Late on June 21 the US House of Representatives voted 214-203 against an amendment to the Foreign Operations Appropriations Bill that would have closed the US Defense Department's Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), a combat-training school for Latin American soldiers, formerly the US Army School of the Americas (SOA). Critics say that since its founding in 1946, SOA/WHINSEC has trained many of the region's worst human rights violators.

Following the recent revelations about Ethiopia, a second African country has been named as hosting secret US detention center for terror suspects. Seymour Hersh's latest in the June 25 New Yorker, "The General's Report"—a reference to Antonio Taguba, who investigated the Abu Ghraib scandal—includes some quotes from a "recently retired high-level C.I.A. official" (anonymous, and therefore unverfiable, of course) about the "wrangling" over interrogation guidelines in the wake of the scandal. Writes Hersh:

A trial on the apparent CIA kidnapping of a Muslim cleric in Milan has been suspended to allow time for Italy's supreme court to rule on whether prosecutors overstepped their constitutional bounds. The trial is not expected to resume until late October. The Italian government conteds that the prosecutors should not have sought the extradition of the US agents, and thus revealed their identity.

In what is being hailed as a landmark decision, a 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals panel ruled 2-1 that the federal Military Commissions Act doesn't strip Ali al-Marri, a legal US resident, of his constitutional right to challenge his accusers in court, and that the government must allow him to be released from military detention.

Despite recent denials by the Ethiopian regime, Der Spiegel corroborates June 11 that "terror suspects have been questioned by US officials in Ethiopia after being transferred from Somalia and Kenya. The captives included Europeans who were detained, interrogated and then released without charge." Up to 100 suspects are thought to have been transferred to Ethiopia in the process known as "extraordinary rendition." Der Spiegel spoke with Swedish citizen Munir Awad, 25, who was released from Ethiopian detainment three weeks ago. He told Der Spiegel that he had travelled to Mogadishu in December with his girlfriend Safia Benaouda, 17, also a Swedish citizen. He said that after Ethiopian forces invaded they fled to Kenya, where they were arrested by local militia, handed over to US troops and sent to Addis Ababa.

The trial began June 8 of 26 Americans and six Italians who stand accused in absentia in Italy of kidnapping an Egyptian terror suspect [Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr AKA Abu Omar], and dispatching him to Egypt, where he is said to have been tortured. Most of the Americans in the "extraordinary rendition" proceedings are thought to be CIA agents. Italy has not said whether it will seek the suspects' extradition to the Milan trial, yet Washington has already refused to do so. [BBC, June 8]

Bruce Riedel of the Brookings Institution has a piece in the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs, "Al-Qaeda Strikes Back," which finds, "By rushing into Iraq instead of finishing off the hunt for Osama bin Laden, Washington has unwittingly helped its enemies: al Qaeda has more bases, more partners, and more followers today than it did on the eve of 9/11." While still supporting the Afghanistan mission, Riedel sees the Iraq war as counter-productive, and warns that attacking Iran would play into al-Qaeda's hands. He also has an interesting take on the notion of "false flag" operations, so beloved of the conspiracy industry:

Six human rights groups have issued a list of 39 people purportedly imprisoned by the United States in secret, the whereabouts of whom are unknown, and have called upon the Bush administration to suspend its policy of "disappearances." US officials defend these measures, saying that it is often essential that terrorist networks do not learn of such detentions ahead of planned operations. [NYT, June 7]