The Guardian reports: The killing of three US citizens, one a 16-year-old boy, in targeted drone strikes last year were unlawful and violated their constitutional rights by not affording them due process, according to a lawsuit filed by their relatives on Wednesday.

Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical Muslim cleric who was placed on a CIA “kill list” last year, died in a targeted strike in Yemen on 30 September that also killed Samir Khan, an alleged propagandist for al-Qaida, in the Arabian Pensinsula. Al-Awlaki’s teenage son, Abdulrahman, was killed in a separate strike 200 miles away in which six others died two weeks later.

The lawsuit accuses Leon Panetta, the secretary of defence, David Petraeus, the director of the CIA, and two military commanders of authorising and directing unlawful killings. President Barack Obama is not named in the lawsuit: presidents are immune from civil suits arising from their official actions.

The complaint alleges that the deaths are part of a broader programme of deliberate and premeditated killings by the United States, which rely on “vague legal standards, a closed executive process and evidence never presented to the courts”.

The lawsuit has been filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) on behalf of Nasser al-Awlaki, the father of Anwar and grandfather of Abdulrahman, and Sarah Khan, the mother of Khan. It aims to force the Obama administration to disclose information about secret decisions behind the killing.

Danger Room reports: Enrique “Ricky” Prado’s resume reads like the ultimate CIA officer: veteran of the Central American wars, running the CIA’s operations in Korea, a top spy in America’s espionage programs against China, and deputy to counter-terrorist chief Cofer Black — and then a stint at Blackwater. But he’s also alleged to have started out a career as a hitman for a notorious Miami mobster, and kept working for the mob even after joining the CIA. Finally, he went on to serve as the head of the CIA’s secret assassination squad against Al-Qaida.

That’s according to journalist Evan Wright’s blockbuster story How to Get Away With Murder in America, distributed by Byliner. In it, Wright — who authored Generation Kill, the seminal story of the Iraq invasion — compiles lengthy, years-long investigations by state and federal police into a sector of Miami’s criminal underworld that ended nowhere, were sidelined by higher-ups, or cut short by light sentences. It tracks the history of Prado’s alleged Miami patron and notorious cocaine trafficker, Alberto San Pedro, and suspicions that Prado moved a secret death squad from the CIA to Blackwater.

“In protecting Prado, the CIA arguably allowed a new type of mole — an agent not of a foreign government but of American criminal interests — to penetrate command,” Wright writes.

In this sense, there are two stories that blur into each other: Prado the CIA officer, and Prado the alleged killer. The latter begins when Prado met his alleged future mob patron, Alberto San Pedro, as a high school student in Miami after their families had fled Cuba following the revolution. Prado would later join the Air Force, though he never saw service in Vietnam, and returned to Miami to work as a firefighter. But he kept moonlighting as a hitman for San Pedro, who had emerged into one of Miami’s most formidable cocaine traffickers, according to Wright. [Continue reading…]

The Los Angeles Times reports: For years, the idea seemed unthinkable, absurd. A secret U.S. detention center in a remote corner of Poland, where Al Qaeda suspects were brutally interrogated by the CIA? About as likely as “the Loch Ness monster,” is how one Pole described it recently.

That monster is now rearing its head.

Cloistered inside government offices, surrounded by classified documents, Polish prosecutors are building a case that could result in criminal charges against the nation’s former spy chief and even, some say, against former senior political leaders. Evidence that a foreign power was allowed to conduct illicit activities on Polish soil has deeply shaken many Poles’ faith in the United States and in Poland’s sense of itself as a successful democracy born from the ashes of the Cold War.

The prosecutors’ investigation centers on a Polish military garrison that allegedly hosted a CIA “black site” where foreign detainees were subjected to internationally condemned interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding, during 2002 and 2003. The suspects — including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-professed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks — had either been arrested or snatched under the United States’ “extraordinary rendition” program and questioned abroad to avoid American legal standards for interrogations, prosecutors say.

The allegations have already damaged the reputation of the country that Poles thank for helping them to cast off communist oppression. Many now angrily believe the U.S. took advantage of their gratitude, loyalty and eagerness to please by setting up a torture site that it would never have allowed within its own borders.

“It’s the kind of thing we expect from Soviet Russia. We remember the Soviet occupation; we remember the German occupation,” said attorney Mikolaj Pietrzak, who represents one of the Islamist men allegedly held and questioned in Poland. “The fact that this beacon of liberty which is America would allow this — it’s a great disappointment in the United States as the land of the free.” [Continue reading…]

ABC News reports: A Polish official says that prosecutors have a construction order that proves the CIA wanted a cage for terror suspects built at a secret ‘black site’ prison inside Poland.

Senator Jozef Pinior claims Krakow prosecutors have a document that shows a local contractor was asked to build a cage at Stare Kiekuty, a Polish army based used as a CIA prison for al Qaeda terror suspects in 2002 and 2003.

“In a state with rights,” Pinior told the Polish paper Gazeta Wyborcza, “people in prison are not kept in cages.” He said a cage was “non-standard equipment” for a prison, but standard “if torture was used there.”

Asked if he was sure the cage was for humans, he said, “What was it for? Exotic birds?” He said he has not seen the construction order, but that the Krakow prosecutor’s office, which is investigating the prison, has a copy of it.

This week Gazeta Wyborcza reported that the prosecutor’s office also allegedly has a signed order from Zbigniew Siemiatkowski, the then-head of Polish intelligence, authorizing the creation of the black site. A source told the paper that the agreement has a space intended for an American signature, but that the Americans did not sign the document “because they do not want to sign documents inconsistent with their own Constitution and international law.”

Mark Karlin reports: By academic pedigree and personal background, Jennifer Harbury should be among the ruling elite in the US. She is a graduate of Cornell and Harvard Law School, in fact receiving her law degree from Harvard just a few years before Barack Obama. Instead of following the path of most of her classmates to money and power, she became a legal aid attorney in Texas.

As part of her interest in human rights, she traveled to Guatemala in the early ’90s to write a book, “Bridge to Courage: Life Stories of Guatemalan Compañeros & Compañeras.” It was at that time she met, fell in love with and married Everardo (Efraín Bámaca Velásquez), who was a commandante in the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity Front. He was fighting against the US-backed military and government, which was committing genocide against the indigenous population and the poor (ending in more than 200,000 dead – and countless more tortured, but released).

In 1992, Everardo was captured by the Guatemalan military. Harbury demanded to know the whereabouts of her husband and held a hunger strike in front of the Clinton White House, which was covered by the media and made into a national story by “60 Minutes.” Harbury’s request was simple: she wanted the State Department or CIA to tell her what had happened to her husband. But both agencies didn’t acknowledge they knew of his whereabouts.

In an interview with Truthout, Harbury recounted:

After a year of trying to find out what had really happened to him, a young prisoner escaped from the army torture program and reported that Everardo was alive and being severely tortured. After my third hunger strike to save his life, in March 1995, then New Jersey Senator Toricelli disclosed that official US documents indicated that he had been killed by Guatemalan officers on the CIA payroll.

After receiving many files at last through the FOIA [Freedom of Information Act], it became clear that the State Department and the CIA had known where Everardo was and that he was in the hands of our own CIA liaisons or assets, since the week of his capture. They also knew approximately 300 other secret prisoners of war were suffering the same fate. The files show that all these prisoners were tortured to death, thrown down wells, out of helicopters, etc., yet the truth was only revealed to us in 1995. By then all were dead. We could have saved them.

In fact, Everardo, Harbury discovered, was kept in a body cast to keep him constrained while he was tortured for more than two years before being executed, all the time with the full knowledge and likely operational involvement of the CIA. [Continue reading…]

Heidi Larson writes: I was in New York on 11 September 2001, standing near one of the TV screens in the media section of Unicef’s communication division, where I headed up Unicef’s global communication work on immunisation. As the second plane crashed into the twin towers, we were quickly evacuated out of Unicef headquarters. I remember looking at the tall UN secretariat on First Avenue, home of the UN security council and the office of the UN secretary general. The building had always struck me as looking so graceful, but that morning it just looked like another ideal terrorist target. In fact, I never looked at the UN secretariat building with the same eyes again, and the impacts of that day – and the weeks and months that followed – were just the beginning of a changed, less trusting, anxious world.

The impacts of that day in New York became an unexpected thread in my Unicef work and the current research I lead at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where we monitor trends in vaccine confidence globally.

Last week’s call by the World Health Assembly for an emergency response to polio eradication is not unrelated to the news that Dr Shakil Afridi has been convicted of treason in Pakistan and sentenced to 33 years in prison. Dr Afridi, former surgeon general of the Khyber agency, was central to the CIA-led fake vaccination drive used to confirm the presence of Osama bin Laden in his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

The news of Dr Afridi’s role did not emerge until a Guardian article in July 2011, when it shook the immunisation world. Although Dr Afridi had pretended to provide a hepatitis B vaccination, not normally a door-to-door delivery, the news had a particularly strong impact on those working in polio eradication, where door-to-door vaccination is the norm. Anxieties and distrust about the polio vaccine and its western providers were rampant in some communities, and suspicions about CIA links with the polio vaccination campaigns, and rumours they were a front for the sterilising of Muslims, had been around for a decade after 9/11. After years of working to dispel myths about CIA links to the polio eradication efforts – from northern Nigeria to Pakistan and India, all of the work seemed fruitless. [Continue reading…]

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports: Two suspected US drone strikes have killed up to 12 civilians in the south of Yemen.

Reports vary but between 14 and 15 people have been killed in a double air strike on the southern city of Jaar. Of these, as many as a dozen are being reported as civilians. Up to 21 civilians have also been reported injured.

Witnesses said the first strike targeted alleged militants meeting in a house. Civilians who had flocked to the impact site were killed in a follow-up strike. Although the attack is unconfirmed, if accurate this tactic would echo the grim hallmarks of US drone tactics in Pakistan.

Earlier this year the Bureau exposed a CIA practice of ‘follow-up’ strikes in an investigation with the Sunday Times. On at least a dozen occasions twin strikes killed at least 50 civilians. The civilians died when they rushed to help victims of an initial attack and were hit by a second, follow-up strike.

U.S. intelligence agencies and the FBI are conducting investigations to find the source of a leak about the use of a double agent in Yemen who had joined al Qaeda but was serving as an informant for both Saudi intelligence and the CIA. The leak is said to have undermined intelligence operations. What the leak also reveals is that British intelligence agents are now implicated in assassinations — operations that are illegal under British law.

The Guardian reports: A British citizen played a central role in foiling the latest “underwear” bomb plot hatched in Yemen to attack a US-bound plane, as well as in the assassination of a top al-Qaida operative at the weekend, according to various sources in Washington on Thursday.

CNN reported that the agent involved was a British citizen of Saudi origin who had been recruited about a year ago by Saudi intelligence.

MSNBC, which also reported that the agent was a British passport holder, said that British intelligence was “heavily involved”. Other US media outlets gave the Saudi intelligence service most of the credit for the successful running of the operation. The Guardian independently confirmed British involvement.

The agent was recruited by al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), which operates in Yemen and Saudi Arabia, and asked to carry a bomb aboard a US-bound plane.

The revelation is politically and legally awkward for MI6 and MI5 whose agents, unlike American ones, are banned from missions that lead to assassinations, such as the US drone attack at the weekend that killed the top al-Qaida operative in the Yemen, Fahd al-Quso. The attack is being attributed to information from the agent.

Such is the sensitivity that America’s National Public Radio reported that the British government asked the Obama administration not to reveal the role of British intelligence in the mission.

James Clapper, the US director of National Intelligence, has opened an “internal review” of US intelligence agencies to determine whether there had been leaks of classified information related to the underwear bomb operation.

The FBI is conducting a separate criminal investigation, a law enforcement official said. The US defence secretary, Leon Panetta, a former CIA director, said: “When these leaks take place, they damage our ability to be able to pursue our intelligence efforts.”

The Washington Post reports: For al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen, the volunteer seemed ideal. He was willing to die in a suicide operation, and he had travel papers that would allow him to board a U.S.-bound flight.

It was a perfect dangle, in the parlance of spycraft, and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula took the bait.

The group’s bombmaker fitted the man with a new version of a nonmetallic “underwear bomb.” What he didn’t know was that the would-be martyr was an agent run by Saudi Arabia. And the man turned the device over to his Saudi handlers inside Yemen.

The Saudis flew the bomb out of the country on a noncommercial jet and handed it over to American officials in an unidentified third country, according to Mustafa Alani, director of security and defense studies at the Gulf Research Center in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, who has close contacts with the kingdom’s intelligence and counterterrorism agencies. A U.S. official confirmed aspects of his account.

The informant was one of several operatives sent into Yemen over the past two years with Western passports and other documents designed to attract the attention of a terrorist group that is determined to attack the United States, U.S. and Western intelligence officials said Wednesday.

One official described the effort to disrupt the airline plot as part of a broader use of operatives with “clean skins” who can pass themselves off as militants capable of traveling into Europe or the United States.

As part of the effort, the Saudis have used fledgling al-Qaeda operatives who were temporarily detained, as well as individuals who have entered the country’s rehabilitation program, which seeks to turn militants against terrorist groups.

The effort has focused on flipping low-level and aspiring jihadis, according to a former U.S. intelligence official familiar with the operation, which was revealed in news reports Monday.

It’s worth remembering that al Qaeada has demonstrated that it can be as adept in the art of deception as are the intelligence agencies. As the Washington Post reported in January, 2010:

The suicide bomber who killed seven CIA operatives in Afghanistan last week was a Jordanian informant who lured intelligence officers into a trap by promising new information about al-Qaeda’s top leadership, former U.S. government officials said Monday.

The attacker, a physician-turned-mole, had been recruited to infiltrate al-Qaeda’s senior circles and had gained the trust of his CIA and Jordanian handlers with a stream of useful intelligence leads, according to two former senior officials briefed on the agency’s internal investigation. His track record as an informant apparently allowed him to enter a key CIA post without a thorough search, the sources said.

The bomber, identified as Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, was standing just outside an agency building on the base Wednesday when he exploded a bomb hidden under his clothes, killing the seven Americans along with a Jordanian officer who had been assigned to work with him. Six CIA operatives were wounded.

The agency has declined to publicly identify the victims, a mix of career officers and contractors with backgrounds ranging from law enforcement to military Special Forces.

Details about the suicide bomber’s identity provided jarring insight into how a vital intelligence post in eastern Afghanistan was penetrated in the deadliest attack on the CIA in more than 25 years. Initial reports suggested that the bomber was an Afghan soldier or perhaps a local informant who had been brought onto the base for debriefing.

Instead, the new evidence points to a carefully planned act of deception by a trusted operative from a country closely allied with the United States in the fight against al-Qaeda. U.S. and Jordanian officials had come to regard Balawi as trustworthy, former officials said, despite a history of support for Islamist extremism — a point of view he appeared to endorse in an interview with an al-Qaeda-affiliated publication as recently as this past fall.

“He was someone who had already worked with us,” said a former U.S. counterterrorism officer who discussed the ongoing investigation on the condition of anonymity. The official said Balawi had been jointly managed by U.S. and Jordanian agencies and had provided “actionable intelligence” over several weeks of undercover work along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

A successful infiltration of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula by a Saudi intelligence agent with CIA oversight will be hailed in Washington as a major success, but it begs an important question: if the operations of the bomb maker, Fahd Mohammed Ahmed al-Quso, could be tracked so closely, why couldn’t he have been arrested instead of killed by a drone strike?

The supposed rationale for assassinating suspected terrorists by remote control is that they are so elusive and operate in such inaccessible locations that capture is impossible. It’s hard to imagine how this could have been the case with al Quso. He must effectively have been under surveillance and rather than make use of what might have been multiple opportunities to arrest him, the CIA apparently decided there was no need — he could simply be eliminated whenever necessary.

As a battlefield practice, take no prisoners is considered a war crime. For the Obama administration it has become standard procedure — and a procedure that the American journalists virtually never question.

The New York Times reports: The would-be suicide bomber dispatched by the Yemen branch of Al Qaeda last month to blow up a United States-bound airliner was actually an intelligence agent for Saudi Arabia who infiltrated the terrorist group and volunteered for the suicide mission, American and foreign officials said Tuesday.

In an extraordinary intelligence coup, the double agent left Yemen, traveling by way of the United Arab Emirates, and delivered both the innovative bomb designed for his air attack and critical information on the group’s leaders to the C.I.A., Saudi and other foreign intelligence agencies.

After spending weeks at the center of the terrorist network’s most dangerous affiliate, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the agent provided critical information that permitted the C.I.A. to direct the drone strike on Sunday that killed Fahd Mohammed Ahmed al-Quso, the group’s external operations director and a suspect in the bombing of the American destroyer Cole in Yemen in 2000.

He also handed over the bomb, designed by the group’s top explosives expert to be invisible to airport security, to the F.B.I., which is analyzing its properties.

Officials said the agent, whose identity they would not disclose, works for the Saudi intelligence service, which has cooperated closely with the C.I.A. for several years against the terrorist group in Yemen. He operated in Yemen with the full knowledge of the C.I.A., but not under its direct supervision, the officials said.

The agent is now safe in Saudi Arabia, officials said. The bombing plot was kept secret for weeks by the C.I.A. and other agencies because they feared retaliation against the agent and his family.

Declan Walsh reports: In the shadows of the American operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the fate of a small-town Pakistani doctor recruited by the C.I.A. to help track the Qaeda leader still looms between the two countries, a sore spot neither can leave untouched.

Picked up by Pakistani intelligence agents days after the Bin Laden raid a year ago and now in secret detention, the doctor, Shakil Afridi, has embodied the tensions between Washington and Islamabad. To some American officials he is a hero, worthy of praise and protection; Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta has personally appealed for his release. But inside Pakistan’s powerful military, still smarting from the raid on its soil, he is seen as a traitor who should face treason charges that could bring his execution. “We need to make an example of him,” one senior intelligence official said.

Beyond hard feelings and talk, however, his case has had a much wider effect: It has also roiled the humanitarian community in Pakistan, giving rise to a wave of restrictions that have compromised multimillion dollar aid operations serving millions of vulnerable Pakistanis.

Hardest hit is Save the Children, the largest international aid agency in Pakistan.

Dr. Afridi has told interrogators for the top Pakistani military intelligence agency, the ISI, that he was introduced to the C.I.A. through Save the Children, according to Pakistani officials and Western aid workers. Save the Children vigorously denies the claim, saying it has been made a scapegoat by a desperate man who, according to senior American officials, has been tortured in Pakistani custody. Nevertheless his claims have had a stark impact on an organization that says it spent $105 million last year helping seven million Pakistanis, most of them women and children.

Senior managers have been forbidden from leaving the country, other staff members have been refused visas, and aid supplies have been blocked by customs officials, depriving an estimated 35,000 infants of medical care over a three-month period. Pakistani intelligence has monitored the phone calls and residences of Save the Children staff.

Other aid groups complain of problems, too, largely at the hands of Pakistani officials convinced that their employees could be spies. To them, the affair sheds new light on a murky practice that they say should never take place: the recruitment of aid workers as intelligence operatives in a sensitive country like Pakistan, already awash in conspiracy theories about Western meddling. [Continue reading…]