Malta gave US military ‘vital blanket landing authorisation’ for Iraq missions

When an investigation into the renditions of terrorism suspects by private contractors engaged by the United States military revealed that Malta had been the landing spot for seven of these flights, no response was ever forthcoming from the government of the time to inquiries by the Council of Europe and the European Parliament regarding their knowledge of these cases.

But three US Embassy cables released to MaltaToday through a 2006 Freedom of Information request to the Department of State have revealed that the Maltese government provided the US with the approval for emergency landing for all military aircraft carrying either hazardous material or suspect personnel, in its support of the war against terrorism.

The three cables, from 2002, 2003 and 2004, detail the Maltese government's historic support of Embassy requests in the war against terrorism.

The most significant contributions, as stated in the cables, came in the form of "approval of over-flight for all military aircraft, approval for emergency landing for all military aircraft, approval for emergency landing for all military aircraft including those with hazardous material or suspect personnel, use of the Malta Drydocks for routine and emergency repairs of US navy ships, and full security support for visiting US navy ships."

Additionally in 2004, Malta provided "vital blanket US military over-flight and emergency landing authorization for Afghanistan and Iraq-related missions" and "exchanged important intelligence information on counter-terrorism and WMD activity."

The police and intelligence service, the Security Services, were also forthcoming by assisting embassy officials with "timely responses to investigative requests for information on potential suspects or groups within or transiting Malta."

Malta's complicity in the CIA renditions of the Bush administration has so far remained unclear, because no inquiry was ever launched and a European Parliament investigation failed to touch upon Malta's acquiescence to six crucial stopovers of CIA-contracted flights carrying terrorist suspects kidnapped by the CIA.

But the former Nationalist administration was a keen supporter of US interests, something noted by the US Embassy in the same cables when it noted that the Maltese government "continued to support 6th Fleet ship visits despite sensitive Maltese political neutrality questions" - a reference to the 1987 Constitutional clause that equates Maltese neutrality in the context of equidistance from the two superpowers of the time.

It is not clear whether military flights carrying suspect personnel in Malta were related to CIA renditions of terrorist suspects, but the cables seen by MaltaToday - supplied for the annual terrorism reports compiled by the Department of State - do not feature anywhere in the respective country reports on terrorism, formerly called Patterns of Global Terrorism.

A request to the ministry for foreign affairs to confirm the various approvals to requests for clearance for US military landings, which included transport of hazardous material and suspect personnel, had not been answered at the time of printing.

Rendition flights in Malta

The use of Malta in the CIA's highly controversial practice of extraordinary renditions remains an opaque area, as David Lindsay of the Malta Independent found when he followed the case back in 2005 and 2006.

European Parliament investigations had confirmed Malta's place in the network of renditions, but its Temporary Committee only managed to investigate high-profile cases in countries such as Italy, Germany and Poland, concluding that its investigations were "therefore not exhaustive".

Specifically, the EP Committee was "concerned" about stopover countries like Malta, calling on such states "to launch adequate investigations into this matter".

The government has never made public any information on the number of stopovers in Malta by aircraft owned by CIA front companies linked to extraordinary renditions.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Bush administration established a global 'spider's web' of secret prisons and kidnappings - or renditions - of suspected terrorists to countries like Egypt, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan, in which torture and imprisonment without trial were common.

What has always been unclear was Malta's complicity in the Extraordinary Rendition Programme.

To circumvent national restrictions on the use of military aircraft, the CIA used charter services and private companies to render suspects around the world. Contractors like Blackwater (now Academi) were employed by the CIA to carry out the transfer of the suspects.

According to the European Parliament Temporary Committee, at least six different suspected CIA rendition aircraft stopped over at Malta International Airport between 2001 and 2005. A number of these stopovers occurred en route to or from "suspicious locations" such as Amman, Tripoli and Cairo.

Such horror stories include those of Khalid El-Masri, who travelled from his home in Germany to Skopje, Macedonia, where he was detained at the border by Macedonian security officials who mistook him for an Al-Qaeda operative who used the pseudonym Khalid Al-Masri.

Denied access to a lawyer, he was held for 23 days in a hotel room before being handed over to the CIA, in whose custody he was beaten and drugged before being flown to a secret prison in Afghanistan. Following months of detention, El-Masri was dumped on a rural road in Albania.

Indeed, the very plane (N313P) used to render El-Masri to Afghanistan and identified by Human Rights Watch as "the plane that the CIA used to move several prisoners to and from Europe, Afghanistan and the Middle East" spent some time in Malta in December 2003.

On six of the seven occasions, the flights arrived from or departed to "suspicious locations" in terms of rendition activities. These, according to the EP, included Amman, Jordan, Cairo, Alexandria and Hurghada in Egypt as well as to Tripoli in Libya. The latter has been has been linked to secret negotiations regarding Libya's nuclear weapon development programme between a CIA-MI6 joint team and their Libyan counterparts in December 2003.

Malta served as a European base for the Blackwater CASA C-212 wide-body passenger-cargo aircraft.

Blackwater has disputed the contents of the EP Committee's report, saying it did not participate in any rendition flights and labelling the Committee's assertions as "erroneous and undocumented.

After 9/11 - Malta and the USA

Malta's cooperation with the United States escalated considerably after the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre. In 2004, Malta became the first EU member state to install the Personal Identification Secure Comparison and Evaluation System (PISCES) at its airport and three seaports, as part of the United States Terrorist Interdiction Program (TIP). The $1.5 million system is a border control tool that identifies wanted criminal and terrorist suspects as they enter and exit the country.

In 2002, the government reacted quickly to a request from the US Embassy and Italian law enforcement in arresting and extraditing to Italy a Tunisian Islamic extremist with reported Al Qaeda ties, and accepted the installation of a $2 million container-scanning system at the Freeport to inspect suspicious cargo and WMD material.

The Maltese government also ratified a ship-boarding agreement with the US government, allowing military personnel to board Malta-flagged vessels suspected of transporting WMD material or engaged in criminal activity.

The US also asked Malta in 2008 to freeze the assets of the Freeport-based Islamic Republic of Iran shipping line (IRISL), with an embassy cable showing that although "taken aback at the broad ramifications of the request", Finance Minister Tonio Fenech had assured Ambassador Molly Bordonaro of Malta's full commitment to combating WMD proliferation "to the fullest extent possible under Maltese law". Pressure from the government of Malta also led to law firm Ganado & Associates to terminate its professional relationship with IRISL.