Reykjavik Transit

Bayrock’s “white elephants” included the 46-story Trump SoHo condo-hotel on Spring Street in New York City, for which the principle developer was a partnership formed by Bayrock and FL Group, an Icelandic investment company. FL Group’s willingness to generously finance Bayrock’s its rather poorly-conceived Trump projects, peculiar Russian/FSU/Brooklyn team,  and its purported tax dodging were about Iceland’s “special” relationship with Russian finance. In this regard, there are several puzzles to be resolved.    Bayrock Group LLC, a spectacularly unsuccessful New York real estate development company that surfaced in the early 2000s and, by 2014, had all but disappeared except for a few lawsuits. As of 2007, Bayrock and its partners reportedly had more than $2 billion of Trump-branded deals in the works. But most of these either never materialized.

First, it turns out that FL Group, Iceland’s largest private investment fund until it crashed in 2008, had several owners/investors with deep Russian business connections, including several key investors in all three top Iceland banks.

Second, it turns out that FL Group had constructed an incredible maze of cross-shareholding, lending, and cross-derivatives relationships with all these major banks, as illustrated by the following snapshot of cross-shareholding among Iceland’s financial institutions and companies as of 2008.
This thicket of cross-dealing made it almost impossible to regulate “control fraud,” where insiders at leading financial institutions went on a self-serving binge, borrowing and lending to finance risky investments of all kinds. It became difficult to determine which institutions were net borrowers or investors, as the concentration of ownership and self-dealing in the financial system just soared.

Third, FL Group make a variety of peculiar loans to Russian-connected oligarchs as well as to Bayrock. For example, as discussed below, Alex Shnaider, the Russian-Canadian billionaire who later became Donald Trump’s Toronto business partner, secured a €45.8 million loan to buy a yacht from Kaupthing Bank during the same period, while a company belonging to another Russian billionaire who reportedly owns an important vodka franchise got an even larger loan.27

Fourth, Iceland’s largest banks also made a series of extraordinary loans to Russian interests during the run-up to the 2008 crisis. For example, one of Russia’s wealthiest oligarchs, a close friend of President Putin, nearly managed to secure at least €400 million (or, some say, up to four times that much) from Kaupthing, Iceland’s largest bank, in late September 2008, just as the financial crisis was breaking wide open. This bank also had important direct and indirect investments in FL Group. Indeed, until December 2006, it is reported to have employed the FL Group private equity manager who allegedly negotiated Felix Sater’s $50 million deal in early 2007.28

Fifth, there are unconfirmed accounts of a secret U.S. Federal Reserve report that unnamed Iceland banks were being used for Russian money laundering.29 Furthermore, Kaupthing Bank’s repeated requests to open a New York branch in 2007-08 were rejected by the Fed. Similar unconfirmed rumors repeatedly appeared in Danish and German publications, as did allegations about the supposed Kazakh origins of FLG’s cash to be “laundered” in the Kriss lawsuit.

Sixth, there is the peculiar fact that, when Iceland’s banks went belly-up in October 2008, their private banking subsidiaries in Luxembourg, which were managing at least €8 billion of private assets, were suddenly seized by Luxembourg banking authorities and transferred to a new bank, Banque Havilland. This happened so fast that Iceland’s Central Bank was prevented from learning anything about the identities or portfolio sizes of the Iceland banks’ private offshore clients. But again, there were rumors of some important Russian names.

Finally, there is the rather odd phone call that Russia’s Ambassador to Iceland made to Iceland’s Prime Minister at 6:45 a.m. on October 7, 2008, the day after the financial crisis hit Iceland. According to the PM’s own account, the Russian Ambassador informed him that then-Prime Minister Putin was willing to consider offering Iceland a €4 billion Russian bailout.

Of course this alleged Putin offer was modified not long thereafter into a willingness to entertain an Icelandic negotiating team in Moscow. By the time the Iceland team got to Moscow later that year, Russia’s desire to lend had cooled, and Iceland ended up accepting a $2.1 billion IMF “stabilization package” instead. But according to a member of the negotiating team, the reasons for the reversal are still a mystery.
 An Icelander involved in the country's fraud investigations said that substantial Russian funds are likely to have moved through the banks there, but that it’s a subject Icelanders prefer to avoid -- even though the first country that offered financial aid to Iceland when the 2008 meltdown occurred was Russia, and even though legions of Russian oligarchs frequently jetted in and out of Reykjavik.
The late Boris Berezovksy, once one of the wealthiest and wiliest of Russia's oligarchs, thought the Russia-Iceland connection was obvious. He told a SkyTV interviewer in 2009 that if you wanted to look for where "Putin and his cronies" might be laundering money, well, "the best example, definitely, is Iceland."
Berezovsky was found with a length of his favourite black cashmere scarf around his neck, and a second length was tied around a shower rail above his head on March 23, 2013 in Titness Park, London
  Mr Berezovsky’s death is among up to 14 being reviewed by police and MI5 in light of the nerve agent attack on Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury.  The Trump administration’s trade team is still not fully in place, Hamilton points out. “And it’s up to its eyeballs in trade conflicts and negotiating efforts with NAFTA partners as well as others such as China and the EU.”  Although the administration has stated a preference for bilateral rather than multilateral agreements, the next priority for a new bilateral agreement in Europe would likely be with the post-Brexit U.K. government.   But as Iceland’s place in the Cold War shows, its bilateral agreements with the United States have a long history. Iceland may be prepared to wait.
 Three prominent Icelandic politicians have come forward after emails from Trump in which he pledged to personally match any donations they made. Katrín Jakobsdóttir, head of the Left Green Party, said the letter, in which Trump bashed “Crooked Hillary” her “pathetic cronies” and the “dishonest liberal media,” had left her speechless.
“I have no idea why he emailed me the letter,” MP Guðlaugur Þór Þórðarson, a member of the Independence Party (Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn) and one of the emails recipients,
 "There isn’t enough information to say whether these foreign solicitations were intentional or the result of incompetence,” said Brendan Fischer, an associate counsel at the Campaign Legal Center.

https://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/12/19/the-curious-world-of-donald-trumps-private-russian-connections/

http://icelandmag.is/article/donald-trump-asks-icelandic-mps-financial-assistance

Parliament sees UK logs of takeoffs and landings at Diego Garcia

In April leaked classified CIA documents from a forthcoming US Senate intelligence committee report revealed that the US had held "high value" detainees on Diego Garcia, which has been leased by Britain to the US since 1966, with the "full co-operation" of the British government. The Metropolitan police are currently investigating allegations that an opponent of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi was rendered via Diego Garcia.
At least 10 high-value targets were secretly held and interrogated at Guantánamo’s Camp Echo at various times from late 2003 to 2004. They were then flown to Rabat, Morocco, before being officially sent to the U.S. military’s detention facility at Guantánamo in September 2006.
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/4/9/senate-cia-torture.html
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/12/uk-cia-torture-flights-rendition-programme

http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201415/cmselect/cmfaff/377/37704.htm

The prisoner transfer flight, outlined in documents and interviews, visited five CIA prisons in Afghanistan, Poland, Romania, Morocco and Guantanamo Bay. The flight plan was so poorly thought out, some in the CIA derisively compared it to a five-card straight revealing the program to outsiders: Five stops, five secret facilities, all documented.
The flight logs were compiled by European authorities investigating the CIA program.

The flight started in Kabul, where the CIA picked up al-Hawsawi at the secret prison known as the Salt Pit. The Boeing 737 then flew to Szymany, Poland, where a CIA team picked up professed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and took him to Bucharest, Romania, to the new prison, code-named Britelite.

Next it was on to Rabat, Morocco, where the Moroccans ran an interrogation facility used by the CIA.

At 8:10 p.m. on Sept. 23, 2003, the Boeing 737 took off from a runway in Rabat. On board were al-Hawsawi, al-Nashiri, Zubaydah and Binalshibh. At 1 a.m. the following day, the plane touched down at Guantanamo.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/08/06/ap-exclusive-program-secret-cia-whisked-figures-gitmo-court-ruling/



[February 21 2998]


CIA Director Michael Hayden has now acknowledged that two rendition flights carrying terror suspects refueled on British territory, despite earlier U.S. assurances that none of the secret flights since the Sept. 11 attacks had used British airspace or soil.

Hayden told agency employees that information previously provided to the British "turned out to be wrong."

The spy agency reviewed rendition records late last year and discovered that in 2002 the CIA had in fact refueled two separate planes, each carrying a terror suspect, on Diego Garcia, a British island territory in the Indian Ocean.

"The refueling, conducted more than five years ago, lasted just a short time. But it happened. That we found this mistake ourselves, and that we brought it to the attention of the British government, in no way changes or excuses the reality that we were in the wrong. An important part of intelligence work, inherently urgent, complex, and uncertain, is to take responsibility for errors and to learn from them," Hayden stated in the message obtained by The Associated Press.

Hayden said neither man was tortured and denied there has ever been a holding facility for CIA prisoners on Diego Garcia.

Hayden delivered the news to the British government last weekend on a previously scheduled trip to London.

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband announced the rendition flights earlier Thursday. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he "shared the disappointment that everybody has" about the stops, and it was important to ensure it would not happen again.

One of the two prisoners is now jailed at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base and the other was released to his home country, where he has since been freed by that government, according to a U.S. intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

Neither man was part of the CIA's interrogation and detention program, according to the official. In this case, the CIA only moved them from one country to another. The CIA has held and interrogated fewer than 100 prisoners in its detention program, using "enhanced" or harsh interrogation techniques on about a third of them, Hayden has told Congress.

The rendition program secretly transfers alleged terrorists from one country to another without formal extradition proceedings. It can involve moving prisoners to the custody of governments where harsh interrogation techniques, including torture, are known to be used. The U.S. government insists it does not move prisoners to third countries without assurances that torture will not be used.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters in December 2005 that the United States respects the sovereignty of foreign countries when conducting intelligence operations within their borders, suggesting that the CIA conducts rendition flights with the permission of the governments involved.

The process of getting permission from governments through which rendition flights fly did not begin until after the 2002 flights in question, according to a State Department official.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Thursday that Rice spoke to Miliband about "the administrative error" on Wednesday.

"Unfortunately, even with the best intentions, unfortunately, even with the most rigorous searches and, unfortunately, with good technology, sometimes administrative errors occur and this was the case," McCormack said. "We regret that there was an error in initially providing inaccurate information to a good friend and ally."

McCormack said the review last year was "self-generated."

"We, in taking a look in particular at the issue of Diego Garcia, asked ourselves a few questions and as a result generated this search," he said.

Gordon Johndroe, National Security Council spokesman for President Bush, said the incident was "unfortunate" but will not damage U.S.-British cooperation.

"Mistakes were made in the reporting of the information," he said. "But we will continue to have a good counterterrorism cooperation between the United States and United Kingdom."

Labels: black site, CIA Director Michael Hayden, cia prison, detention, Diego Garcia, extraordinary rendition, high-value, logs, rabat, senate intelligence committee, transfer flight

More than 80% of Husby's 12,000 or so inhabitants are from an immigrant background, and most are from Turkey, the Middle East and Somalia.

Mr Reinfeldt said the situation in the district had been improving in recent years, with more jobs being created and a falling crime rate.

However, local people accused the police of racism. Rami al-Khamisi, a law student and founder of the youth organisation Megafonen, told the Swedish edition of online newspaper The Local that he had been insulted racially by police. Teenagers, he said, had been called "monkeys".

Labels: f Stockholm riots, fifth, fourth night, police, third night, Thirty fires

U.S. officials said that Obama approved the use of “signature” strikes  The expanded authority will allow the CIA and JSOC to fire on targets based solely on their intelligence “signatures” — patterns of behavior that are detected through signals intercepts, human sources and aerial surveillance, and that indicate the presence of an important operative or a plot against U.S. interests.
For eight years, the United States has conducted but never formally acknowledged a program to kill terrorists associated with Al Qaeda and the Taliban away from the battlefield in Afghanistan. Using drones, the Central Intelligence Agency has made 320 strikes in Pakistan since 2004, killing 2,560 or more people, including at least 139 civilians. Another 55 strikes took place in Yemen.

Labels: CIA, drone, jsoc, signature strikes

Abdel Hakin Belhaj, a commander of the rebel forces in Libya, says he was tortured after being arrested in 2004. He says that he was taken from Bangkok to Libya by a joint CIA and MI6 operation which was set up to help Col Muammar Gaddafi round up his enemies.
In the statement, the Metropolitan Police said that it had received a complaint from him relating to his rendition to Libya and information relating to a second similar case.

The statement said: "The allegations raised in the two specific cases concerning the alleged rendition of named individuals to Libya and the alleged ill-treatment of them in Libya are so serious that it is in the public interest for them to be investigated now rather than at the conclusion of the Detainee Inquiry."
Metropolitan Police and Crown Prosecution Service said MI5 and MI6 officers would not be charged over separate torture collusion claims.
He is also suing the UK over his transfer to Libya and subsequent torture.

The government has set up an inquiry into claims of rendition.

Labels: Abdel Hakin Belhaj, libya, metropolitan police, MI5, MI6, rendition

Between 2003 and 2006, the CIA operated a secret prison from the building's basement, bringing in high-value terror suspects for interrogation and detention, minutes from the center of Romania’s capital city of Bucharest. The CIA prison opened for business in the fall of 2003, after the CIA decided to empty the black site in Poland, according to former U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the detention program with reporters.
Shuttling detainees into the facility without being seen was relatively easy. After flying into Bucharest, the detainees were brought to the site in vans. CIA operatives then drove down a side road and entered the compound through a rear gate that led to the actual prison.
The detainees could then be unloaded and whisked into the ground floor of the prison and into the basement.
The basement consisted of six prefabricated cells, each with a clock and arrow pointing to Mecca, the officials said. The cells were on springs, keeping them slightly off balance and causing disorientation among some detainees.
The CIA declined to comment on the prison.
During the first month of their detention, the detainees endured sleep deprivation and were doused with water, slapped or forced to stand in painful positions, several former officials said. Waterboarding, the notorious interrogation technique that simulates drowning, was not performed in Romania, they said.

Labels: black site, bucharest, CIA, cia flights, detainee, extraordinary rendition, Romania

Richmor case suggests that the CIA's practice of using charter flights cost tens of millions of dollars for private planes in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks to transport terror suspects for questioning and its own personnel.to transport . Richmor billed at a rate of $4,900 an hour for the use of the plane and earned at least $6 million over three years, according to the invoices and other court records. Richmor accounted for only a small percentage of the CIA’s business, according to publicly available records. WP

Labels: CIA, detainee, detention, flight, n85vm, richmor. rendition

MI6 Sir John Sawers



MI5 and MI6 secret interrogation policy operated until it was rewritten on the orders of the coalition government last July.: Document shows intelligence officers instructed to weigh importance of information sought against pain inflicted
here

Labels: interrogation policy, MI5, MI6

Guardian quotes Wikileaks:
A senior Irish civil servant warned the US embassy in Dublin that Irish government lawyers might be forced to conclude that Ireland was in violation of torture conventions if aircraft were found to have used Shannon airport for rendition flights involving terrorist suspects, according to a leaked US diplomatic cable.

The 2004 cable was sent as the Irish government was beginning to come under particularly intense pressure over the appearance at Shannon of a Gulfstream jet allegedly used to transport prisoners which allegedly had its tail number changed. The senior civil servant told the diplomats some Irish ministers felt they were "going out on a limb defending US use of Shannon".

There have been a series of WikiLeaks releases on Shannon. In a 2007 cable (published last month) the then Irish foreign minister, Dermot Ahern, was described as "convinced" during a meeting with US diplomats that at least three flights involved in renditions had refuelled at the airport.

The allegations surrounding the jet referred to in the 2004 cable had "raised suspicions and caused confusion" with the Irish government, according to the senior civil servant.

He cautioned that if it were ever to be discovered that the US was not good on its word or had transported prisoners through Shannon in the context of the war on terrorism, there would be enormous political pressure on the government.

As for the legal issue, he said that were a plane to include Shannon in an itinerary that also included transporting prisoners, GOI [government of Ireland] lawyers might be forced to conclude that the GOI itself was in violation of torture conventions

The cable stated that the Jonathan S Benton, deputy chief of mission at the US embassy in Dublin, told the senior civil servant: "that the USG [US government] would be in no position to respond to the detailed questions asked about particular planes, such as the Gulfstream jet, but stood by its commitment to abide by Irish law, consult with the Irish and avoid actions that would bring embarrassment to the Irish government."

Labels: Dermot Ahern, Dublin, Guardian Wikileaks, Gulfstream IV, Ireland, Jonathan S Benton, rendition, Shannon

Amnesty International publishes report on complicity in rendition of EU members such as Poland and other former Eastern Bloc countries. here

Labels: Amnesty International, Bulgaria, complicity, EU, European Union, extraordinary rendition, Poland, rendition detention detainee flight CIA, Romania

“People don’t seem to realize that here in Sudurnes, we are going through the second crisis,”. “It has only been four years since the [US] defense force left the country, at which point more than 1,000 people lost their jobs.

Labels: closing, Iceland, Keflavik, lost jobs, Sudurnes, US Base

By a six-to-five vote, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, reversing an earlier decision, dismissed a lawsuit against Jeppesen Dataplan Inc., a Boeing subsidiary accused of arranging flights for the C.I.A.’s “extraordinary rendition” program, as it is known. The American Civil Liberties Union filed the case on behalf of five former prisoners who say they were tortured because of the program – and that Jeppesen was complicit in their treatment.

Judge Raymond C. Fisher described the case as presenting “a painful conflict between human rights and national security.” But, he said, the majority had “reluctantly” concluded that the lawsuit represented “a rare case” in which the government’s need to protect state secrets trumped the plaintiffs’ need to have any day in court. Judge Fisher took the unusual step of urging the executive branch and Congress at length to consider granting reparations to torture victims if secret records indicated that their allegations were true.

Labels: 9th circuit, CIA, dataplan, detainees, extraordinary rendition, flights, holder, Jeppesen, raymond fisher, USCA

The CIA has tapes of 9/11 plotter Ramzi Binalshibh being interrogated in a secret overseas prison. The tapes depict Binalshibh's interrogation sessions at a Moroccan-run facility the CIA used near Rabat in 2002. more


At 8:10 p.m. on Sept. 23, 2003, the Boeing 737 took off from a runway in Rabat. On board were al-Hawsawi, al-Nashiri, Zubaydah and Binalshibh. At 1 a.m. the following day, the plane touched down at Guantánamo.
In early March 2004, as the legal documents piled up at the Supreme Court, the high court announced that oral arguments would be held in April. After that, a ruling could come at any time, and everyone at the island prison — secretly or not — would be covered.

On March 27,2004, a Gulfstream IV jet left Guantánamo Bay . The plane landed in Rabat the next morning. By the time the Supreme Court ruled June 28 that detainees should have access to U.S. courts, the CIA had once again scattered Zubaydah, al-Nashiri and the others throughout the black sites.

Two years later, after The Washington Post revealed the existence of the program, Bush emptied the prison network. Fourteen men, including the four who had been at Guantánamo Bay years earlier, were moved to the island prison. They have remained there ever since.

Labels: black site, CIA, Mauritania, morocco, rabat, Ramzi Binalshibh, tapes

On June 1, a detainee will stand with a lawyer and plead his case in front of an Afghan judge, said Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, the deputy commander for detention operations.in official detention facility in Parwan, a new prison recently opened at the edge of Bagram Air Base. A January 2011 deadline to hand over the facility has been pushed back, Martins said. The hope now is to transfer some of the holding cells to Afghan control by the end of the year and complete the rest by early 2012.

Fadi al-Maqalah, detainee, et al. v Gates USAppDC 09-5265:

The appellate court ruled that there was no right to federal court review for the detainees, who say they were captured outside of Afghanistan, far from any battlefield, and then shipped to Bagram to be held indefinitely in harsh conditions.

Labels: Afghanistan, Bagram, detainee, Fadi al-Maqalah, Parwan, USAppDC

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit rules the jurisdiction of the U.S. courts does not extend to foreigners held at Bagram Air Force Base in the Afghan theater of war, and reverses a U.S. district judge who allowed the detainees' petitions.
David Sentelle, the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, is an appointee of President Ronald Reagan. Harry Edwards was appointed by President Jimmy Carter, and David Tatel by President Bill Clinton. David Sentelle is the only member who remains from the panel that appointed Kenneth Starr as an independent counsel, who, at the time, was considered to be a partisan choice.

Labels: Afghanistan, Bagram, David Sentelle, David Tatel, detainees, Harry Edwards, prison

The US airbase at Bagram in Afghanistan contains a facility for detainees that is distinct from its main prison,While Mr. Obama signed an order to eliminate so-called black sites run by the Central Intelligence Agency in January, it did not also close this jail, which is run by military Special Operations forces.

Nine former prisoners have told the BBC that they were held in a separate building, and subjected to abuse. The facility is referred to by many former prisoners as the Tor Jail, which translates as "black jail".

The US military says the main prison, now called the Detention Facility in Parwan, is the only detention facility on the base. Manfred Nowak, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on torture, said that the site fell into something of a legal limbo.

Labels: Admiral Olsen, Afghanistan, Bagram, black jail, black site, Parwan, Special Operations forces

Icelanders laughing at our efforts to pronounce that volcano should pronounce the word "match"

easier for you would be the section of New York's West Bronx named for the creek that runs through it:

Spuyten Duyvil

Labels: Eyjafjallajökull, pronounciation, Spuyten Duyvil

The glimpses of televised waterboarding will provoke gasps among the audience. But those who have no interest in the torture of hapless foreigners can forget international affairs and simply revel in the director’s dark enchantments. Mr Polanski has made a perfect film of Mr Harris’s intricate page-turner—one that will outlast his own present difficulties, and Mr Blair’s as well.


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Labels: extraordinary rendition, Polanski, torture, waterboarding

“The Ghost Writer” plays off the British public’s disillusion with Tony Blair and the recurring complaints about Blair’s alleged collaboration with the C.I.A. Yet, when Lang is cornered by the Ghost, the P.M. speaks with impressive conviction. In effect, he defends the use of torture; he takes the Cheneyesque hard line, ridiculing liberals who want safety and, at the same time, the luxury of high-mindedness. The answer to the question of why he’s so acquiescent to the Americans is worked out in thriller (rather than policy) terms. It’s the kind of supposition that may strike viewers, here and in Britain, as frivolous, or just plain wrong, but it’s a fine piece of mischief—suggestive, wounding to Blair, and, as a fiction, emotionally gratifying in the way of le Carré’s conspiracy plots.

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a fine piece of mischief

Labels: Britain, CIA, detainee, extraordinary rendition, flight, Ghost Writer, rendition

Matthew G. Olsen a deputy assistant attorney general in the National Security Division of the Department of Justice.

The Obama administration has decided to continue to imprison without trials nearly 50 detainees at the Guantánamo Bay military prison in Cuba because a high-level task force has concluded that they are too difficult to prosecute but too dangerous to release, an administration official said on January 21.

Labels: Guantánamo Bay, imprison without trial, Matthew G. Olsen

Mark Corallo, a spokesman for Xe Services, said Blackwater was never under contract to participate in covert raids with CIA or Special Forces troops "in Iraq, Afghanistan or anywhere else." Corallo added: "Any allegation to the contrary by any news organization would be false."
Some requests from the field for lethal raids were rejected at CIA headquarters because they posed excessive risks to the U.S. teams or to civilians, or because intelligence experts merely wanted to keep watching the prospective targets.

But when the time came to carry out those raids -- often against figures who were thought to be al-Qaeda leaders -- some CIA field officers assigned responsibilities among the available personnel without regard to which ones were contractors or federal employees, according to the source, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to discuss classified operations.

That meant Blackwater personnel helped to kill some of the targets and did not merely defend the CIA officers taking part in the raids, the source said.

Labels: Blackwater, CIA, detainee, detention, extraordinary rendition, Xe Services

On an almost nightly basis during the height of the Iraqi insurgency from 2004 to 2006, Blackwater personnel played central roles in “snatch and grab” operations, clandestine raids with C.I.A. officers against people suspected of being insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan and the transporting of detainees. Separately, former Blackwater employees said they helped provide security on some C.I.A. flights transporting detainees in the years after the 2001 terror attacks in the United States. George Little, a C.I.A. spokesman, would not comment on Blackwater’s ties to the agency. But he said the C.I.A. employs contractors to “enhance the skills of our own work force, just as American law permits.”

“Contractors give you flexibility in shaping and managing your talent mix — especially in the short term — but the accountability’s still yours,” he said. The C.I.A. director, recently initiated an internal review examining all Blackwater contracts with the agency to ensure that the company was performing no missions that were “operational in nature,”

Labels: Blackwater, CIA, cia flights detainees, extraordinary rendition, snatch and grab

According to the lunar Muslim calendar, 2004's new year - the beginning of the month of Muharram - fell on February 22. Amanatullah Ali, a rice merchant from the village of Ghabyanwal in Pakistan's Punjab, was coming to the end of a business trip to Iran. He crossed the border in Iraq - a pilgrimage considered especially auspicious during Muharram. While he was on his way there, in or around Baghdad, he was picked up by the SAS, then handed over to the Americans and flown to Bagram which has 650 detainees. On three occasions since he was detained, the Red Cross has helped Amanatullah to speak to his family by telephone,
'He wasn't captured by Americans,' Abdul Razzaq says, 'but by British. It was the British who took him.'

Labels: Amanatullah Ali, Bagram, black site, extraordinary rendition, flights, Obama Administration, SAS

Federal agents arrested Hossein Ardebili an Iranian attempting to purchase phased array radar in Georgia, Eastern Europe in '07 and secretly extradited him to the United States. Although Ardebili wanted to meet the salesmen in Dubai, the undercover Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent lured him to Georgia. Phased array antennae date from WWII and are used in FM radio broadcasting as well as in radar, where the radar beam is electronically steered through phased array systems to direct radar beams fast enough to maintain a fire control quality track on many targets simultaneously while also controlling several in-flight missiles.

The Iranian, who has been quietly jailed in a Philadelphia-area prison for nearly two years, pleaded guilty to charges in 2008 and faces up to 140 years in prison.

The case had been sealed from public view while U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents scoured the dealer's laptop to pursue hundreds of leads about Iran's covert effort to acquire American military gear. Ardebili, whose nickname online was Alex Dave, negotiated the purchases of 1,000 state-of-the-art radar shifters, 10 gyro chip sensors used in advanced aircraft applications, and a digital air computer for an F-4 aircraft, prosecutors said.Ardebili, a former Iranian government procurement official, pleaded guilty May 19, 2008, to violating the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which essentially prohibits arms and other sales to Iran. He was also charged with money-laundering and conspiracy.

Labels: extradited, Hossein Ardebili, I.C.E., International Emergency Economic Powers Act, Phased array

In July 2005, a CIA-chartered Gulfstream IV, tail number N63MU, flew direct from Kabul to Vilnius. Several former intelligence officials involved in the CIA's prison program confirmed the flight as a prisoner transfer to Lithuania. The Vilnius prison was closed.

Labels: black site, CIA, extraordinary rendition, Gulfstream IV, Kabul, N63MU, Vilnius

A suit, brought on behalf of Amir Meshal by the American Civil Liberties Union, is the first by a U.S. citizen seeking damages for the practice of "rendition." An American who was captured by Kenyan forces in January 2007 filed suit in U.S. District Court in Washington on Tuesday, arguing that FBI agents allegedly involved in his interrogation and transfer to other countries violated his constitutional rights.

Labels: Amir Meshal. American Civil Liberties Union, FBI, USDC (DC)

“We decline to create, on our own, a new cause of action against officers and employees of the federal government,” Chief Judge Dennis G. Jacobs wrote in a 59-page majority opinion joined by six other judges.

Judge Jacobs said that it was for the executive branch to “decide how to implement extraordinary rendition, and for the elected members of Congress — and not for us as judges — to decide whether an individual may seek compensation” from government officials for a constitutional violation.

Four judges issued dissenting opinions, in which they all joined, running a total of 117 pages. In one, Judge Guido Calabresi wrote, “I believe that when the history of this distinguished court is written, today’s majority decision will be viewed with dismay.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a former member of the Second Circuit appeals court, participated in the oral argument of the case last December, but was later elevated to the United States Supreme Court by President Obama and did not participate in the decision.
opinion

Labels: Dennis G. Jacobs, extraordinary rendition, Guido Calabresi, Maher Arar, opinion rehearing, Second Circuit appeals, Sonia Sotomayor, torture

An Italian court on 04 November convicted 22 CIA operatives and a U.S. Air Force colonel of orchestrating the kidnapping of a Muslim cleric here in 2003 and flying him to Egypt, where he said he was tortured. The case is the only instance in which CIA operatives have faced a criminal trial for the controversial tactic of extraordinary rendition, under which terrorism suspects are seized in one country and forcibly transported to another without judicial oversight. A similar case involving a German citizen kidnapped in the Balkans has resulted in arrest warrants and a civil lawsuit but has not gone to trial.

The CIA and other U.S. officials have contended that extraordinary renditions, which began during the Clinton administration and accelerated under the Bush White House after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, are permissible under U.S. law to capture terrorism suspects in foreign countries.
"I am not guilty. I am only responsible for following an order I received from my superiors," R. S. Lady said. "It was not a criminal act. It was a state affair."

Labels: CIA, egypt, extraordinary rendition, John le Carré, Lady R S, rendition

This week Norway's Riis Johansen held a seminar on exploration in Arctic areas and led a delegation to Jan Mayen to take a closer look at the possibilities for exploration.The plans are only territory establishment, they say, and will never be carried through, Norway just wants to show strength in front of Iceland, who recently opened up for search activities in adjoining sea areas.

Norway and Iceland in 2008 signed an agreement clarifying an accord from 1981 on exploring for oil and gas between Iceland and Jan Mayen, which was annexed by Norway in 1926. Iceland has a head start and started offering licenses this year in the southern part of the so-called Jan Mayen Ridge, for which only two companies applied. The agreement states that Iceland is entitled to 25 percent of the potential oil production in Norway’s territory in their joint fossil fuel exploitation area between Iceland and Jan Mayen, dubbed the “Dragon Zone,” and Norway to 25 percent of the potential oil production in Iceland’s territory.

Results will be announced in October, Bloomberg.com reports.

Labels: Dragon Zone, Iceland, Jan Mayen, Norway, oil exploration, oil production, Riis Johansen

The Bush administration declined to endorse a treaty meant to bar and punish "enforced disappearances" so that those overseeing the CIA's secret prison system would not be criminally prosecuted under its provisions. At least 81 countries have now signed, including all members of the European Union and many nations with checkered human rights records, such as Algeria, Argentina, Cuba and Guatemala.

A White House official said the Obama administration is reviewing the previous U.S. stance on the treaty as part of a wider look at international human rights accords that Washington has not signed. The official did not say when a decision might be made.

Labels: "enforced disappearances", black site, cia flights, detainee, extraordinary rendition, flight, John le Carré, rendition

Huffington
ACLU

Labels: black site, cia flights, extraordinary rendition, John le Carré, rendition sop manual