(10th post in a series on the House GOP's attempt to legalize "Extraordinary Rendition". Links: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12.)
Summary
I just learned about this one a half hour ago. It's been reported on even less than the other cases in the U.S. press (yoo hoo, U.S. press! Look alive!)--just one news brief and one editorial in Seattle newspapers over a year ago, and no one's picked up on the Amnesty International report--so I'm posting it out of chronological sequence.
According to Amnesty International, Ibrahim Habaci and Arif Ulusam of Turkey, Faha al Balhi of Saudi Arabi, MUhmud Sardar Issa of the Sudan, and Khalifa Abdi Hassan of Kenya were arrested in Blantyre, Malawi, on June 22, 2003. The arrests were carried out by Malawian police and CIA agents. They were held in secret. Their families lawyers intervened with the High Court of Malawi, which ordered them to be brought before the court in 48 hours.
By then they'd been flown out of the country. On June 26, 2003, a Malawian government official wrote to Amnesty that:
the arrests were not done by the Malawi Police but by the National Intelligence Bureau and the USA Secret Agents who controlled the whole operation. From the time the arrests were made, the welfare of the detainees, their abode and itinerary for departure were no longer in the hands of the Malawian authorities. Thus as a country we did not have the means to stop or delay the operation...In Malawi we do not know where these people are but they are in hands of the Americans who them out of the country using a chartered aircraft. They should now being going through investigations at a location only known by the USA."
The U.S. ambassador to Malawi denied that the U.S. was responsible for the deportations.
There was some question over where they were taken. According to the Seattle Times, the men were suspected of funneling money to Al Qaeda through Islamic charities, and had been flown to Botswana for interrogation. A Guardian article from August 2003 describes "reports that the Air Malawi plane chartered by the US stopped off in Zimbabwe on the way to a third country, possibly Djibouti or Uganda, where the men were questioned for a month." Several other sources said that they were interrogated in Zimbabwe for a month.
It seems as if the last story is accurate, based on what one of the prisoner's told his wife. Robert Mugabe's Zimbabwe has one of the worst human rights records on the planet, and severe and sometimes fatal torture is widespread there. But fortunately, for once, these men seem not to have been harmed. Ella Ulusam, Arif Usulam's wife, told Xinhua New Service that her husband had called her from Istanbul,
informing her that they were kept for 29 days in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwean(sic), where US and Malawian intelligence officials cleared them of any al-Qaeda links."He told me apart from the trauma of being arrested at night with no reason, they were treated well and are all in good health, " she said.
The Guardian confirms that the CIA and the Malawian government decided they were innocent:
Nothing more was heard until July 24 when lawyers heard that Fahad Ral Bahli had surfaced in Riyadh and the other four in Sudan, all free men. Hub-Eddin Abbakar, a colleague of the Sudanese suspect, said they had been handed over to their respective embassies in Khartoum after the CIA decided they were innocent.
The President of Malawi met with Ella Ulusam and another of the prisoner's wives and apologized to them for their treatment. From Xinhua Net:
"The president was very apologetic," said Ella during the Tuesday interview. "He just said he was sorry, it was not the Malawi government, it was all the Americans. That's all he said."
Sources
1. "Terrorism Notebook," The Seattle Times, June 26, 2003.
2. "Malawi President Apologizes to Families of Released Suspected Al-Qaeda Members," Xinhua News Service, July 29, 2003.
3. Rory Carroll, "Inside Story: Bush's Secret War," The Guardian, August 21, 2003.
4. Amnesty International, "United States America: The Threat of a Bad Example," August 19, 2003.
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