Trial on CIA Rendition Resumes in Italy

ROME - The trial of 26 Americans charged with kidnapping a terror suspect during an alleged CIA operation resumed Wednesday in Italy, despite a pending ruling by the country's highest court on a government challenge that could scuttle the case.

Hearings reopened in Milan after Judge Oscar Magi ruled the trial should continue, even though the Constitutional Court is still debating a request by the Italian government to throw out the indictments against the Americans, who are being tried in absentia.

Alessia Sorgato, a lawyer for several American defendants, said the judge had ordered the resumption of the proceedings to "guarantee a reasonable length of the trial."

"The judge made a very clear reasoning," she said in a telephone interview. Shortly after it opened in June, the trial was suspended pending the Constitutional Court ruling, and Magi had already extended the suspension.

Wednesday's hearing was largely devoted to technicalities, Sorgato said during a break.

She said a hearing at the Constitutional Court on the government challenge is scheduled for July 8, but that a decision is expected much later.

The suspects in the case- all but one identified by prosecutors as CIA agents - are accused of kidnapping an Egyptian terror suspect from a Milan street on Feb. 17, 2003, in an operation coordinated by the CIA and Italian intelligence.

Italian prosecutors say Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, was transferred to U.S. bases in Italy and Germany before being moved to Egypt, where he was imprisoned for four years. Nasr, who was released last year, said he was tortured.

Seven Italians also were indicted in the case, including Nicolo Pollari, the former chief of military intelligence. Pollari has denied any involvement by Italian intelligence in the abduction.

The Constitutional Court must rule on whether the kidnapping trial will be permitted to publicly air details of the U.S. extraordinary rendition program, which involved moving terrorism suspects from country to country without public legal proceedings.

In its challenge, the Italian government contends the prosecution unlawfully relied on state secrets to justify the charges. The high court also plans to hear a challenge charging that prosecutors went too far by wiretapping Italian intelligence agents indicted in the case.

The 26 Americans have left Italy, and a senior U.S. official has said they would not be turned over for prosecution, even if Rome requests it.

The Italian government has not responded to prosecutors' requests to seek the extradition of the Americans, and the Justice Ministry has indicated the Constitutional Court's ruling would be a key factor.

Canada's high court takes Gitmo case

OTTAWA -- (AP) -- Canada's Supreme Court ruled Thursday it will hear arguments about whether classified Canadian documents about a Canadian detainee at Guantánamo Bay should be released.

Lawyers for Omar Khadr, charged with killing a U.S. soldier with a grenade in a 2002 firefight in Afghanistan when he was 15 years old, will argue next week that the government should release details about meetings Canadian foreign affairs officials and members of Canada's spy agency had with Khadr in 2002 and 2003.

Khadr was interviewed by foreign affairs officials and members of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, and at least some of the results of the interviews were passed to American authorities.

Khadr's lawyers have obtained censored summaries of the material but are seeking more documents, including additional intelligence material and correspondence between Canadian and U.S. officials. They say Khadr has a constitutional right to the information to defend himself against the American charges.

Khadr is expected to be among the first detainees to face a U.S. war-crimes trial since the World War II era.

Khadr says he was mistreated by his U.S. captors and coerced into making self-incriminating statements after the 2002 firefight in Afghanistan that led to the charges against him.

''The Canadian government went to Guantánamo Bay in 2002 and 2003 and interrogated Omar Khadr absent all international legal rights,'' said Dennis Edney, Khadr's lawyer.

``They then shared that information with the Americans, but they refused to provide that same information to us, his defense counsel, to assist Omar in making a full answer in defense to the charges he's facing.''

Edney claims the Canadian interviews at Guantánamo violated Canada's bill of rights -- a contention that raises the wider legal issue of whether the bill can be applied in a foreign jurisdiction.

Canada's Supreme Court has ruled in the past that, as a general rule, Canadian officials overseas need only follow the laws of the host country. But there is a major exception to that rule -- if the foreign practices are at odds with international human rights law.

That prompted Khadr's legal team to argue that the Guantánamo detention conditions, as well as the special military tribunal preparing to try him for murder, don't measure up to accepted norms.

They cite violations of juvenile justice rules set out by the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, noting that Khadr was 15 when he was captured. They also point to international agreements on civil and political rights and the treatment of prisoners.

Canada's Justice Department, in its brief to the court, dismissed the efforts by Khadr's lawyers as a ``fishing expedition in relation to the most sensitive of government-held information.''

Khadr was sent to the prison camps in Cuba in October 2002, after his 16th birthday.

He faces a maximum sentence of life in prison if convicted on military commissions charges that include murder as a war crime, conspiracy and providing material support forterrorism.

The military says it plans to charge about 80 detainees at Guantánamo, but so far none of the cases has gone to trial.

Military judge rules for driver's defense

For a third time, a military judge has authorized lawyers for Osama bin Laden's driver to send questions to alleged al Qaeda kingpins in segregation at Guantánamo.

The ruling by Navy Capt. Keith Allred rejected national security arguments raised by Pentagon prosecutors. The military judge also sounded dismissive of a government argument that the driver could have conspired in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks without knowing about the suicide plot.

Specifically, Allred authorized the lawyers to ask reputed mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed whether the driver was a part of the 9/11 suicide plot and other al Qaeda attacks.

'The issue of whether the accused was `merely a driver,' or knew the unlawful purpose and was actively engaged in the unlawful work of al Qaeda seems to be very much at issue,'' Allred wrote in the four-page ruling, dated Friday.

The Pentagon made it public on Wednesday, intact, with no portions blacked out. Earlier judges' rulings have been censored.

It was the latest setback to Pentagon prosecution efforts to limit the discovery phase before the separate military trials of the driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan of Yemen, and Canadian captive Omar Khadr. Both are slated to face military commissions this summer.

Pentagon prosecutors had three times resisted the judge's plan to let Hamdan's lawyers ask questions of seven former CIA captives. They have been at Guantánamo since September 2006 and are now held as ''Task Force Platinum'' prisoners,at a segregated site set up secretly by the military, called Camp 7.

Under the scheme, devised by Allred, defense lawyers submit questions for Mohammed and the others to an independent security officer who works for the judge, not the prosecution.

The judge limited the substance to the time before Hamdan's capture in November 2001 in Afghanistan, and before the men were held and interrogated secretly by the CIA overseas -- meaning they cannot divulge U.S. interrogation techniques.

The security officer will have the questions translated, as well as the answers -- and then black out any responses that don't cover that time period.

Allred said in his ruling that national security could be safeguarded by the special security review.

Even before the Pentagon made the ruling public, defense lawyers had on Tuesday already submitted written questions for four of the men, chief among them the man known in CIA circles as KSM, Mohammed.

Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer, Hamdan's Pentagon appointed defense counsel, called Allred's ruling ``a real rebuke of the government's dragnet theory of conspiracy as well as granting us access to these detainees.''

The questions for Mohammed specifically ask, ''What was Hamdan's involvement in Sept. 11,'' said Mizer.

Based on their research, he said, the answer should be, ``nothing.''

Hamdan, 36, is accused of being a driver and sometime bodyguard for Bin Laden prior to the 9/11 attacks in Afghanistan. He is broadly charged as a co-conspirator in the terror plot and other al Qaeda attacks. Conviction carries life in prison.

Hamdan has admitted that he worked for bin Laden, and earned $200 a month as a driver. But he says he never joined al Qaeda and did not plot any attacks.

Allred wrote: ``It is not unfair to permit the Defense to seek to show that while he may have been a bodyguard and driver, he knew little or nothing about the inner workings of this conspiracy, or that was not a party to it, if they can.''

The Pentagon has yet to release the prosecutor's brief opposing access.

But Allred seemed to hint at government concerns in fashioning the question-and-answer format. If the security officer detects one captive trying to send a message to another ''colleague or a confederate,'' the judge wrote, the security officer can delete the answer, or summarize it.

Last week, an Army judge in the Khadr case also ruled five times for the defense on discovery issues.

In one instance, Army Col. Peter Brownback ordered the Pentagon to let defense attorneys take a deposition from the battalion commander at Khadr's July 2002 capture in Afghanistan.

Prosecutors had argued that Khadr's lawyers should only be allowed to question the officer at the trial. He has been identified in court only as ``Lt. Col. W.''

One issue is why ''Lt. Col. W'' rewrote a portion of a battlefield account of Khadr's capture, two months after the fact, which could help convict him.

In the case of access to the so-called high-value detainees, Allred had agreed to the defense request in early February at a hearing at Guantánamo.

Then, the prosecutor, Army Lt. Col. Will Britt, objected in court -- and told the judge that military commission guidelines forbid him from ruling wholesale on the question of access. Rather, Britt told the judge, he needed to consider access piecemeal, on a case-by-case basis.

Allred then issued a written ruling in mid February, laying out the terms of access and ordering the government to establish an independent Security Officer who does not work for the prosecution.

The prosecution immediately filed for reconsideration.

It was not immediately clear Wednesday whether the prosecution would be appealing Allred's latest decision.

Gitmo captive: I was threatened with rape

WASHINGTON -- In a fresh document from the Guantánamo war court files, Canadian captive Omar Khadr alleges that he was repeatedly threatened with rape as an interrogation technique in Afghanistan and at U.S. Navy base in Cuba.

The partially censored nine-page affidavit, signed by Khadr on Feb. 22, covers old ground already investigated, including allegations of abuse at Guantánamo that emerged in 2005, prompting a Navy criminal investigation.

But the document includes never-before revealed allegations, such as the rape threats and a partially censored description of regaining consciousness after his capture to discover he was being interrogated in an American field hospital in Afghanistan. He was 15.

Once released from medical care to the Bagram detention center, he said, ``I was interrogated many, many times. For about the first two weeks to a month that I was there I would be brought into the interrogation room on a stretcher.''

A Pentagon spokesman, Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, repeated the Pentagon's long-held conviction that Guantánamo captives are treated humanely and that any credible allegations of mistreatment are investigated and dealt with in keeping with military standards.

"In this case, we have no evidence to substantiate these claims," he wrote in an e-mail. He also noted that all approved interrogation techniques are published in the Army Field Manual on Interrogations and that an al Qaeda training manual "teaches its operatives to make false claims of abuse."

The details are emerging in the military trial case of Khadr, now 21, accused of the grenade killing of a U.S. Army commando in a July 2002 firefight. The document was admitted to court last week as part of the pretrial arguments over access to potential witnesses for Khadr's upcoming summertime trial before U.S. military officers, called a military commission.

Meantime, the Canadian's Pentagon lawyers have been searching for interrogators and other witnesses to his capture, in which he was shot twice in the back in a U.S. raid on a suspected al Qaeda compound. They also want witnesses to the interrogations in Afghanistan and later in Guantánamo.

The lawyers are seeking to punch holes in the prosecution case alleging that Khadr, as an al Qaeda conspirator since age 10, was the only enemy combatant who could have thrown the grenade that fatally wounded Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Speer, 28, of Albuquerque, N.M., in a firefight near Khost, Afghanistan.

Speer died of his wounds days later at a U.S. military hospital in Germany. Last week, the defense revealed at a pretrial hearing that the brigade commander at the firefight wrote two accounts, with the same date.

In the first account, a brigade commander identified to the public as ''Lt. Col. W'' wrote that the grenade thrower was killed on the spot. In the second, according to Navy Cmdr. William Kuebler, written two months later, Lt. Col. W said only that the enemy was ''engaged,'' leaving open the possibility that he had survived.

Khadr was the only survivor.

The documents are under seal at the Office of Military Commission along with the other defense motions from last week's case.

Now, the affidavit, a 63-item statement by the Canadian who grew up between Toronto, South Asia and U.S. detention, offers Khadr's most comprehensive account of his alleged treatment -- an English document crafted with his lawyers, which does not name his guards and interrogators, at least in the portion not blacked out by military censors.

For example, after his capture and regaining consciousness, he said, he was guarded by ``a young blond soldier who was about 25 and a Mexican or Puerto Rican soldier.''

The document is riddled with threats of rape wielded by the United States and its allies.

''On several occasions at Bagram, interrogators threatened to have me raped or sent to other countries like Egypt, Syria, Jordan or Israel to be raped,'' he alleges in Item 23. By Item 55, he has been transferred to Guantánamo, and he is taken to interrogation with an Afghan man, who ''told me that I would be sent to Afghanistan and raped.'' In Item 56, he says, an interrogator pulled his hair, spit in his face and threatened to bring in an Egyptian ``to rape me.''

The document also revisits old allegations -- such as his description on arriving in Guantánamo, at age 16, and hearing someone in the military say, ``Welcome to Israel.''

Or his claim, investigated by the military, that in March 2003 guards splashed his prison camp uniform with Pine Sol and dragged him around an interrogation booth, like a human mop, because he had urinated on himself during a bout of shackled isolation.

Pentagon and Guantánamo spokesmen did not reply Tuesday to queries on what that investigation found or whether anyone was disciplined.

The current prison camps spokesman, Navy Cmdr. Rick Haupt, in February declined to address allegations emerging at the military commissions, saying, ``It is likely best for all of us to hear what the attorneys have to say during the hearings.''

Lawyer: Mistrust of Jews a Gitmo Ploy

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - Lawyers for four Kuwaiti men held at Guantanamo Bay have asked a court to block U.S. military prosecutors from contacting the detainees without their consent, accusing the government March 17 of violating legal ethics.

Matthew MacLean, a Washington-based attorney for the Kuwaitis, said his clients and U.S. federal courts have recognized him and a colleague as legal representatives - and alleged that government interrogators have told his clients their lawyers are Jewish in a bid to sow mistrust.

"Are these prosecutors bound by the rules that are binding on all prosecutors everywhere?" MacLean said. "Or are these prosecutors going to be allowed to be cowboys, doing whatever they want?"

The case goes to the heart of complaints by many detainees' lawyers, who say the challenges in accessing their clients on sporadic visits to the isolated U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba make it more difficult to establish their trust.


MacLean's emergency petition, filed in a Washington appeals court, raises concerns over a recent assertion by Guantanamo's chief prosecutor that he does not need the lawyers' permission because they do not represent the detainees before the war-crimes tribunal system.

The chief prosecutor for the Guantanamo tribunals, Army Col. Lawrence Morris, said in an e-mail that was sent to MacLean on Feb. 26 and submitted with the court filing that the government "certainly" can have contact with the Kuwaitis regardless of the attorneys' representation.

The legal adviser to the tribunal system, Air Force Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann, said prosecutors have followed professional rules of responsibility. He added that the government is "working to clarify the distinction" between trial counsel and attorneys who represent detainees in other matters such as lawsuits over their confinement.

The petition is one of the first cases before the U.S. Court of Military Commission Review, which the Pentagon created last year to hear appeals from the tribunal system. On March 17, the court ordered the government to file a response by week's end, MacLean said.

President Bush said during a trip to the Middle East in January that two of the last four Kuwaitis held at Guantanamo will be charged, but he did not say which and prosecutors have not revealed further details. Eight other Kuwaiti detainees have been sent home.

The U.S. military plans to charge about 80 of the roughly 275 men held at Guantanamo on suspicion of links to the Taliban or al-Qaida. Fourteen detainees have been selected for prosecution, but so far none of the cases has gone to trial.