By Cora Currier, ProPublica

Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn unsealed an indictment Wednesday charging Ibrahim Suleiman Adnan Adam Harun with six terrorism-related counts.

The announcement that Harun is in U.S. custody in New York may also shed light on a small part one of the most secretive aspects of U.S. counterterrorism operations during the Bush administration: What became of terror suspects held by the CIA in its network of "black-site" prisons around the world? Or disappeared into foreign cells in extraordinary renditions?

With their indictment of Harun, prosecutors offered a basic account of how the 43-year-old Nigerian – described as "a prototype Al Qaeda Operative" – spent the last decade. He fought U.S. forces in Afghanistan, prosecutors said, before leaving for Africa, where he allegedly conspired to bomb U.S. diplomatic facilities. Harun, also known by his alias Spin Ghul, eventually wound up in Libyan prison for six years before he was released amid the turmoil of the uprising against Muammar Qaddafi.

Did the U.S. know that he was in Libya, and did they play a role in his detention? Did the CIA work with the Libyans to then obtain information from him?

Testimony from an alleged former CIA detainee, a leaked document from the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, and evidence from cases of others rendered to Libya suggest that might be so.

A spokesman for the CIA said that the agency "does not, as a rule, comment on matters before the courts." The U.S. Attorney's office for the Eastern District of New York declined to provide information beyond what was announced with the indictment. A lawyer for Harun, David Stern, also declined to comment.

The CIA has steadfastly refused to comment on the fates of most former detainees, publicly accounting for only 16 people of the roughly 100 the agency has said it once held. The U.S. has successfully dismissed lawsuits over rendition and asserted that much about the CIA program is still classified.

President Obama, for his part, ordered the CIA black-site prisons closed when he took office. (He allowed renditions to continue, with pledges of greater oversight of the countries where suspects were sent.) But still, little about the program has been officially disclosed.

Human Rights Watch and other organizations, as a consequence, have been trying to piece together the details of the CIA's detention and rendition programs for years. In 2009, ProPublica published a list of more than thirty people believed to have been held by the CIA whose whereabouts were still unknown—including a Spin Ghul.

Now and then, the fates of these detainees have emerged in the press or through rights groups, particularly since the upheaval caused by the Arab Spring.

Joanne Mariner, a senior researcher with Amnesty International who worked on identifying former detainees for Human Rights Watch, said that the information in the indictment of Harun lines up with what she knew about Spin Ghul. Operating in an arena of such secrecy, "when all this was going on, we'd get these little clues and bits of information. It's really quite interesting to see confirmation that these people did exist," she said.

Marwan Jabour, who alleges he was held in Afghanistan by the CIA ("Ghost Prisoner,") told Human Rights Watch that he was shown photos of Harun (whom he called Ghul) during interrogations, and was led to believe he was in U.S. custody. Jabour had met Harun in Pakistan in 2003, and described him as an African who spoke Arabic. Jabour was held from 2004 to 2006, during which time, according to this week's indictment, Harun was arrested in Libya.

A 2007 document from Guantanamo, released by Wikileaks, cites detailed information provided by Harun. For example: "Ghul also noted that Saudi authorities had detained Saudi Al Qaeda members…Ghul remarked that these two individuals were Al Qaeda members since approximately 1995." In the document he is identified as both Harun and Ghul, and described as a "Nigerian [sic] national and Al Qaeda operative." The citations refer to CIA intelligence reports, but don't specify where Harun was or when he provided the information.

Since Qaddafi's fall, evidence has emerged of close communication between the CIA and Libyan officials during the Bush administration, despite the Qaddafi regime's reputation for torture and brutal prison conditions. Documents found in the abandoned office of Libya's former top intelligence official refer to the rendition of several people to Libya and the sharing of information. Other "missing prisoners" believed to have been held by the CIA turned up in Libyan prisons. Some of them have given detailed accounts of detention in U.S. custody before being sent there.

"The U.S. delegated a lot of its detention capacity to abusive governments like Libya— they were perfectly happy to have Libya holding these people," says Mariner.

If the U.S. did know he was in Libya, it took authorities some time to catch up with him after he gained his freedom in June 2011.

After his release, Harun told prosecutors, he was placed on a ship full of Libyan refugees bound for Italy, where he was arrested for assaulting officials onboard. Italian authorities agreed to extradite him to the U.S. last fall.

Harun is the latest in a recent string of terror suspects brought to federal court from overseas by the Obama administration – including Osama Bin Laden's son-in-law Abu Gaith, who pleaded not guilty in federal court in Manhattan to conspiring to kill Americans earlier this month.

Some Congressional Republicans have insisted that such cases are better prosecuted in military commissions like the one at Guantanamo. Senator Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., said of Harun: "the administration has once again decided to forgo an extensive intelligence interrogation and instead bring an enemy combatant immediately into the federal court system."

According to court documents, Harun was interviewed by U.S. officials last September in Italy, with his Italian counsel present. He waived his Miranda Rights before those sessions. The indictment against him remained sealed because the government believed "he may be in a position to provide information…relevant to the national security of the United States."

Harun is scheduled to appear in court in Brooklyn this afternoon, and could face life in prison. Whether or not his trial reveals more about the CIA's role, at the very least, Harun can be crossed off the list of the missing.

On Monday, December 31st, Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post reported that weapons and high explosive powder were found in the home of a Greenwich Village couple. The article also featured an evidence-free assertion that one of the accused is an “Occupy Wall Street activist”.

Take Action Now to Protect OWS from false allegations of terrorism

As the OWS PR working group emphasized in the immediate aftermath of the story, “There is nothing… to support a link between OWS and the individual arrested."

The NYPD further does not believe that that the accused was active in any political movements, as reported in the New York Times. And when the New York Post reporter, Jamie Schram, was asked by Atiq Zabinski of the OWS Media Working Group to cite his source for the OWS connection, he refused, and abruptly ended the conversation, referring Zabinski to the Post’s legal department.

Occupiers have long been experiencing the tangible impact of hyping falsehoods about Occupy Wall Street, such as how it contributes to real and documented police violence, unconstitutional domestic spying activities, and the marginalization of constituencies and views that deserve respectful treatment by reporters.

The scope of this problem has recently become even more pronounced through the “disclosures that FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are treating protests against the corporate and banking structure of America as potential criminal and terrorist activity. These documents also show these federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America.”

In response the ‘Your Inbox: Occupied’ team decided to start a petition for concerned OWS activists demanding a retraction and an apology from the New York Post on the same print and Web pages as the original accusation.

Since its inception Occupy Wall Street has been firmly committed to non-violence. Yet this is far from the first time that the Post has distorted the facts of a story in order to associate the movement with violence.

Sign the petition today, and then we can go deliver them in person to Rupert Murdoch.

[Via some of the good folks within the Occupy movement]

Another Gitmo prisoner has died, reports the Associated Press:

The latest death occurred in Camp 5, a section of the prison used mostly to hold prisoners who have broken detention center rules.

This prisoner had recently splashed a guard with what military officials call a "cocktail," typically a mixture of food and bodily fluids, which is why he was on disciplinary status, Durand said.

He was on a hunger strike earlier this year but stopped it on June 1 and was at 95 percent of his ideal body weight and 14 pounds heavier than when he came to Guantanamo, the spokesman said.
...
Durand, the prison spokesman, said the man who died Saturday had not been charged and was not designated for prosecution.

This is the ninth prisoner to die at Guantanamo. Six of those deaths were the result of suicide, including these three men:

According to the NCIS documents, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell’s eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated. The NCIS report also proposes that the three prisoners, who were held in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of these actions almost simultaneously.

Al-Zahrani, according to the documents, was discovered first, at 12:39 a.m., and taken by several Alpha Block guards to the camp’s detention medical clinic. No doctors could be found there, nor the phone number for one, so a clinic staffer dialed 911. During this time, other guards discovered Al-Utaybi. Still others discovered Al-Salami a few minutes later. Although rigor mortis had already set in—indicating that the men had been dead for at least two hours—the NCIS report claims that an unnamed medical officer attempted to resuscitate one of the men, and, in attempting to pry open his jaw, broke his teeth.

The prisoner's identity has not been released yet pending notification of next of kin.

It was a Bloody Sunday, indeed for Iraqis as bombs and small arms attacks claimed at least 75 lives and left another 285 wounded in a series of attacks that targeted the country’s security forces. The onslaught by insurgents struck a dozen cities and an outpost of the Iraqi Army. Ten soldiers were killed in that assault, and 8 more were wounded. A brigadier general and 7 police recruits were killed when a bomb exploded in the city of Kirkuk, and 2 more car bombs detonated outside the French Consulate in Nasiriyah. Explosives went off in a number of other cities, including Baghdad. No group claimed immediate responsibility for the violence.

Via:

"What kind of life is this?" said Safeen Qadir, 26, a university student in Kirkuk. He described dead bodies and weeping, shouting relatives at bombing scenes in Kirkuk, where three midmorning explosions killed seven and wounded about 70.

"Because of the daily explosions, we must write our wills before go out of home," Qadir said. "The death exists in every inch of the city of Kirkuk, and no one is spared from the crime of terrorism."

Via:

Journalist Ahmed Rushdi, reporting from Baghdad, told Al Jazeera that, according to him, it was not only al-Qaeda that was behind the attacks.

"It is also the insurgency against the government and the political parties, because there is a major political dispute between al Maliki and his opponents," Rushdi said.

"It is another day in the major failure of the security forces in Iraq. The people here are asking themselves; what is the government doing to regain control of the situation? There seems to be no real intelligence data concerning these attacks."

As the attacks were sweeping across Iraq on Sunday, a Baghdad criminal court sentenced Iraq's Sunni vice president to death after finding him guilty of masterminding the killing of two people. The sentence was handed down in absentia.

Hashemi fled the country after Iraq's Shia-led government authorities had accused him in December of running a death squad, as the last US troops were withdrawing from the country.

Ecuador has said that Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, has sought out asylum at the South American country’s embassy in London, according to Reuters. A week ago, Assange lost a bid in Britain’s highest court to avoid being extradited to Sweden, where he is to be questioned on sex-crime allegations. Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Ricardo Pinto told reporters that “Ecuador is studying and analyzing the request.” The controversial Assange has waged a legal war in Britain’s courts for about two years to be allowed to stay in the country, even as his website has continued to publish sensitive documents.

The situation threatens to inflame tensions between the government of Rafael Correa, Ecuador's leftist and ardently anti-Washington president, and U.S. authorities, who accuse Assange of damaging its foreign relations with his leaks.

It is also an embarrassment for Britain, where the Foreign Office whose foreign ministry on Tuesday confirmed Assange was beyond the reach of its police in the Ecuadorean embassy.
...
"While the department assesses Mr. Assange's application, Mr. Assange will remain at the embassy, under the protection of the Ecuadorean Government," the embassy said on its website.

If Ecuador denies Assange's petition for asylum, the only option that remains through the courts is an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.

After the past weekend in Chicago at the NATO summit where nearly 100 protesters were arrested, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! speaks to National Lawyers Guild attorney Sarah Gelsomino who is representing on of the five activists charged with terror-related crimes. Two are accused of attempted possession of explosives or incendiary devices, and three more are accused of conspiracy to commit terrorism, material support for terrorism and possession of explosives.

While many have been impressed by what is viewed as restraint on the part of the Chicago police department as far as violence towards occupy protesters goes, the #NoNATO protests may well be unparalleled in the abuse of legal authority and flagrant disregard for constitutional rights by law enforcement.

Gelsomino says the so-called "NATO Three" were set up by government informants who planted the explosives. "Our clients who are facing the most serious charges of terrorism are actually in solitary confinement right now, we just learned," Gelsomino says. "A very top priority this week is to get them out of that extremely punitive and extremely dangerous condition that they’re in right now."

Rush Transcript:

AMY GOODMAN: We turn to the protesters detained during the NATO summit. According to the Chicago Police Department, nearly a hundred people were arrested over the course of the week. Five of them stand accused of terrorism-related offenses. Two men were arrested over the weekend for allegedly engaging in threatening behavior before the NATO summit. Sebastian Senakiewicz was charged with falsely making a terrorist threat, and Mark Neiweem was accused of attempted possession of explosives or incendiary devices.

Before the weekend began, three activists were arrested on terror charges for an alleged plot to attack President Obama’s campaign headquarters and other sites around Chicago during the NATO summit. Jared Chase, Brent Betterly and Brian Jacob Church are accused of conspiracy to commit terrorism, material support for terrorism and possession of explosives. Police say they recovered materials for making Molotov cocktails in a raid last week. But attorneys for the so-called "NATO Three" say they were set up by government informants who planted the explosives. Supporters also say police seized equipment that was used for brewing homemade beer.

Michael Deutsch, an attorney for the protesters with the National Lawyers Guild, accused Chicago police of entrapment.

MICHAEL DEUTSCH: Obviously, we don’t have access to all the information that the state has. But what we do know is, is that there were police—undercover police officers that ingratiated themselves with people who come from out of town. And from our information, these so-called incendiary devices and the plans to attack police stations, attack the mayor’s office, is all coming from the mind of the police informants and are not coming from our clients, who are nonviolent protesters. They are not anarchists. They don’t belong to a Black Bloc organization. They’re involved with nonviolent protest. And what we believe is, is that this is a way to stir up prejudice against the people who are exercising their First Amendment rights.

AMY GOODMAN: To discuss the implications of these charges, we’re going to Chicago to speak with Sarah Gelsomino, an attorney with the People’s Law Office and the National Lawyers Guild. She’s representing one of the protesters facing terror charges from the summit.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Sarah.

SARAH GELSOMINO: Thank you, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about exactly what happened.

SARAH GELSOMINO: Well, last Wednesday night at around 11:30 at night, the Chicago police executed a midnight raid on a house in the Bridgeport area in the Near South Side in Chicago, and they entered three different—excuse me, four apartment buildings in that house. In one of those apartments, they arrested nine people. In the other three, they, without warrant or consent, detained the individuals who lived in those building—in those apartments, interrogated them about their political beliefs and about their knowledge of the people who lived in that apartment where they arrested the nine people and searched their apartments. They also entered that fourth apartment, again without showing a warrant and without any consent. And there is where they eventually arrested the nine people. They arrested two additional people down the street. Six of those people have since been released without charges. As you know, the NATO Three are facing very serious terrorism threats—or terrorism charges. And the other two are who we now believe to be police informants.

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Three men arrested during a raid by Chicago police earlier this week will face terrorism charges on Saturday. Authorities say the men tried to make Molotov cocktails to use during protests of this weekend’s NATO summit in the city. Each of the men are being held in lieu of $1.5 million bail. But are the charges actually trumped up to retaliate for one of the men videotaping Chicago police ahead of the NATO summit as they threatened protesters with violence?

Via:

They were scheduled to be in court later Saturday for a bond hearing on charges of conspiracy to commit terrorism, possession of an explosive or incendiary device and providing material support.
...
Police identified the men being held as Brian Church, 20, of Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.; Jared Chase, 24, of Keene, N.H.; and Brent Vincent Betterly, 24.

Attorney Sarah Gelsomino told reporters that the three men are “absolutely in shock and have no idea where these charges are coming from.” Six other people were arrested in the raid, but were released Friday without being charged. One of those six, Darrin Annussek of Philadelphia, denied that there were materials in the apartment to construct incendiary devices when the police made their raid.

According to Gelsomino, beer-making equipment was among the items seized by federal agents, and in the video above, items that could be beer-making equipment are shown, although it's not clear if what is pictured is the actual confiscated items.

The National Lawyer's Guild issued the following statement on Thursday regarding the raid (See full statement at the link):

Chicago, IL -- The National Lawyers Guild (NLG) condemns a preemptive police raid that took place at approximately 11:30pm Wednesday in the Bridgeport neighborhood, and instances of harassment on the street, in which Chicago police are unlawfully detaining, searching, and questioning NATO protesters. The Bridgeport raid was apparently conducted by the Organized Crime Division of the Chicago Police Department and resulted in as many as 8 arrests.

According to witnesses in Bridgeport, police broke down a door to access a 6-unit apartment building near 32nd & Morgan Streets without a search warrant. Police entered an apartment with guns drawn and tackled one of the tenants to the floor in his kitchen. Two tenants were handcuffed for more than 2 hours in their living room while police searched their apartment and a neighboring unit, repeatedly calling one of the tenants a "Commie faggot." A search warrant produced 4 hours after police broke into the apartment was missing a judge's signature, according to witnesses. Among items seized by police in the Bridgeport raid were beer-making supplies and at least one cell phone.

"Preemptive raids like this are a hallmark of National Special Security Events," said Sarah Gelsomino with the NLG and the People's Law Office. "The Chicago police and other law enforcement agencies should be aware that this behavior will not be tolerated and will result in real consequences for the city."

It has also come to light that over a week before the NATO summit, police had threatened the now arrested men with violence, and adding that they would "come look for you, each and every one of you.” The exchange was captured on video and posted to Youtube, which follows below along with transcription of the conversation.

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