Mission & Justice

Jason Dowling; 8/8/08

This week Osama bin Laden’s former driver was found guilty in the first full trial held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. It’s a fate that could well have befallen Australian Mamdouh Habib, who found himself in Guantanamo Bay after a journey under United States control that allegedly involved being tortured in Egypt as part of the sinister rendition program. It’s been a long saga but now it seems that the truth about Habib’s experiences and the failure of the Australian Government to ensure that he received appropriate legal protection is finally seeping out. In recent days, The Age requested information from the Attorney-General’s Department on how the Australian Government became aware Habib was in Egypt and if anyone from the government visited him there. The department was also questioned about whether Australian air space, personnel or equipment had ever been used to assist with a rendition.

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Jason Dowling; 30/6/08

The Federal Government wants to charge almost $2000 to release information regarding its knowledge of rendition, the forced transfer of terrorism-related prisoners between countries. The Age has requested through freedom of information all correspondence and reports related to rendition the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet produced or received between January 2006 and January 2008. In a preliminary assessment the department said it would charge $1912.90 to release 112 pages and has refused to reduce the cost on public interest grounds. It has emerged Australia had knowledge the United States was intending to send Australian terror suspect Mamdouh Habib to be interrogated in another country after his arrest in Pakistan in 2001.

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Joseph A. Kechichian; 5/6/08

According to the respected London Guardian, the United States operated and may continue to rely on “floating prisons” to accommodate “enemy combatants” in the open-ended war on terrorism. Even worse, the purpose of these facilities was to conceal actual “numbers and whereabouts of detainees” and, more important, to sidestep any and all obligations under international law. Coming after notorious revelations from Bagram prison in Afghanistan to the scandals of Abu Ghraib in Iraq to the legal hairsplitting in Guantanamo Bay to secret rendition flights, why are prisoners being held without trial, and are they still subject to torture despite denials to the contrary?

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Elisabetta Povoledo; 30/5/08

A top Italian terrorism investigator has told a court how easily an alleged CIA operation to kidnap a radical imam was unravelled: all that was necessary was to trace the mobile phones in use near the spot where the cleric disappeared on his way to a mosque in February 2003. “The evidence led us to believe that the operative group consisted of Americans,” Bruno Megale, the head of Milan’s anti-terrorism police force, told the court. “Some of the phones had called numbers in the United States; some had called the state of Virginia (where the CIA has its headquarters).” Testifying in the trial of 26 Americans, all but one identified as CIA operatives, Mr Megale described tracking massive amounts of mobile phone traffic to piece together Europe’s only prosecution of the Bush Administration’s much-disputed practice known as extraordinary rendition.

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Nicola Berkovic; 28/5/08

Assurances given to British authorities about the scope of the Haneef inquiry were inappropriate and an attempt by the Rudd Government to limit the terms of that inquiry, the Opposition alleges. A Senate estimates committee heard yesterday that Attorney-General Robert McClelland assured British prosecutors that “due regard would be paid to the sensitivity of English policing and intelligence information” during the inquiry being conducted by John Clarke QC. Attorney-General’s department secretary Robert Cornall, who was with Mr McClelland on his trip to Britain, said the authorities were concerned that nothing in the inquiry would “intrude into matters that were being investigated and prosecuted in England”.

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Natalie O’Brien; 27/5/08

The former head of spy agency ASIO, Dennis Richardson, warned US authorities that Canberra could not agree to their transferring Mamdouh Habib to Egypt at least a week before the Sydney man was “kidnapped” and sent to the North African country, where he was subjected to months of torture. The current head of ASIO, Paul O’Sullivan, revealed during a Senate estimates hearing yesterday that his predecessor, Mr Richardson, was per-sonally involved in discussions with the US State Department and the intelligence community about the “hypothetical” possibility of Mr Habib being taken to Egypt. “The director-general of ASIO informed the US au-thorities that it was not the Australian government policy position to engage in practices of rendition,” Mr O’Sullivan said.

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Natalie O’Brien; 23/5/08

Senior government officials have admitted discussing the possibility of “another government” transferring Mamdouh Habib to Egypt after his arrest in Pakistan, despite later denials that they knew he was going to be flown to the North African country, where prisoners are known to be tortured. Documents tabled in parliament yesterday show for the first time the potential for a transfer was discussed at a meeting in Canberra in late October 2001. Present at the meeting were senior officials from the Prime Minister’s Office, ASIO, the Australian Federal Police, the Department of Foreign Affairs and the Attorney-General’s Department. The officials agreed at the meeting “that the Australian Government could not agree to the transfer of Mr Habib toEgypt”. It has never been publicly admitted before that senior government officials knew of and discussed the possibility of Mr Habib being sent to Egypt before he disappeared from Pakistani custody in early November 2001.

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11/4/08

It is hard to figure why exactly Human Rights Watch (HRW) chose to submit its report entitled “Double Jeopardy: CIA Renditions to Jordan” now. The report covers the period between 2001 and 2004. Surely HRW has more up-to-date reports on the human rights situation in the country; dwelling on past accusations which were thoroughly investigated at the time is odd, to say the least. Amnesty International submitted a similar report on the subject in 2006, alleging that Jordan was a “central hub” of secret detention facilities serving in past the so-called US rendition programme. There were repeated allegations during that period that Jordan harbours secret jails to interrogate and incarcerate people accused of committing acts of terrorism. Some human rights NGOs, both local and international, made these charges only to be proven wrong upon closer scrutiny. The National Centre for Human Rights, a well-respected independent human rights watchdog in the country, did go to a great extent to investigate the charges; it discovered there were no secret detention facilities but premises serving national or foreign purposes.

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10/4/08

Jordan has blasted as “erroneous” a Human Rights Watch report that the US spy agency secretly transported at least 14 prisoners to the kingdom between 2001 and 2004. “The report is erroneous and inaccurate. It is based on individual allegations, unobjective foundation and wrong conclusions,” State Minister for Information Nasser Judeh said on Tuesday. In a statement, Judeh said Jordan hopes that “such reports in the future would be based on accurate and objective information, instead of relaying on individual information and take them for granted as facts.”

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