Malawi named in cia torture report

Malawi has been named among countries that the US Senate Intelligence Committee (SIC) alleges to have aided in overtures of that country’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) against suspects of terror.
The committee released the controversial report,  which the the Washington Post also published, on Tuesday and cites Malawi for its role in 2003 when five suspected operatives of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda terrorist group were arrested and later deported.
The suspects were Mahmud Sardar Issa, a Sudanese national who at the time headed the charitable Islamic Zakat Fund Trust in Blantyre and Fahad Ral Bahli, a Saudi who at the time was director  of the Malawi Branch of the Registered Trustees of the Prince Sultan bin Aziz Special Committee on Relief.
Others were a Turkish national Arif Ulusam, who owned a restaurant in Blantyre; Ibrahim Itabaci,  at the time was executive director of Bedir International School and a Kenyan national, Khalifa Abdi Hassan, an Islamic scholar, who at the time was hired by the Muslim Association of Malawi.
The five were arrested in a joint operation by the CIA, the National Intelligence Bureau and the Malawi Police Service following allegations that they belonged to the East African cell of the al-Qaeda.
According to sources in official circles at the time, al-Qaeda intended to channel money from Asia, where late bin Laden was based, through certain charitable organisations to finance operations in Africa and beyond.
Their local lawyer at the time obtained a court injunction stopping the Malawi Government and its agents from further detaining and deporting the five suspects.
The lawyer told presiding High Court judge Justice Healey Potani that his clients were arrested without being told the crime they committed.
“They were treated without dignity as they were handcuffed, blindfolded and transferred from Blantyre to Lilongwe, some 350 kilometres away, where they were kept in an unknown location awaiting deportation to an unknown destination,” the lawyer told the mid-night court session.
He alleged that the Malawi Government wanted to hand them over to the CIA who would later transfer them to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, where al-Qaeda suspects, particularly those arrested in Afghanistan, are being held.
The Director of Public Prosecutions at the time, Fahad Assani, successfully challenged the court restraining order.
For several months before the SIC released a summary of its controversial report on the CIA’s torture programme on Tuesday, Senate Democrats were locked in a well-publicised battle with the Executive branch over whether to redact the aliases used for CIA officials used in the document.
But even as the White House and the CIA engaged in this dispute with the Senate, a separate, and potentially more serious, set of revelations was at stake.
According to several US officials involved with the negotiations, the intelligence community has long been concerned that the Senate document would enable readers to identify many countries that aided the CIA’s controversial torture programme between 2002 and roughly 2006.
These countries, according to the report, made the CIA programme possible in two ways: by enabling rendition, which involved transferring US detainees abroad without due legal process and by providing facilities far beyond the reach of US law where those detainees were subjected to torture.
The officials told The Huffington Post in recent weeks that they were nervous the names of those countries might be included in the declassified summary of the Senate report.
The names of the countries ultimately did not appear in the summary. n