U.S. allies in Africa may have engaged in secret prisoner renditions reports McClatchy.
A network of U.S. allies in East Africa secretly have transferred to prisons in Somalia and Ethiopia as many as 150 people who were captured in Kenya while fleeing the recent war in Somalia, according to human rights advocates here….
The prisoners, who included men and women of 17 nationalities and children as young as 7 months, were held in Kenya for several weeks before most of them were transferred covertly to Somalia and Ethiopia, where they’re being held incommunicado, the groups charge.
The transfers, which authorities reportedly carried out in the middle of the night and made public only after a recent court order in Kenya, violated international law, according to the rights groups. They charge that the program is being driven by the United States, which has built a close relationship with Kenya and Ethiopia in the war on terrorism.
At least one of the transferees is an American citizen identified on a flight manifest as Amir Mohamed Meshar. Meshar was flown from Nairobi to Baidoa, the seat of Somalia’s transitional government, on Feb. 10, according to Islamic human-rights groups. His whereabouts, and those of 12 other detainees aboard that chartered flight, are unknown….
Representatives of Islamic groups who’d visited detainees in late January in their jail cells in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, said they’d spotted U.S. diplomatic vehicles outside the holding facilities. They also said some detainees had reported being questioned by U.S. law enforcement agents.
American human rights abuses spread throughout the world.
March 14th, 2007
In The Most Important Congressional Investigation in U.S. Historyhttp://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/3/12/181553/747
, Daily Kos’ Valtin provides background on the 1975-1976 Church Committee’s investigation of intelligence abuses by the CIA, FBI, NSA, and other agencies.
Extent of the Select Committee Investigation
Since the passage of the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act, signed into law in 1992 by President George H. W. Bush, over 50,000 pages of Church Committee records have been declassified and made available to the public. These files contain testimony and information on U.S. attempts to assassinate foreign leaders, on the Church Committee’s investigation of the intelligence agencies’ response to domestic assassination, MKULTRA mind control research by the CIA and other agencies, and COINTELPRO, among other topics.
No other Congressional investigation left such a damning indictment of government malfeasance and undemocratic actions as the Church reports have left us.
Sen. Church was not left untouched by backlash. The “Anybody But Church” Committee (ABC) — the child of the conservative Washington National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC). (See the many court decisions against NCPAC for their electoral shenanigans here.) Apparently, Idahoans, upset at Church’s support for the Panama Canal treaty, elected GOP’er Steve Symms by less than 1% of the vote in the Reagan landslide year of 1980.
The Church Committee Reports
It’s worth quoting some from the reports to give a flavor of their breadth, their political rigor, and their depth of research. The whole is way too long to quote at any length, or even give a decent sampling, but I believe those who are politically active today, and those who are currently serving in Congress, should use the Church hearings as both an inspiration and a template.
March 14th, 2007