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Tony Blair knew in detail about the CIA’s secret kidnap and interrogation programme after the September 11 attacks and was kept informed “every step of the way” by MI6, a security source has told The Telegraph. Mr Blair, the then prime minister, and Jack Straw, his foreign secretary, were fully briefed on CIA activities and were shown now infamous Bush administration legal opinions that declared “enhanced interrogation” techniques such as waterboarding and stress positions to be legal, the source said.

The claims come as Scotland Yard continues to investigate whether MI6 officers should face criminal charges for alleged complicity in the rendition of suspected terrorists, including two Libyan Islamists who were sent back in 2004 to Tripoli, where they were tortured.

The case was opened in January 2012 after documents recovered during the Libyan revolution appeared to show that Sir Mark Allen, the former head of counter-terrorism at MI6, and other agents had been complicit in the rendition of Abdel Hakim Belhadj, who was captured by the CIA with his pregnant wife and sent back to Libya. Among the documents was a memo apparently signed by Sir Mark congratulating the then Libyan intelligence chief, Moussa Koussa, on the “safe arrival” of Mr Belhadj. The Telegraph understands that MI6 has been forced to hand over top secret documents from that period to police and that senior officers who served at the time have been interviewed as part of the investigation. It is not known whether Mr Straw, who intelligence sources have indicated was fully briefed on the rendition, has also been interviewed by police.

Poland has asked the European Court of Human Rights to bar media and public presence during an upcoming hearing on Poland’s complicity with the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program that delivered terror suspects to secret prisons around the world. The public hearing in Strasbourg, France, scheduled for Dec. 3, will be the first arguments testing allegations that the Polish government allowed the CIA to operate a jail for supposed Al-Qaeda fighters in Poland. The request for a private hearing “will be examined by the court shortly,” a court spokesperson told Reuters. Poland cited national security concerns as to why it wants the hearing to remain confidential.

"We should have the right to review this case in public," said Adam Bodnar, vice president of the Warsaw-based Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights. "I do not see a reason for confidentiality of proceedings." Bodnar added that most of the evidence about the alleged CIA jail is already public, and keeping it secret is pointless now. His organization was instrumental in uncovering evidence of Poland’s cooperation with the agency.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) case was brought by lawyers for Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, both now detainees waiting for charges at Guantanamo Bay.

Just after the Senate Intelligence Committee voted in April to declassify hundreds of pages of a withering report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s detention and interrogation program, C.I.A. Director John O. Brennan convened a meeting of the men who had played a role overseeing the program in its seven-year history.The spies, past and present, faced each other around the long wooden conference table on the seventh floor of the C.I.A.’s headquarters in Northern Virginia: J. Cofer Black, head of the agency’s counterterrorism center at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks; the undercover officer who now holds that job; and a number of other former officials from the C.I.A.’s clandestine service. Over the speakerphone came the distinctive, Queens-accented voice of George J. Tenet.

Over the past several months, Mr. Tenet has quietly engineered a counterattack against the Senate committee’s voluminous report, which could become public next month. The effort to discredit the report has set up a three-way showdown among former C.I.A. officials who believe history has been distorted, a White House carefully managing the process and politics of declassifying the document, and Senate Democrats convinced that the Obama administration is trying to protect the C.I.A. at all costs.The report is expected to accuse a number of former C.I.A. officials of misleading Congress and the White House about the program and its effectiveness, but it is Mr. Tenet who might have the most at stake.

Mr. Tenet, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has arranged a number of conference calls with former C.I.A. officials to discuss the impending report. After private conversations with Mr. Brennan, he and two other former C.I.A. directors — Porter J. Goss and Michael V. Hayden — drafted a letter to Mr. Brennan asking that, as a matter of fairness, they be allowed to see the report before it was made public. Describing the letter, one former C.I.A. officer who spoke on condition of anonymity said that the former directors “think that those people who were heavily involved in the operations have a right to see what’s being said about them.”Mr. Brennan then passed the letter to Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who is chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

LISBON, Portugal (AP) — A Portuguese court has ruled that a former CIA operative convicted of kidnapping an Egyptian cleric as part of an extraordinary renditions program should be turned over to Italy to serve her six-year sentence there, a court official said Friday. The decision to extradite Sabrina De Sousa after her arrest last October was handed down on Tuesday, the president of the court in Lisbon, Luis Vaz das Neves, told The Associated Press. De Sousa, who operated under diplomatic cover in Italy, was among 26 Americans convicted in absentia for the kidnapping of Milan cleric Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, known as Abu Omar, in broad daylight from a Milan street on Feb. 17, 2003. Extraordinary renditions were part of the Bush administration's "war on terror" after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The Egyptian cleric's kidnapping, which also implicated Italy's secret services, has proven embarrassing to successive Italian governments. De Sousa, who was born in India and holds both U.S. and Portuguese passports, was initially acquitted due to diplomatic immunity, but was found guilty by Italy's highest court in 2014. She was arrested at Lisbon Airport on a European warrant last year as she was on her way to visit her elderly mother in India with a round-trip ticket.

Authorities seized her passport and set her free while awaiting the court decision on her extradition. Manuel Magalhaes e Silva, De Sousa's Portuguese lawyer, told the AP in an email he was officially informed of the extradition decision Friday and intends to lodge an appeal at the Supreme Court. If that fails, he will go to the Constitutional Court, he said. De Sousa has argued against extradition to Italy, telling a Portuguese court after her arrest that Italian authorities tried her in absentia and never officially notified her of her conviction, according to Vaz das Neves. All of the Americans were tried in absentia and were represented for most of the proceedings by court-appointed lawyers who had no contact with their clients. Only toward the end of the trial did De Sousa and another defendant, a member of the military, receive clearance to hire their own lawyers. The Lisbon judge ruled that De Sousa should be sent to Italy so she can be notified of the conviction and possibly demand another trial, Vaz das Neves said. The judge also ruled that if De Sousa accepts her prison sentence, she must be allowed to serve it in Portugal if she wishes, which is possible under European legal procedure, according to Vaz das Neves. De Sousa has said that she had been living in Portugal and intended to settle there.

De Sousa has denied in interviews participating in the rendition and has said she wants to hold the CIA accountable. "If she truly arrives in Italy, she could finally choose to say to magistrates what she so far has only said in interviews," said the lead prosecutor in the case, Armando Spataro. De Sousa has requested a pardon from Italy. Earlier this month, in an act of clemency, Italy's president reduced the sentences of two others convicted in the case. President Sergio Mattarella reduced former CIA base chief Robert Seldon Lady's sentence to seven years from nine. Mattarella also wiped out the entire penalty — three years — faced by another American, Betnie Medero. After being kidnapped Nasr was transferred to Egypt where he claimed he was tortured. After he was released from Egyptian custody, Italian authorities in 2005 issued an arrest warrant for him. He was convicted in absentia by an Italian court in 2013 on decade-old terror charges and was sentenced to six years in prison, although he never returned to Italy to serve the sentence.

The European Parliament on Wednesday condemned the “apathy shown by member states and EU institutions” over torture in secret CIA prisons in Europe. A non-binding resolution, which passed 329-299, urged member states to “investigate, insuring full transparency, the allegations that there were secret prisons on their territory in which people were held under the CIA programme.” It also called on the European Union to undertake fact-finding missions into countries that were known to house American black sites. The resolution named Lithuania, Poland, Italy, and the United Kingdom as countries complicit in CIA operations. The Parliament also expressed “regret” that none of the architects of the U.S. torture program faced criminal charges, and that the U.S. has failed to cooperate with European criminal probes.

Despite banning torture when he came into office, President Obama has fought all attempts to hold Bush administration officials accountable, including by invoking the state secrets privilege to block lawsuits and delaying the release of the Senate Torture Report. When it was made public in 2014, the executive summary of the 6,000-page report confirmed that Poland’s former president, Aleksander Kwasniewski, signed off on the use of a CIA black site in the country, though he denied knowledge of torture. The European Court of Human Rights later issued an unprecedented ruling requiring Poland to pay $262,000 in reparations to two Guantánamo inmates who were tortured in Poland. While Obama continues to “look forward, not back,” victims of U.S. torture are increasingly looking to international courts for justice.

The European Parliament’s resolution requested that the European Commission and European Council produce a report on member states’ investigations and prosecutions by the end of June. In April, a federal judge ruled that survivors of CIA torture could sue the two psychologists who designed the CIA’s torture techniques. The case marks the first time a torture-related lawsuit against CIA employees will go to trial.

WikiLeaks released about 300,000 e-mails styled to Turkey’s ruling AKP. While no link to the “failed” military coup on July 15 was discovered, the cache contains mails suggesting that Libyan Al-Qaeda leader AbdelHakim Belhaj reached out to acquire help with laundering and investing funds stolen from the ousted Libyan government in 2011. The former “victim of US rendition” later hobnobbed with celebrities like U.S. Senator John McCain.

WikiLeaks released a cache with 294,548 emails on Tuesday. All of the emails which were released were attributed to Turkey’s AKP at akparti.org.tr, which is the primary domain of Turkey’s ruling party. The mails cover a period from 2010 up until July 6, 2016. That is, a few days before the “failed” military coup on July 15. An initial search has not resulted in the discovery of mails that would suggest foreknowledge about the coup and it is not sure that it will. After all, who would post mails about such a highly sensitive issue over a relatively unsecured party server, or over the internet in general. Although, after the FBI concluded that former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sent and received mails on issues that were classified Top Secret / Compartmentalized via a personal e-mail server, one would not be surprised if there were mails about the upcoming coup in the cache. Time will show. A brief search for “buzz words” that reflect Turkey’s role in the so-called Arab Spring and the wars in and against Libya and Syria, however, gave an immediate “bonus” result.

One of the mails styled to a AKP member via the party server appears to have been sent from AbdelHakim Belhaj. Belhaj was up until the overthrow of the Libyan government in 2011 the chief of the Libyan Al-Qaeda franchise the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG). After the overthrow of the Libyan government, Belhaj (Belhadj) would become the chief of the Tripoli Military Council and hobnob with celebrities like U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and US. Senator John McCain. Not bad, for someone who previously has been through the treadmill of the United States’ illegal extraordinary rendition program. Belhadj is today one of the most controversial figures in Libyan politics and, according to many, one of the main stumbling blocks on a road to peace and reconciliation. It is noteworthy that Abdelhakim Belhaj (Belhadj) and his second in command in the LIFG, Mahdi Al-Harati, have been linked to the British intelligence service MI6. Al-Harati would after 2011 move on to Syria. In 2012 al-Harati led two major campaigns of the so-called Libyan Brigade against the Syrian Arab Army from Jordan. Both campaigns failed at ousting the Syrian government, but increased the chaos in the country.

NBC News yesterday called her a “key apologist” for the CIA’s torture program. A follow-up New Yorker article dubbed her “The Unidentified Queen of Torture” and in part “the model for the lead character in ‘Zero Dark Thirty.’” Yet in both articles she was anonymous. The person described by both NBC and The New Yorker is senior CIA officer Alfreda Frances Bikowsky. Multiple news outlets have reported that as the result of a long string of significant errors and malfeasance, her competence and integrity are doubted — even by some within the agency. The Intercept is naming Bikowsky over CIA objections because of her key role in misleading Congress about the agency’s use of torture, and her active participation in the torture program (including playing a direct part in the torture of at least one innocent detainee). Moreover, Bikowsky has already been publicly identified by news organizations as the CIA officer responsible for many of these acts.

The executive summary of the torture report released by the Senate last week provides abundant documentation that the CIA repeatedly and deliberately misled Congress about multiple aspects of its interrogation program. Yesterday, NBC News reported that one senior CIA officer in particular was responsible for many of those false claims, describing her as “a top al Qaeda expert who remains in a senior position at the CIA.” NBC, while withholding her identity, noted that the same unnamed officer “also participated in ‘enhanced interrogations’ of self-professed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, witnessed the waterboarding of terror suspect Abu Zubaydah and ordered the detention of a suspected terrorist who turned out to be unconnected to al Qaeda, according to the report.” The New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer, writing yesterday about the NBC article, added that the officer “is still in a position of high authority over counterterrorism at the C.I.A.” This officer, Mayer noted, is the same one who “dropped the ball when the C.I.A. was given information that might very well have prevented the 9/11 attacks; she gleefully participated in torture sessions afterward; she misinterpreted intelligence in such a way that it sent the C.I.A. on an absurd chase for Al Qaeda sleeper cells in Montana. And then she falsely told congressional overseers that the torture worked.” Mayer also wrote that the officer is “the same woman” identified in the Senate report who oversaw “the months-long rendition and gruesome interrogation of another detainee whose detention was a case of mistaken identity.”

Both news outlets withheld the name of this CIA officer even though her identity is widely known among journalists, and her name has been used by various media outlets in connection with her work at the CIA. Both articles cited requests by the CIA not to identify her, even though they provided details making her identity clear. In fact, earlier this year, The Washington Post identified Bikowsky by name, describing her as a CIA analyst “who was tied to a critical intelligence-sharing failure before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the botched 2003 ‘rendition’ of an innocent German citizen thought to be an al-Qaeda operative.” That Post report led to both McClatchy and independent journalist Marcy Wheeler raising questions about the propriety of Bikowsky’s former personal lawyer, Robert Litt, playing a key role in his current capacity as a top government lawyer in deciding which parts of the torture report should be released. The McClatchy article identified Bikowsky by name as the officer who “played a central role in the bungled rendition of Khaled el-Masri. El-Masri, who was revealed to be innocent, claimed to have been tortured by the agency.” El-Masri, a German citizen who was kidnapped from Macedonia and tortured by the CIA in Afghanistan, was released in 2003 after it was revealed he was not involved in al Qaeda.

As every schoolchild knows, there are three check-and-balance branches of the U.S. government: the executive, Congress, and the judiciary. That’s bedrock Americanism and the most basic high school civics material. Only one problem: it’s just not so. During the Cold War years and far more strikingly in the twenty-first century, the U.S. government has evolved.  It sprouted a fourth branch: the national security state, whose main characteristic may be an unquenchable urge to expand its power and reach.  Admittedly, it still lacks certain formal prerogatives of governmental power.  Nonetheless, at a time when Congress and the presidency are in a check-and-balance ballet of inactivity that would have been unimaginable to Americans of earlier eras, the Fourth Branch is an ever more unchecked and unbalanced power center in Washington.  Curtained off from accountability by a penumbra of secrecy, its leaders increasingly are making nitty-gritty policy decisions and largely doing what they want, a situation illuminated by a recent controversy over the possible release of a Senate report on CIA rendition and torture practices.

All of this is or should be obvious, but remains surprisingly unacknowledged in our American world. The rise of the Fourth Branch began at a moment of mobilization for a global conflict, World War II.  It gained heft and staying power in the Cold War of the second half of the twentieth century, when that other superpower, the Soviet Union, provided the excuse for expansion of every sort.  Its officials bided their time in the years after the fall of the Soviet Union, when “terrorism” had yet to claim the landscape and enemies were in short supply.  In the post-9/11 era, in a phony “wartime” atmosphere, fed by trillions of taxpayer dollars, and under the banner of American “safety,” it has grown to unparalleled size and power.  So much so that it sparked a building boom in and around the national capital (as well as elsewhere in the country).  In their 2010 Washington Post series “Top Secret America,” Dana Priest and William Arkin offered this thumbnail summary of the extent of that boom for the U.S. Intelligence Community: “In Washington and the surrounding area,” they wrote, “33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings -- about 17 million square feet of space.”  And in 2014, the expansion is ongoing.

In this century, a full-scale second “Defense Department,” the Department of Homeland Security, was created.  Around it has grown up a mini-version of the military-industrial complex, with the usual set of consultants, K Street lobbyists, political contributions, and power relations: just the sort of edifice that President Eisenhower warned Americans about in his famed farewell address  in 1961.  In the meantime, the original military-industrial complex has only gained strength and influence. Increasingly, post-9/11, under the rubric of “privatization,” though it should more accurately have been called “corporatization,” the Pentagon took a series of crony companies off to war with it.  In the process, it gave “capitalist war” a more literal meaning, thanks to its wholesale financial support of, and the shrugging off of previously military tasks onto, a series of warrior corporations. Meanwhile, the 17 members of the U.S. Intelligence Community -- yes, there are 17 major intelligence outfits in the national security state -- have been growing, some at prodigious rates.  A number of them have undergone their own versions of corporatization, outsourcing many of their operations to private contractors in staggering numbers, so that we now have “capitalist intelligence” as well.  With the fears from 9/11 injected into society and the wind of terrorism at their backs, the Intelligence Community has had a remarkably free hand to develop surveillance systems that are now essentially “watching” everyone -- including, it seems, other branches of the government.

Comey is lionised in DC for one challenge over liberties. Yet he backed waterboarding, wire-tapping and indefinite detention

It had the air of Hollywood. On the night of 10 March 2004, James Comey, the nominee to lead the FBI for the next ten years, rushed to the hospital bedside of his terribly ill boss, Attorney General John Ashcroft.There, he eventually confronted White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card and White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, who were trying to get the pancreatitis-stricken Ashcroft to renew a still secret and illegal surveillance program on Americans' electronic communications. Neither Ashcroft nor Comey, then acting attorney general because of Ashcroft's condition, would reauthorize the program. When Gonzales authorized the program to go forward without a Justice Department certification, Comey threatened to resign, along with his staff and FBI Director Robert Mueller.The threats worked: President Bush blinked, and Comey won modifications to the secret surveillance program that he felt brought it into compliance with the law. This event, now the stuff of DC legend, has solidified Comey's reputation as a "civil liberties superhero", in the words of CNN's Jake Tapper, and may be one of the reasons President Obama nominated him Friday to be the next director of the FBI.

There's one very big problem with describing Comey as some sort of civil libertarian: some facts suggest otherwise. While Comey deserves credit for stopping an illegal spying program in dramatic fashion, he also approved or defended some of the worst abuses of the Bush administration during his time as deputy attorney general. Those included torture, warrantless wiretapping, and indefinite detention.On 30 December 2004, a memo addressed to James Comey was issued that superseded the infamous memo that defined torture as pain "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure". The memo to Comey seemed to renounce torture but did nothing of the sort. The key sentence in the opinion is tucked away in footnote 8. It concludes that the new Comey memo did not change the authorizations of interrogation tactics in any earlier memos.In short, the memo Comey that approved gave a thumbs-up on waterboarding, wall slams, and other forms of torture – all violations of domestic and international law.

Earlier this year our organization, the Rockefeller Family Fund (RFF), announced that it would divest its holdings in fossil fuel companies. We mean to do this gradually, but in a public statement we singled out ExxonMobil for immediate divestment because of its “morally reprehensible conduct.”1 For over a quarter-century the company tried to deceive policymakers and the public about the realities of climate change, protecting its profits at the cost of immense damage to life on this planet.Our criticism carries a certain historical irony. John D. Rockefeller founded Standard Oil, and ExxonMobil is Standard Oil’s largest direct descendant. In a sense we were turning against the company where most of the Rockefeller family’s wealth was created. (Other members of the Rockefeller family have been trying to get ExxonMobil to change its behavior for over a decade.) Approached by some reporters for comment, an ExxonMobil spokesman replied, “It’s not surprising that they’re divesting from the company since they’re already funding a conspiracy against us.”2What we had funded was an investigative journalism project. With help from other public charities and foundations, including the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF), we paid for a team of independent reporters from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism to try to determine what Exxon and other US oil companies had really known about climate science, and when. Such an investigation seemed promising because Exxon, in particular, has been a leader of the movement to deny the facts of climate change.3 Often working indirectly through front groups, it sponsored many of the scientists and think tanks that have sought to obfuscate the scientific consensus about the changing climate, and it participated in those efforts through its paid advertisements and the statements of its executives.

t seemed to us, however, that for business reasons, a company as sophisticated and successful as Exxon would have needed to know the difference between its own propaganda and scientific reality. If it turned out that Exxon and other oil companies had recognized the validity of climate science even while they were funding the climate denial movement, that would, we thought, help the public understand how artificially manufactured and disingenuous the “debate” over climate change has always been. In turn, we hoped this understanding would build support for strong policies addressing the crisis of global warming.Indeed, the Columbia reporters learned that Exxon had understood and accepted the validity of climate science long before embarking on its denial campaign, and in the fall of 2015 they published their discoveries in The Los Angeles Times.4 Around the same time, another team of reporters from the website InsideClimate News began publishing the results of similar research.5 (The RFF has made grants to InsideClimate News, and the RBF has been one of its most significant funders, but we didn’t know they were engaged in this project.) The reporting by these two different groups was complementary, each confirming and adding to the other’s findings.

Following publication of these articles, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman began investigating whether ExxonMobil had committed fraud by failing to disclose many of the business risks of climate change to its shareholders despite evidence that it understood those risks internally. Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey soon followed Schneiderman with her own investigation, as did the AGs of California and the Virgin Islands, and thirteen more state AGs announced that they were considering investigations.Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton each called for a federal investigation of ExxonMobil by the Department of Justice. Secretary of State John Kerry compared Exxon’s deceptions to the tobacco industry’s long denial of the danger of smoking, predicting that, if the allegations were true, Exxon might eventually have to pay billions of dollars in damages “in what I would imagine would be one of the largest class-action lawsuits in history.”6 Most recently, in August, the Securities and Exchange Commission began investigating the way ExxonMobil values its assets, given the world’s growing commitment to reducing carbon emissions. An article in The Wall Street Journal observed that this “could have far-reaching consequences for the oil and gas industry.”7

The White House is refusing to hand over top-secret documents to a Senate investigation into CIA torture and rendition of terrorism suspects, claiming it needs to ensure that “executive branch confidentiality” is respected.In the latest development in the spiralling clash between Congress and the administration over oversight of the intelligence agencies, Barack Obama’s spokesman Jay Carney confirmed that certain material from the George W Bush presidency was being withheld for fear of weakening Oval Office privacy.“This is about precedent, and the need, institutionally, to protect some of the prerogatives of the executive branch – and the office of the presidency,” said Carney.“All of these documents pertain to and come from a previous administration, but these are matters that need to be reviewed in light of long-recognised executive prerogatives and confidentiality interests.”

A report published by McClatchy newspapers on Wednesday night said that Senate investigators were trying to obtain an estimated 9,400 such documents relating to CIA detention and interrogation after 9/11.

In public, the White House has tried to stay out of a growing constitutional clash between Congress and the CIA over alleged interference in the investigation. Reuters reported that the White House chief lawyer, Kathryn Ruemmler, had tried to mediate in private between both sides in an attempt to “de-escalate” the tension.But the admission that the White House is withholding key documents is likely to renew criticism that the Obama administration is failing to live up to promises to fully investigate a dark chapter in CIA history.

Over a year ago, the Senate Intelligence Committee voted to adopt a historic, 6,000-page report which contains “startling details” about CIA misdeeds related to its torture program. The report, which cost $40 million to produce and appears to pose no national security threats, has been set for release since December 13, 2012. However, it has yet to see the light of day. The reason: the Obama administration continues to suppress its release, apparently for no reason other than to protect the reputations of the guilty. Per The Atlantic‘s Conor Friedersdorf:

[Over a year ago], the Senate Intelligence Committee voted to adopt a 6,000-page report on the CIA rendition, detention, and interrogation program that led to torture. Its contents include details on each prisoner in CIA custody, the conditions of their confinement, whether they were tortured, the intelligence they provided, and the degree to which the CIA lied about its behavior to overseers. Senator Dianne Feinstein declared it one of the most significant oversight efforts in American history, noting that it contains “startling details” and raises “critical questions.” But all these months later, the report is still being suppressed. The Obama Administration has no valid reason to suppress the report. Its contents do not threaten national security, as evidenced by the fact that numerous figures who normally defer to the national-security state want it released with minor redactions. The most prominent of all is Vice President Joe Biden. The Center for Victims of Torture, in advocating for the public’s right to fully understand the CIA’s lawless torture program during the Bush administration, has procured the signatures of 58 national security experts and officials. These signatures include U.S. senators, former Obama administration officials and retired military leaders. President Obama once promised that his White House would be the most transparent in history, and went so far in February to claim that such is indeed the case. This most-transparent-ever administration is now

marking the CIA report as classified, determined “to keep secret the most thorough accounting we have of the agency’s lawless, immoral behavior.” Is President Obama bowing to factions within the CIA? Shielding the powerful from rebuke during his own illegal drone program? Protecting past criminals as a down payment on future investigations? To answer those questions would be to speculate. However, what is known is this: if we don’t fully understand those CIA abuses perpetrated in the name of the State and national security, we are more likely to allow those abuses to happen again.

From a British diplomatic source I learn that Britain has lobbied the United States against the publication of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on torture and extraordinary rendition.  The lobbying has been carried out “at all levels” – White House, State Department and CIA.  The British have argued that at the very least the report must be emasculated before publication. The British argument is that in a number of court cases including the Belhadj case, the British government has successfully blocked legal action by victims on the grounds that this would weaken the US/UK intelligence relationship and thus vitally damage national security, by revealing facts the American intelligence service wish hidden.  [We will leave aside for the moment the utter shame of our servile groveling judges accepting such an argument].  The British Government are now pointing out to the Americans that this argument could be fatally weakened if major detail of the full horror and scope of torture and extraordinary rendition is revealed by the Senate Intelligence Committee.  The argument runs that this could in turn lead to further revelations in the courts and block the major defence against prosecutions of Blair, Straw and Dearlove, among others, potentially unleashing a transatlantic wave of judicial activism. The unabashed collusion of two torturing security states in concealing the truth of their despicable acts – including complicity in the torture of women and minors – and blocking criminal prosecution of the guilty is a sign of how low public ethics have sunk.  Fortunately there are still a few people in the British Foreign Office disgusted enough to leak it.

If you had been a reader of The American Conservative magazine back in December 2011, you might have learned from an article written by me that “Unmarked NATO warplanes are arriving at Turkish military bases close to Iskenderum on the Syrian border, delivering weapons [to the Free Syrian Army] derived from Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s arsenals…” Well, it seems that the rest of the media is beginning to catch up with the old news, supplemented with significant details by Sy Hersh in the latest issue of the London Review of Books in an article entitled “The Red Line and the Rat Line.” The reality is that numerous former intelligence officials, like myself, have long known most of the story surrounding the on-again off-again intervention by the United States and others in Syria, but what was needed was a Sy Hersh, with his unmatched range of contacts deep in both the Pentagon as well as at CIA and State Department, to stitch it all together with corroboration from multiple sources. In a sense it was a secret that wasn’t really very well hidden but which the mainstream media wouldn’t touch with a barge pole because it revealed that the Obama Administration, just like the Bushies who preceded it, has been actively though clandestinely conspiring to overthrow yet another government in the Middle East. One might well conclude that the White House is like the Bourbon Kings of France in that it never forgets anything but never learns anything either.

The few media outlets that are willing to pick up the Syria story even now are gingerly treating it as something new, jumping in based on their own editorial biases, sometimes emphasizing the CIA and MI6 role in cooperating with the Turks to undermine Bashar al-Assad. But Hersh’s tale is only surprising if one had not been reading between the lines over the past three years, where the clandestine role of the British and American governments was evident and frequently reported on over the internet and, most particularly, in the local media in the Middle East. Far from being either rogue or deliberately deceptive, operations by the U.S. and UK intelligence services, the so-called “ratlines” feeding weapons into Syria, were fully vetted and approved by both the White House and Number 10 Downing Street. The more recent exposure of the Benghazi CIA base’s possible involvement in obtaining Libyan arms as part of the process of equipping the Syrian insurgents almost blew the lid off of the arrangement but somehow the media attention was diverted by a partisan attack on the Obama Administration over who said what and when to explain the security breakdown and the real story sank out of sight.

So this is what happened, roughly speaking: the United States had been seeking the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria since at least 2003, joining with Saudi Arabia, which had been funding efforts to destabilize his regime even earlier. Why? Because from the Saudi viewpoint Syria was an ally of Iran and was also a heretical state led by a secular government dominated by Alawite Muslims, viewed as being uncomfortably close to Shi’ites in their apostasy. From the U.S. viewpoint, the ties to Iran and reports of Syrian interference in Lebanon were a sufficient casus belli coupled with a geostrategic assessment shared with the Saudis that Syria served as the essential land bridge connecting Hezbollah in Lebanon to Iran. The subsequent Congressional Syria Accountability Acts of 2004 and 2010, like similar legislation directed against Iran, have resulted in little accountability and have instead stifled diplomacy. They punished Syria with sanctions for supporting Hezbollah in Lebanon and for its links to Tehran, making any possible improvement in relations problematical. The 2010 Act even calls for steps to bring about regime change in Damascus. The United States also engaged in a program eerily reminiscent of its recent moves to destabilize the government in Ukraine, i.e., sending in ambassadors and charges who deliberately provoked the Syrian government by meeting with opposition leaders and openly making demands for greater democracy. The last U.S. Ambassador to Syria Robert Ford spoke openly in support of the protesters while serving in Damascus in 2010. On one occasion he was pelted with tomatoes and was eventually removed over safety concerns.

How a former CIA officer’s efforts to get Congress to investigate the rendition and torture of a CIA captive failed

In an unusual move, the U.S. Department of Justice has filed a motion to make a private lawsuit simply disappear. While the U.S. Government is not a party to this defamation lawsuit—Victor Restis et al. v. American Coalition Against Nuclear Iran, Inc.—filed July 19, 2013, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Attorney General Eric Holder is concerned that the discovery being undertaken might jeopardize our national security.

The government’s argument for intervening in this lawsuit is technical and thin.

The strongest precedent in the government’s brief in the current case is the 1985 case of Fitzgerald v. Penthouse Intern., Ltd. Fitzgerald had sued Penthouse Magazine for an allegedly libelous article, but the U.S. Navy moved to intervene on the ground that the government had a national security interest which would not be adequately protected by the parties, so the government requested the action be dismissed, after invoking the state secrets privilege. The federal district court granted the motions and dismissed the case, which the U.S. Court of Appeals for Fourth Circuit affirmed. So there is precedent for this unusual action by the government in a private lawsuit, but the legitimacy of the state secrets privilege remains subject to question.

LISBON: A former CIA operative convicted of kidnapping an Egyptian cleric in Milan as part of the U.S. extraordinary renditions program is fighting against being sent to Italy to serve the six-year sentence she received in absentia there, a Portuguese court official said Friday.Sabrina De Sousa, who has both U.S. and Portuguese citizenship, was arrested at Lisbon's international airport Monday on a European arrest warrant issued by Italy.She told a judge on Tuesday she wants to stay in Portugal, where she has been living recently, Luis Vaz das Neves, president of the Lisbon court handling her case, told The Associated Press on Friday.De Sousa also "expressed a wish to serve her sentence, if she has to serve it, here in Portugal," he said.De Sousa was among 26 Americans, mostly CIA agents, convicted in absentia in the kidnapping of Milan cleric Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, known as Abu Omar, from a Milan street on Feb. 17, 2003.De Sousa claims she was never notified of the Italian court decision, according to Vaz das Neves.

De Sousa handed both her passports over to the Lisbon court, which gave her 10 days to provide written arguments against her extradition. In the meantime, she must report weekly to a police station.The court believed she was not a flight risk, Vaz das Neves said, since she had a return plane ticket to Lisbon, is a Portuguese citizen and says she wants to settle here.De Sousa, who operated for the CIA under diplomatic cover, was initially acquitted due to diplomatic immunity but was found guilty by Italy's highest court in 2014.The Indian-born De Sousa came out against the U.S. decision not to allow the American defendants to get their own lawyers near the end of the first trial, eventually winning permission to have her own counsel. De Sousa said she was concerned about losing her freedom to visit family in India.

Vaz das Neves said De Sousa was trying to fly to Goa, a one-time Portuguese territory in India, to see her 89-year-old mother when she was arrested. She was due back in Portugal on Oct. 27.Asked why De Sousa was not caught earlier, Vaz das Neves said Portuguese authorities were aware of the warrant but police had no record of her residing here.De Sousa's lawyer in Lisbon said neither he nor his client would give interviews until the extradition case was resolved.But De Sousa acknowledged in published comments that she had endangered her freedom by trying to travel across a border."I knew I was taking a risk, but at some point I want to live (in Portugal) as a free citizen, and this needs to be resolved," De Sousa told Vice News in an article Thursday.After De Sousa presents her arguments, the court has 10 days to respond. The Portuguese Constitution prohibits the extradition of nationals, but Vaz das Neves said the court will also have to take European Union laws into account.

German prosecutors have opened an investigation into the alleged monitoring of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone by the U.S. National Security Agency, officials said Wednesday, in a move that could again complicate diplomatic relations between the two allies. It was not immediately clear what the new investigation might mean in terms of possible prosecutions of Americans. Documents provided by National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden indicated in October that the U.S. was monitoring Merkel’s cellphone conversations, as well as those of 35 other foreign leaders. Merkel expressed outrage and accused Washington of a grave breach of trust. In the ensuing diplomatic fallout, President Barack Obama acknowledged Germany’s anger and promised that new guidelines would cut back on such monitoring, except in the case of a national security interest. “The leaders of our close friends and allies deserve to know that if I want to learn what they think about an issue, I will pick up the phone and call them rather than turning to surveillance,” Obama said at the time.

Following the news of the German probe, Obama’s deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, said the U.S. believes direct dialogue between the two countries rather than an investigation is the best way to address Germany’s concerns. “We believe we have an open line and good communication” with Merkel and her team, Rhodes told reporters aboard Air Force One as Obama flew to Brussels for a meeting of the Group of Seven nations. After mulling for months whether to open a formal probe, Chief Federal Prosecutor Harald Range determined “that sufficient factual evidence exists that unknown members of U.S. intelligence services spied on the mobile phone of Chancellor Angela Merkel,” his office said. In a similarly thorny diplomatic case, Germany got as far as issuing warrants for 13 unidentified CIA agents suspected of kidnapping a German terrorism suspect and taking him to a detention center in Afghanistan. The case was shelved in 2007 after the U.S. Justice Department said extraditing the agents would harm “American national interests.”

In his Wednesday announcement, Range’s office said he was not opening a formal investigation of wider allegations of blanket surveillance of telecommunications data in Germany by U.S. and British intelligence, saying that there was not yet sufficient factual evidence of concrete crimes. His office said that will remain under consideration. Merkel’s spokesman, Steffen Seibert, declined to comment on Range’s decision or on whether the government fears it will weigh on relations with the U.S. The government didn’t exert any influence on the prosecutor, Seibert told reporters. “I am not going to evaluate here the decision he has made,” he said. Separately, the German Parliament earlier this year set up a committee to investigate the scope of spying by the NSA and other intelligence services in Germany.

The WaPo has a story that repeats what I’ve been harping on for over a year (and in some cases, has been clear even longer): the Senate Torture Report shows that CIA repeatedly lied to Congress. There are, however, ugly new details about the torture (though it’s not clear whether they show up in the report): particularly regarding the treatment of Ammar al-Baluchi. If declassified, the report could reveal new information on the treatment of a high-value detainee named Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, the nephew of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks. The Pakistanis captured Ali, known more commonly as Ammar al-Baluchi, on April, 30, 2003, in Karachi and turned him over to the CIA about a week later. He was taken to a CIA black site called “Salt Pit” near Kabul. At the secret prison, Baluchi endured a regime that included being dunked in a tub filled with ice water. CIA interrogators forcibly kept his head under the water while he struggled to breathe and beat him repeatedly, hitting him with a truncheon-like object and smashing his head against a wall, officials said. As with Zubaida and even Nashiri, officials said, CIA interrogators continued the harsh treatment even after it appeared that Baluchi was cooperating. The report notes that two other prisoners — members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group — were subjected to similar treatment at the same time.

Two other terrorism suspects, from Libya — Mohammed al-Shoroeiya and Khalid al-Sharif — endured similar treatment at Salt Pit, according to Human Rights Watch. One of the men said CIA interrogators “would pour buckets of very cold water over his nose and mouth to the point that he felt he would suffocate. Icy cold water was also poured over his body. He said it happened over and over again,” the report says. CIA doctors monitored their body temperatures so they wouldn’t suffer hypothermia. Ultimately, CIA got DOJ to authorize “water dousing” — in the manner that CIA always got DOJ to approve mere shadows of what they actually did, and the approval more closely matches the description of the LIFG prisoners — in the Bradbury Techniques Memo (see page 10). But not before it got used over and over at the Salt Pit (the same place where water dousing had already contributed to Gul Rahman’s death). Which is, I’m quite certain, one thing that CIA was doing with the Legal Principles document, a set of legal guidelines the CIA wrote for itself (with John Yoo’s freelance help) as the CIA’s legal problems started to mount. As I’ve noted, the first draft of the memos got hand-carried to John Yoo on April 28, 2003, just as these detainees were in the Salt Pit. There were several more discussions internally at CIA in anticipation of litigation before they tried (unsuccessfully) to create a fait accompli with Pat Philbin on June 16, 2003. At that point, the document only generally approved techniques equivalent to those already approved. As CIA would later explain,

We rely on the applicable law and OLC guidance to assess the lawfulness of detention and interrogation techniques. For example, using the applicable law and relying on OLC’s guidance, we concluded that the abdominal slap previously discussed with OLC (and mentioned in the June 2003 summary points) is a permissible interrogation technique. Similarly, in addition to the sitting and kneeling stress positions discussed earlier with OLC, the Agency has added to its list of approved interrogation techniques two standing stress positions involving the detainee leaning against a wall. I guess, in similar fashion, John Yoo and his CIA buddies believe ice-drowning is equivalent, as another kind of simulated drowning, to waterboarding, which had been approved? Then the next year, when Scott Muller tried the same trick with Jack Goldsmith — trying to get him to sign off on the techniques CIA had freelanced its own legal opinion — he asked to include water dousing (and another water-based technique and one still-redacted technique) explicitly. Of course, the description of water dousing fell far short of what the CIA was actually doing — dunking men in ice-water repeatedly — though the outlines, especially the concern about detainees ingesting water and hypothermia — show the outlines of the torture such language was meant to gloss. To understand the CIA’s torture program, you have to understand what these bureaucratic maneuvers were meant to cover. Now we know they were intended to authorize controlled drowning of men in ice water.