Legal Opinion: Pressure grows on America to end illegal detentions

Days after US judges threw out charges against Guantanamo inmates, CIA agents are on trial for kidnapping. Robert Verkaik, Law Editor, reviews a bad week in 'the war on terror'

The legal framework supporting the US-led "war on terror" is beginning to look very shaky. On Monday the military tribunal system that sanctions the detention of inmates held at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay was dealt a devastating blow when judges dismissed charges against a Canadian-born suspected al-Qa'ida fighter and Osama bin Laden's alleged former driver.

In both cases, the judges found that they had no jurisdiction to proceed with military commission trials, as neither men had been classified as an "unlawful enemy combatant" as required by a recent US law.

On Friday, the day President George Bush arrives in Rome, 26 CIA agents are to be put on trial over the kidnapping of an Egyptian imam in Italy. In all, 33 people, including the CIA agents, face charges of kidnapping the former cleric Osama Mustafa Hassan, better known as Abu Omar, on a Milan street on 17 February 2003 and taking him to a high-security prison outside Cairo, where he claims he was tortured.

None of the CIA agents are expected to appear in court in person but if the allegations against the US security service are upheld it will be another defeat for the US policy of extraordinary rendition, where terror suspects are seized from one country and then flown to a third-party state to be tortured.

This policy has already been criticised by human-rights groups and the Council of Europe. Dick Marty, the Swiss MP who is leading the Council of Europe investigation into the flights, is due to publish his latest findings into secret detentions on Friday.

It is understood that he has interviewed a number of disgruntled CIA agents who have broken cover to express their concern about the use of rendition. "They spoke to me because they found what was happening to be disgusting," Mr Marty said in an interview with the Swiss newspaper La Liberté. Their statements will help to "strengthen the findings of the first report published on 6 June 2006, on the secret activities of the CIA in Europe," Marty said.

Last year's report found that 14 European countries colluded in or tolerated the secret transfer of terrorist suspects by the United States, and two of them - Poland and Romania - may have harboured CIA detention centres. The report identified a "spider's web" of landing points around the world used by the US authorities for the undercover transfer of security suspects to third countries or US-run detention centres.

Mr Marty, rapporteur of the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly (PACE), said that he believed Western governments had signed secret agreements after the 11 September 2001 attacks in the United States to give more power to their security services. "This is why some countries are opposed to my investigations," he said. Mr Marty declined to identify which countries he had in mind, but did say that Britain, France and Germany "knew what was happening . . . but they didn't act".

His latest investigation on illegal secret detention in Europe, the results of which will be published on Friday, is expected to be no less damning.

r.verkaik@ independent.co.uk

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