| http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010717/ts/morocco_barka_cia_dc_1.html
Tuesday July 17 4:31 PM ET Moroccan Rights Groups Ask CIA to Open Files RABAT (Reuters) - Two Moroccan independent human rights groups asked the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (news - web sites) (CIA (news - web sites)) on Tuesday to release files related to Morocco's alleged repression of political dissidents over the past decades. The groups AMDH and OMDH, in an open letter addressed to President Bush (news - web sites), said information revealed by a Moroccan former secret agent showed the CIA had a hand in what has become known in Morocco as the country's ``dark past.'' The agent, Ahmed Boukhari, told France's Le Monde newspaper and the Moroccan weekly Le Journal of the circumstances surrounding the death of Moroccan opposition leader Mehdi Ben Barka in Paris in 1965 and specifically mentioned the CIA. ``The information shows that CIA cadres were responsible from 1960 for drawing up plans and programs for the Moroccan secret services, their equipment and training,'' the two groups said in a letter faxed to the media. These CIA officials were ``involved in, directed or were aware of extremely dangerous criminal acts systematically committed by the Moroccan services such as kidnappings, torture, abductions, killings and dissolving bodies,'' it added. Ben Barka, a charismatic leftist leader who fled into exile during the early years of Morocco's independence from France, disappeared in October 1965. Boukhari, like others in the past, said Ben Barka was seized in broad daylight in the Paris Latin Quarter and driven to a house on the outskirts of the city, where he died after being tortured by senior Moroccan military officials. Ben Barka's body was then taken back to Rabat and disposed of in an acid vat, Boukhari said. In an article based on his account, Le Monde and Le Journal wrote last month that three U.S. expatriates, identified as ''Colonel Martin, Steve and Scott'' worked for the CIA in the counter-insurgency department of the Moroccan secret services at the time of Ben Barka's reported death. The two human rights groups said ``thousands of important documents related to this ugly period are in the hands of U.S. intelligence and are still under a lid of secrecy decades later.'' |
