Khadr could face terrorism charges

TORONTO, Jan. 11 (UPI) -- A study released by the University of Ottawa says if Canadian-born Guantanamo Bay prisoner Omar Khadr is repatriated, he could face terrorism charges.

The study, authored by nine University of Ottawa law students, says if Canada asks the United States to repatriate Khadr, laws created after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, relating to terrorism and war crimes charges could be applied to Khadr's alleged offences in Afghanistan, the Star reported.

"It was important for us to not consider him guilty or not guilty but to see the (Guantanamo) process that he is in and decide whether it's fair," Ajmal Pashtoonyar, one of the report's nine authors, said in a statement. "What we should be asking is if the United States' government would be quiet if Canada had one of its U.S. citizens in a detention facility like Guantanamo."

Khadr was captured in July 2002 after a firefight in Afghanistan with U.S. forces. U.S. government officials allege that Khadr threw a grenade that fatally wounded a U.S. soldier.

The law students hope the committee will raise the issue when Canadian senators resume hearings next month, but Canadian foreign affairs spokesperson Eugenie Cormier-Lassonde says that "any questions regarding whether Canada plans to ask for the release of Omar Khadr from Guantanamo are premature and speculative as the legal process and appeals process are still ongoing."

Fallujah: The first Iraqi intifada

Doral protesters target Guantánamo

As many as 60 protesters -- some wearing trademark orange jumpsuits -- staged a street demonstration in Doral Friday morning to mark the sixth anniversary of the opening of the prison camps at Guantànamo Bay, Cuba.

Rush-hour motorists mostly whizzed by the demonstrators, who were chanting, ''Hey-hey, ho-ho, U.S. out of Guantànamo'' and ''Stop torture now,'' at a busy intersection at Northwest 87th Avenue and Doral Boulevard.

A few drivers honked their car and truck horns as protester Rae Newman of Miami waved a sign declaring, ``Honk 4 Peace.''

''People are somewhat complacent,'' she said, adding that the horn-honking ``goes in waves, actually. When one person honks, it gives others the courage to honk.''

The local demonstrators, joined by the national anti-war Code Pink movement, are protesting near the Pentagon's Southern Command headquarters as part of a coordinated series of demonstrations called by Amnesty International.

Six years ago Friday, the first 20 detainees arrived at the remote U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba to open the offshore detention and interrogation center.

The Defense Department, which had no official comment on the anniversary, calls the prison camps a war-on-terror necessity and says captives are treated humanely.

Southcom is the Pentagon's outpost for operations in Latin America and the Caribbean and supervises the prison camps, where the United States currently holds 275 men as ``enemy combatants.''

The Doral demonstrators fanned out on a sidewalk with banners that also declared, ''Torture is terror'' and ''Close Guantànamo.'' About a third wore the jumpsuits and held photos of war-on-terror detainees, both men since freed and some still in the prison camps.

The group of protesters then marched up a sidewalk toward Southcom, the jumpsuits and banners serving as quirky street theater in generally businesslike Doral.

One protester brought a pet rooster, saying it symbolized ``a wake-up call for America.''

FBI Wiretaps Dropped Due to Unpaid Bills

Telephone companies cut off FBI wiretaps used to eavesdrop on suspected criminals because of the bureau's repeated failures to pay phone bills on time, according to a Justice Department audit released Thursday.

The faulty bookkeeping is part of what the audit, by the Justice Department's inspector general, described as the FBI's lax oversight of money used in undercover investigations. Poor supervision of the program also allowed one agent to steal $25,000, the audit said.

More than half of 990 bills to pay for telecommunication surveillance in five unidentified FBI field offices were not paid on time, the report shows. In one office alone, unpaid costs for wiretaps from one phone company totaled $66,000.

And at least once, a wiretap used in a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act investigation - the highly secretive and sensitive cases that allow eavesdropping on suspected terrorists or spies - "was halted due to untimely payment."

"We also found that late payments have resulted in telecommunications carriers actually disconnecting phone lines established to deliver surveillance results to the FBI, resulting in lost evidence," according to the audit by Inspector General Glenn A. Fine.

Ex-Official Wants Immunity in Tape Case

Attorneys for Jose Rodriguez told Congress the former CIA official won't testify about the destruction of CIA videotapes without a promise of immunity, two people close to the tapes inquiry said Wednesday.

Rodriguez, the former head of the CIA's National Clandestine Service, ordered that the tapes, which show harsh CIA interrogation of two al-Qaida suspects, be destroyed in 2005. Rodriguez is scheduled to testify before the House Intelligence Committee on Jan. 16.

Defense attorney Robert Bennett told lawmakers, however, that he would not let Rodriguez testify because of the criminal investigation into the case. Without a promise of immunity, anything Rodriguez said at the hearing could be used against him in court.

The discussions were described to The Associated Press by two people close to the case who spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks were to be private.

The CIA has acknowledged that it destroyed the videos, and the Bush administration has urged Congress and the courts to stay out of the tapes inquiry while the Justice Department investigates.

U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy agreed Wednesday not to hold hearings. He said the Justice Department had promised a thorough investigation, and he saw "no reason to disregard the Department of Justice's assurances."

Congress, however, has refused to back off and had planned to make Rodriguez one of the first witnesses in its investigation. It was unclear whether Bennett issued a formal request for immunity or merely told the committee that Rodriguez wouldn't testify without it.

Reached by telephone Wednesday night, Bennett said he would have no public comment on the matter. A spokesman for the committee also declined to comment.

Lawmakers are typically reluctant to grant immunity requests because doing so could torpedo a criminal investigation. Anything Rodriguez spoke about would be off-limits to the Justice Department, as would any secondary evidence built on his testimony.

Attorney General Michael Mukasey recently appointed a prosecutor to conduct a criminal investigation into destruction of the tapes. John Durham, a career public corruption and organized crime prosecutor, has a reputation for being independent.

Durham is investigating whether destroying the tapes amounted to obstruction of justice or violated any court orders.

Kennedy and others had ordered the Bush administration not to destroy any evidence of mistreatment or abuse of terrorism suspects being held at the U.S. naval prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. But the two suspects interrogated on video - Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri - were not held at Guantanamo. They were interrogated in secret CIA prisons overseas.

Kennedy, a former prosecutor who was appointed to the bench by President Clinton, said Wednesday that the tapes do not appear to have been covered by his court order. He ruled that attorneys for Yemeni detainees at Guantanamo Bay hadn't "presented anything to cause this court to question whether the Department of Justice will follow the facts wherever they may lead."

Attorney David Remes had said a judicial inquiry might involve testimony from senior lawyers at the White House and Justice Department. Government attorneys, appearing in court Dec. 21, said such hearings would disrupt and possibly derail the ongoing Justice Department inquiry.

Lawyers for other terrorism suspects have filed similar requests before other judges. While Kennedy's decision doesn't require those judges to follow suit, it will help bolster the Justice Department's argument that they should not wade into the investigation.

UK Lawyer Says Spain Complicit In Guantanamo Abuse

LONDON (Reuters) - Spanish authorities were complicit in the secret U.S. transfer of two British residents to Guantanamo Bay and took part in their interrogation there, a lawyer for the two men said on Wednesday.

Edward Fitzgerald said Spain had facilitated the ordeal of the two men, Jamil el-Banna and Omar Deghayes, who were freed last month after suffering what he called years of "intensive interrogation and torture" in the U.S. prison camp on Cuba.

"The central point we will be making is that the Spanish authorities are clearly implicated in the ordeal of the past five years," Fitzgerald told a London court which is considering a Spanish request to extradite the pair from Britain to face terrorism charges.

He said Spain had acquiesced in the secret U.S. transfer of the two men through its airspace from Afghanistan to Guantanamo.

Spanish authorities not only provided U.S. authorities with material about which to question the two men, but sent their own investigators to take part in interrogations, the lawyer said.

He demanded to know whether Spain had sought the men's extradition while they were in Guantanamo, and said it was unjust that authorities were now seeking to question them on the same allegations from which U.S. authorities had cleared them.

"We do submit this is an overwhelming case of an abuse of power and an abuse of process," Fitzgerald told the court.

ADJOURNMENT

David Perry, representing the Spanish authorities, said Spain wants to prosecute the pair as alleged members of an al Qaeda cell there.

Both strongly deny the charge of belonging to a terrorist organization, which carries a maximum sentence of 15 years. Judge Timothy Workman adjourned the case until February 14.

The case reignites sensitive questions over alleged complicity between European governments and U.S. authorities over secret CIA transfers of terrorist suspects, known as renditions.

European governments have widely condemned detention without trial in Guantanamo and called for its closure. But revelations that some of them sent their own intelligence officers to question suspects there have caused controversy in several countries, including France and Germany.

El-Banna, a Jordanian who has five British children, was arrested in Gambia, west Africa in 2002 and transferred by the United States first to Afghanistan and then to Guantanamo.

Deghayes, a Libyan, married in Afghanistan in 2001 and, according to a supporters' Web site, fled the country with his wife and baby son after the U.S. invasion that year and was arrested in Pakistan on his way back to Britain.

He lost the sight of one eye after U.S. guards assaulted him with pepper spray in Guantanamo, according to the legal charity Reprieve which represents him.

Handling of Interrogation Recordings Leads to a Defense Request in Padilla Case

Citing disclosures that the federal government had concealed, and in some cases destroyed, videotaped interrogations of Al Qaeda operatives, a defense lawyer in the case of Jose Padilla, the Brooklyn-born convert to Islam who was convicted as a terrorism conspirator, asked a federal judge on Monday to disclose any recordings that might bear on Mr. Padilla’s recruitment into the terrorist organization.

The judge rejected the request, saying she had reviewed relevant material and concluded that the government had handed over all the required evidence.

The lawyer, Kenneth M. Swartz, representing one of Mr. Padilla’s co-defendants, Adham Amin Hassoun, focused on an interrogation of a Qaeda operative known as Uways, who gave up information about how he and others had interviewed Mr. Padilla for deployment to a Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan.

The defense was given an unclassified summary of the interrogation, but Mr. Swartz requested access to related classified material on grounds that it might help in the defense of Mr. Hassoun, 45, accused of being Mr. Padilla’s recruiter.

Mr. Swartz said the issue acquired new urgency with the disclosures in December that the Central Intelligence Agency had destroyed videotapes documenting the interrogation of two Qaeda operatives in the agency’s custody, including one who provided intelligence about Mr. Padilla.

But Brian K. Frazier, an assistant United States attorney, called the request “just sheer speculation.” Judge Marcia G. Cooke of Federal District Court denied the motion, saying that she had reviewed the classified material related to the Uways interrogation and found that it included no exculpatory evidence.

Mr. Padilla, Mr. Hassoun and a third defendant, Kifah Wael Jayyousi, 46, were found guilty in August of terrorism conspiracy charges. A sentencing hearing is scheduled to begin on Tuesday.

Federal prosecutors are seeking life sentences for Mr. Padilla and his two co-conspirators, though defense lawyers have asked for leniency, saying their clients were devout Muslims who had been interested in helping other Muslims, not in committing terrorist acts.

Mr. Padilla has been in custody since his arrest in May 2002 at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago. He was accused of plotting to explode a radioactive “dirty bomb” in the United States, but that was not part of his trial.

CIA scrambles to ‘lawyer up.’

Newsweek reports that the Justice Department’s decision to launch an investigation into the destruction of CIA tapes “has sent several alarmed agency employees scrambling to find lawyers.” CIA veterans “fear the move is tantamount to unleashing an independent counsel on Langley“:

“A lot of people are worried,” says one former CIA official, who asked not to be identified talking about sensitive matters. “Whenever you have the bureau running around the building, it’s going to turn up some heads. This could turn into a witch hunt.”

Legal expenses for each employee could reach “hundreds of thousands” of dollars and will not be paid for by the CIA.

Pakistan Officials Warn U.S.: Keep Out

Pakistan reacted angrily Jan 6 to reports that President George W. Bush is considering covert military operations in the country's volatile tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.

"It is not up to the U.S. administration, it is Pakistan's government who is responsible for this country," chief military spokesman Major General Waheed Arshad told AFP.

"There are no overt or covert U.S. operations inside Pakistan. Such reports are baseless and we reject them."

The New York Times reported on its website late Saturday that under a proposal being discussed in Washington, CIA operatives based in Afghanistan would be able to call on direct military support for counter-terrorism operations in neighbouring Pakistan.

Citing unnamed senior administration officials, the newspaper said the proposal called for giving Central Intelligence Agency agents broader powers to strike targets in Pakistan.

Pakistan's western tribal belt is seen as a safe haven for Taliban and al-Qaeda militants who carry out attacks in Afghanistan, as well as the most likely hideout for al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

The United States now has about 50 Soldiers in Pakistan, the report said.

The new plan was reportedly discussed by vice-president Dick Cheney, secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and national security aides in the wake of the Dec. 27 assassination of Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto.

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf had not been consulted, the New York Times reported.

Military spokesman Arshad also dismissed comments from White House hopeful Hillary Clinton that she would propose a joint U.S.-British team to oversee the security of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal if she was elected president.

"We do not require anybody's assistance. We are fully capable of doing it on our own," he said.

Pakistan's foreign ministry spokesman Mohammad Sadiq late Sunday described the New York Times report as "speculative" but said any suggestion of U.S. forces on its territory was "unacceptable".

On Clinton's remarks about nuclear weapons, Sadiq added: "It must be clearly understood that Pakistan alone is and will be responsible for the security of its nuclear assets."

For sale: West’s deadly nuclear secrets

A WHISTLEBLOWER has made a series of extraordinary claims about how corrupt government officials allowed Pakistan and other states to steal nuclear weapons secrets.

Sibel Edmonds, a 37-year-old former Turkish language translator for the FBI, listened into hundreds of sensitive intercepted conversations while based at the agency’s Washington field office.

She approached The Sunday Times last month after reading about an Al-Qaeda terrorist who had revealed his role in training some of the 9/11 hijackers while he was in Turkey.

Edmonds described how foreign intelligence agents had enlisted the support of US officials to acquire a network of moles in sensitive military and nuclear institutions.

Among the hours of covert tape recordings, she says she heard evidence that one well-known senior official in the US State Department was being paid by Turkish agents in Washington who were selling the information on to black market buyers, including Pakistan.

The name of the official – who has held a series of top government posts – is known to The Sunday Times. He strongly denies the claims.

However, Edmonds said: “He was aiding foreign operatives against US interests by passing them highly classified information, not only from the State Department but also from the Pentagon, in exchange for money, position and political objectives.”

She claims that the FBI was also gathering evidence against senior Pentagon officials – including household names – who were aiding foreign agents.

“If you made public all the information that the FBI have on this case, you will see very high-level people going through criminal trials,” she said.

Her story shows just how much the West was infiltrated by foreign states seeking nuclear secrets. It illustrates how western government officials turned a blind eye to, or were even helping, countries such as Pakistan acquire bomb technology.

The wider nuclear network has been monitored for many years by a joint Anglo-American intelligence effort. But rather than shut it down, investigations by law enforcement bodies such as the FBI and Britain’s Revenue & Customs have been aborted to preserve diplomatic relations.

Edmonds, a fluent speaker of Turkish and Farsi, was recruited by the FBI in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Her previous claims about incompetence inside the FBI have been well documented in America.

She has given evidence to closed sessions of Congress and the 9/11 commission, but many of the key points of her testimony have remained secret. She has now decided to divulge some of that information after becoming disillusioned with the US authorities’ failure to act.

One of Edmonds’s main roles in the FBI was to translate thousands of hours of conversations by Turkish diplomatic and political targets that had been covertly recorded by the agency.

A backlog of tapes had built up, dating back to 1997, which were needed for an FBI investigation into links between the Turks and Pakistani, Israeli and US targets. Before she left the FBI in 2002 she heard evidence that pointed to money laundering, drug imports and attempts to acquire nuclear and conventional weapons technology.

“What I found was damning,” she said. “While the FBI was investigating, several arms of the government were shielding what was going on.”

The Turks and Israelis had planted “moles” in military and academic institutions which handled nuclear technology. Edmonds says there were several transactions of nuclear material every month, with the Pakistanis being among the eventual buyers. “The network appeared to be obtaining information from every nuclear agency in the United States,” she said.

They were helped, she says, by the high-ranking State Department official who provided some of their moles – mainly PhD students – with security clearance to work in sensitive nuclear research facilities. These included the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory in New Mexico, which is responsible for the security of the US nuclear deterrent.

In one conversation Edmonds heard the official arranging to pick up a $15,000 cash bribe. The package was to be dropped off at an agreed location by someone in the Turkish diplomatic community who was working for the network.

The Turks, she says, often acted as a conduit for the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s spy agency, because they were less likely to attract suspicion. Venues such as the American Turkish Council in Washington were used to drop off the cash, which was picked up by the official.

Edmonds said: “I heard at least three transactions like this over a period of 2½ years. There are almost certainly more.”

The Pakistani operation was led by General Mahmoud Ahmad, then the ISI chief.

Intercepted communications showed Ahmad and his colleagues stationed in Washington were in constant contact with attachés in the Turkish embassy.

Intelligence analysts say that members of the ISI were close to Al-Qaeda before and after 9/11. Indeed, Ahmad was accused of sanctioning a $100,000 wire payment to Mohammed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers, immediately before the attacks.

The results of the espionage were almost certainly passed to Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani nuclear scientist.

Khan was close to Ahmad and the ISI. While running Pakistan’s nuclear programme, he became a millionaire by selling atomic secrets to Libya, Iran and North Korea. He also used a network of companies in America and Britain to obtain components for a nuclear programme.

Khan caused an alert among western intelligence agencies when his aides met Osama Bin Laden. “We were aware of contact between A Q Khan’s people and Al-Qaeda,” a former CIA officer said last week. “There was absolute panic when we initially discovered this, but it kind of panned out in the end.”

It is likely that the nuclear secrets stolen from the United States would have been sold to a number of rogue states by Khan.

Edmonds was later to see the scope of the Pakistani connections when it was revealed that one of her fellow translators at the FBI was the daughter of a Pakistani embassy official who worked for Ahmad. The translator was given top secret clearance despite protests from FBI investigators.

Edmonds says packages containing nuclear secrets were delivered by Turkish operatives, using their cover as members of the diplomatic and military community, to contacts at the Pakistani embassy in Washington.

Following 9/11, a number of the foreign operatives were taken in for questioning by the FBI on suspicion that they knew about or somehow aided the attacks.

Edmonds said the State Department official once again proved useful. “A primary target would call the official and point to names on the list and say, ‘We need to get them out of the US because we can’t afford for them to spill the beans’,” she said. “The official said that he would ‘take care of it’.”

The four suspects on the list were released from interrogation and extradited.

Edmonds also claims that a number of senior officials in the Pentagon had helped Israeli and Turkish agents.

“The people provided lists of potential moles from Pentagon-related institutions who had access to databases concerning this information,” she said.

“The handlers, who were part of the diplomatic community, would then try to recruit those people to become moles for the network. The lists contained all their ‘hooking points’, which could be financial or sexual pressure points, their exact job in the Pentagon and what stuff they had access to.”

One of the Pentagon figures under investigation was Lawrence Franklin, a former Pentagon analyst, who was jailed in 2006 for passing US defence information to lobbyists and sharing classified information with an Israeli diplomat.

“He was one of the top people providing information and packages during 2000 and 2001,” she said.

Once acquired, the nuclear secrets could have gone anywhere. The FBI monitored Turkish diplomats who were selling copies of the information to the highest bidder.

Edmonds said: “Certain greedy Turkish operators would make copies of the material and look around for buyers. They had agents who would find potential buyers.”

In summer 2000, Edmonds says the FBI monitored one of the agents as he met two Saudi Arabian businessmen in Detroit to sell nuclear information that had been stolen from an air force base in Alabama. She overheard the agent saying: “We have a package and we’re going to sell it for $250,000.”

Edmonds’s employment with the FBI lasted for just six months. In March 2002 she was dismissed after accusing a colleague of covering up illicit activity involving Turkish nationals.

She has always claimed that she was victimised for being outspoken and was vindicated by an Office of the Inspector General review of her case three years later. It found that one of the contributory reasons for her sacking was that she had made valid complaints.

The US attorney-general has imposed a state secrets privilege order on her, which prevents her revealing more details of the FBI’s methods and current investigations.

Her allegations were heard in a closed session of Congress, but no action has been taken and she continues to campaign for a public hearing.

She was able to discuss the case with The Sunday Times because, by the end of January 2002, the justice department had shut down the programme.

The senior official in the State Department no longer works there. Last week he denied all of Edmonds’s allegations: “If you are calling me to say somebody said that I took money, that’s outrageous . . . I do not have anything to say about such stupid ridiculous things as this.”

In researching this article, The Sunday Times has talked to two FBI officers (one serving, one former) and two former CIA sources who worked on nuclear proliferation. While none was aware of specific allegations against officials she names, they did provide overlapping corroboration of Edmonds’s story.

One of the CIA sources confirmed that the Turks had acquired nuclear secrets from the United States and shared the information with Pakistan and Israel. “We have no indication that Turkey has its own nuclear ambitions. But the Turks are traders. To my knowledge they became big players in the late 1990s,” the source said.

How Pakistan got the bomb, then sold it to the highest bidders

1965 Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Pakistan’s foreign minister, says: “If India builds the bomb we will eat grass . . . but we will get one of our own”

1974 Nuclear programme becomes increased priority as India tests a nuclear device

1976 Abdul Qadeer Khan, a scientist, steals secrets from Dutch uranium plant. Made head of his nation’s nuclear programme by Bhutto, now prime minister

1976 onwards Clandestine network established to obtain materials and technology for uranium enrichment from the West

1985 Pakistan produces weapons-grade uranium for the first time

1989-91 Khan’s network sells Iran nuclear weapons information and technology

1991-97 Khan sells weapons technology to North Korea and Libya

1998 India tests nuclear bomb and Pakistan follows with a series of nuclear tests. Khan says: “I never had any doubts I was building a bomb. We had to do it”

2001 CIA chief George Tenet gathers officials for crisis summit on the proliferation of nuclear technology from Pakistan to other countries

2001 Weeks before 9/11, Khan’s aides meet Osama Bin Laden to discuss an Al-Qaeda nuclear device

2001 After 9/11 proliferation crisis becomes secondary as Pakistan is seen as important ally in war on terror

2003 Libya abandons nuclear weapons programme and admits acquiring components through Pakistani nuclear scientists

2004 Khan placed under house arrest and confesses to supplying Iran, Libya and North Korea with weapons technology. He is pardoned by President Pervez Musharraf

2006 North Korea tests a nuclear bomb

2007 Renewed fears that bomb may fall into hands of Islamic extremists as killing of Benazir Bhutto throws country into turmoil