect to anyone who is rendered by this government to another country," he said. "[I]f in fact he had been rendered to Syria, we would have sought those same kind of assurances, as we do in every case." The engineer, Maher Arar, challenged that assertion. "I don't think they are being truthful about this," he said. here
In his case, he said, a "special removal unit" transported him to Syria via Jordan on what he believes to have been a CIA plane. "They rendered me to a country that they consider sponsors terrorism and that has a legacy of torture," he said.

Nominee to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit "None of us would have signed anything if we had not believed it and absolutely agreed with it," Col. Ronald M. Reed, counsel to the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, said yesterday. "The discussion was nothing out of the ordinary." WP NYT Letter From the Judge Advocates General The letter's proponant, William J. Haynes II, the top civilian lawyer at the Pentagon, has been nominated to the Court of Appeals.

CIA counterterrorism officers have signed up in growing numbers for a government-reimbursed, private insurance plan that would pay their civil judgments and legal expenses if they are sued or charged with criminal wrongdoing.
Former CIA general counsel, Jeffrey H. Smith: More senior people should now be liable, instead of "the officers who carried it out."

"People are worried about a pendulum swing" that could lead to accusations of wrongdoing, said another former CIA officer. In December 2001, with congressional authorization, the CIA expanded the reimbursements to 100 percent for CIA counterterrorism officers. That was about the time J. Cofer Black, then the CIA's counterterrorism chief, told Bush that "the gloves come off" and promised "heads on spikes" in the counterterrorism effort. here

Human Rights Watch, in response to a request from The New York Times, provided a list of 14 men, other than those rendered on Labor Day, who the organization believes have been secretly detained since the Sept. 11 attacks and whose whereabouts are still unknown. HRW NYT Shackled and hooded, 14 men in secret CIA custody were gathered one by one from locations across the world last weekend and flown to a rallying point to await one more flight. For some of the prisoners, it was their third or fourth journey to yet another unknown destination since President Bush approved a covert plan for them to disappear into CIA facilities hidden throughout Eastern Europe and Asia.
On Sunday night, the men -- three Pakistanis, two Yemenis, two Saudis, two Malaysians, a Palestinian, a Libyan, a Somali, an Indonesian and a Tanzanian -- were sedated and placed together onto a flight to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. They arrived Labor Day morning, an unusually quiet time at the Pentagon-run facility.

The Hamdan decision did not mean that the sites could not exist; it just meant that the CIA could no longer handle suspects outside the boundaries of the Geneva Conventions, according to the Administration. President Bush:"The current transfers mean that there are now no terrorists in the CIA program. But as more high-ranking terrorists are captured, the need to obtain intelligence from them will remain critical. And having a CIA program for questioning terrorists will continue to be crucial to getting life-saving information." here

A senior intelligence official said there had been fewer than 100 detainees in the C.I.A. program since its inception shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks. Beyond the 14 suspects moved, the remainder have either been turned over to the Defense Department as so-called unlawful enemy combatants, returned to their countries of origin or sent to nations that have legal proceedings against them. But, he said, "Some of these people have been held for a considerable period of time, and their intelligence value has aged off."
The transfer of suspects to Guantánamo Bay effectively suspended the extraordinary program, in which the intelligence agency became the jailer and interrogator of suspects counterterrorism officials considered the world’s most wanted Islamic extremists. here
CIA officials have worried about being accused of making detainees permanently disappear. here