Ethiopa has 41 terrorist in cutody after Somalia campaign

NY Times:

Ethiopian officials acknowledged Tuesday for the first time that they had detained 41 terrorism suspects from 17 countries who had been fighting for Somalia’s Islamist movement.

“Suspected international terrorists have been and are still being captured by the joint forces of the transitional federal government of Somalia and Ethiopia,” said a statement from the Ethiopian Foreign Ministry.

For weeks now, human rights groups have been urging Ethiopia, which has a nettlesome human rights record, to shed some light on the detainees. Many were captured in Kenya, sent to Somalia and then secretly taken to prisons in Ethiopia.

The acknowledgment by Ethiopia of its role in detaining terrorism suspects prompted officials in Washington to speak more candidly about American interrogations of the captives. Those officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not allowed to speak publicly, said Tuesday that American intelligence agents had questioned several of the detainees in Ethiopian jails over the past several months.

But they denied that the United States had played any part in transferring or detaining the prisoners, and denied that the prisoners were part of a covert rendition program in which suspects are captured by American forces and flown to another country to be interrogated. In the past, many rendition suspects have been taken to countries where torture is routine.

It was unclear whether the Ethiopians acted unilaterally in detaining the suspects, or with encouragement from American officials. The Washington officials said that the Ethiopian military had been anxious to get Islamic fighters off the battlefield in Somalia because they had successfully attacked Ethiopian troops, and that the government in Addis Ababa had rarely hesitated in the past to begin operations in the Horn of Africa without American approval.

Several Ethiopian opposition groups had been using Somalia as a base for attacks on Ethiopia, and another American official said it was suspects from those outfits that most interested Ethiopian intelligence agents. Also, Eritrea, Ethiopia’s neighbor and bitter enemy, is widely suspected by Ethiopian intelligence agents of supporting Islamists in Somalia.

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It appears they have a rational reason for arresting these people and the Americans have a rational reason for questioning them, and that the human rights wackos have irrational reasons for questioning the operation. The suspects who have direct ties to the US that were pickup by Kenya have already been sent to the US for indictment and trial such as the man now in Houston awaiting trial on allegations he joined al Qaeda.