The Temporary Committee on the alleged use of European countries by the CIA for the transport and illegal detention of prisoners, widely referred to as the CIA committee, was a Committee of the European Parliament that was set up in 2006 to investigate the alleged role of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in the extraordinary rendition of terrorists. The chairman of the committee was Carlos Coelho. [1]
The Committees of the European Parliament are designed to aid the European Commission in initiating legislation.
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, tasked with gathering, processing, and analyzing national security information from around the world, primarily through the use of human intelligence (HUMINT). As one of the principal members of the United States Intelligence Community (IC), the CIA reports to the Director of National Intelligence and is primarily focused on providing intelligence for the President and Cabinet of the United States.
Extraordinary rendition, also called irregular rendition or forced rendition, is the government-sponsored abduction and extrajudicial transfer of a person from one country to another with the purpose of circumventing the former country's laws on interrogation, detention and torture. Such renditions have predominantly been carried out by the United States government, with the consent of the other countries involved.
An interim report was released in 2006, which stated that "the CIA or other US services have been directly responsible for the illegal seizure, removal, abduction and detention of terrorist suspects on the territory of member states". [2]
The Chairman of the committee, Carlos Coelho, claimed that the CIA's extraordinary renditions in Europe was carried out "with the knowledge and support of European national governments". [3]
In 2007, the final report of the committee was released, which revealed the existence of secret detention facilities in Europe. According to the report, over one thousand CIA-operated flights used European airspace from 2001 to 2005. [4]
The report also included the following details:
Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militare was the military intelligence agency of Italy from 1977–2007.
The Abu Omar Case was the abduction and transfer to Egypt of the Imam of Milan Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, also known as Abu Omar. The case was picked by the international media as one of the better-documented cases of extraordinary rendition carried out in a joint operation by the United States' Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Italian Military Intelligence and Security Service (SISMI) in the context of the "global war on terrorism" declared by the Bush administration.
Milan is a city in northern Italy, capital of Lombardy, and the second-most populous city in Italy after Rome, with the city proper having a population of 1,395,274 while its metropolitan city has a population of 3,250,315. Its continuously built-up urban area has a population estimated to be about 5,270,000 over 1,891 square kilometres. The wider Milan metropolitan area, known as Greater Milan, is a polycentric metropolitan region that extends over central Lombardy and eastern Piedmont and which counts an estimated total population of 7.5 million, making it by far the largest metropolitan area in Italy and the 54th largest in the world. Milan served as capital of the Western Roman Empire from 286 to 402 and the Duchy of Milan during the medieval period and early modern age.
The committee's final report was approved by the European Parliament with 382 votes in favour, 256 against, and 74 abstentions. [4]
Criticism of the War on Terror addresses the morals, ethics, efficiency, economics, as well as other issues surrounding the War on Terror. It also touches upon criticism against the phrase itself, which was branded as a misnomer. The notion of a "war" against "terrorism" has proven highly contentious, with critics charging that participating governments exploited it to pursue long-standing policy/military objectives, reduce civil liberties, and infringe upon human rights. It is argued that the term war is not appropriate in this context, since there is no identifiable enemy and that it is unlikely international terrorism can be brought to an end by military means.
The Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001 is the official name of the inquiry conducted by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence into the activities of the U.S. Intelligence Community in connection with the September 11, 2001 attacks. The investigation began in February 2002 and the final report was released in December 2002.
Mustafa al-Hawsawi is a Saudi Arabian citizen of African descent. He is alleged to have acted as one of many financial facilitators of the September 11 attacks in the United States. However, the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture which was publicly released on December 9, 2014, disclosed an internal CIA cable between the chief of interrogations and the CIA Headquarters wherein he expressed reservations regarding al-Hawsawi's alleged role and involvement in the plot. The report reveals "following al-Hawsawi's first interrogation session, Chief of Interrogations asked CIA Headquarters for information on what al-Hawsawi actually "knows," saying: "he does not appear to the [sic] be a person that is a financial mastermind."
The Niger uranium forgeries were forged documents initially released in 2001 by SISMI, which seem to depict an attempt made by Saddam Hussein in Iraq to purchase yellowcake uranium powder from Niger during the Iraq disarmament crisis. On the basis of these documents and other indicators, the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom asserted that Iraq violated United Nations sanctions against Iraq by attempting to procure nuclear material for the purpose of creating weapons of mass destruction.
This page describes several aircraft that are alleged in media reports to have been used in the practice of extraordinary rendition, the extralegal transfer of prisoners from one country to another.
Carlos Coelho is a Portuguese politician and Member of the European Parliament for the Social Democratic Party–People's Party coalition; part of the European People's Party–European Democrats group.
Ghost detainee is a term used in the executive branch of the United States government to designate a person held in a detention center, whose identity has been hidden by keeping them unregistered and therefore anonymous. Such uses arose as the Bush administration initiated the War on Terror following the 9/11 attacks of 2001 in the United States. As documented in the 2004 Taguba Report, it was used in the same manner by United States (US) officials and contractors of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2003–2004.
Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, is an Egyptian cleric. In 2003, he was living in Milan, Italy, from where he was kidnapped and tortured in Egypt. This "Imam rapito affair" prompted a series of investigations in Italy, culminating in the criminal convictions of 22 CIA operatives, a U.S. Air Force colonel, and two Italian accomplices, as well as Nasr, himself.
Dick Marty is a Swiss politician and former state prosecutor of the canton of Ticino. He is a member of the Swiss Council of States, and is a former member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.
Khaled El-Masri is a German and Lebanese citizen who was mistakenly abducted by the Macedonian police in 2003, and handed over to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). While in CIA custody, he was flown to Afghanistan, where he was held at a black site and routinely interrogated, beaten, strip-searched, sodomized, and subjected to other cruel forms of inhumane and degrading treatment and torture. After El-Masri held hunger strikes, and was detained for four months in the "Salt Pit", the CIA finally admitted his arrest and torture were a mistake and released him. He is believed to be among an estimated 3,000 detainees whom the CIA abducted from 2001–2005.
In military terminology, a black site is a location at which an unacknowledged black operation or black project is conducted. It can refer to the facilities that are controlled by the CIA and used by the U.S. government in its War on Terror to detain alleged unlawful enemy combatants.
Marco Mancini was the second-highest-ranking officer of SISMI, the military intelligence agency of Italy until his 5 July 2006 arrest for his participation in the kidnapping of Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr. He was then indicted a second time on December 13, 2006, for his role in the SISMI-Telecom scandal. On February 12, 2013, he was sentenced to a 9-year jail term by the Milano Court of Appeals.
Saud Memon was a Pakistani businessman from Karachi dealing in yarn and textiles. Memon was said to own the shed where American journalist Daniel Pearl was killed. Memon was wanted by law-enforcement agencies in the Pearl case for supposedly providing the place where Pearl was beheaded and subsequently buried. However, Memon was never formally charged.
Italian intelligence agencies have been reorganized many times since the 1946 birth of the Italian Republic in an attempt to increase their effectiveness and bring them more fully under civilian control.
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been involved in Italian politics since the end of World War II. The CIA intervened in the 1948 general election and would go on to provide covert aid until the early 1960s.
The Temporary Committee on the ECHELON Interception System was a Committee of the European Parliament that was set up in 2000 to investigate the global surveillance network ECHELON. The committee issued its final report in 2001.