Morocco 
Still secrecy on Moroccan dissident disappearance in 1965

afrol News, 26 February - Human rights organisations today officially requested the US government, under the Freedom of Information Act, to release all documents the CIA has confirmed it has on the on Mehdi Ben Barka case. The dissident Ben Barka "disappeared" in 1965 in an abduction allegedly masterminded by Moroccan intelligence and the CIA.

The US-based Human Rights Watch and the Institut Ben Barka, based in Belfort, France, today wrote a letter to the CIA to "request a copy of all documents pertaining to the surveillance and abduction of Mehdi Ben Barka," a Moroccan national, in France in 1965, and his subsequent "disappearance". The request was made under the US Freedom of Information Act, which obliges the government to assess whether national security still is threatened by publishing the documents. In 1977, the CIA admitted it had 1,846 documents on the Ben Barka case.

Mehdi Ben Barka was a leading and widely known opponent of the Moroccan government. He lived in exile in Switzerland and Egypt when he was seized by French police officers on a Paris street on 29 October 1965. He was never seen in public again, and his body was never found. It is suspected that Moroccan security officials, led by then-Minister of Interior General Mohamed Oufkir, masterminded Ben Barka's abduction and "disappearance", and killed him in custody. 

Time magazine reported in its international edition of 29 December 1975, that in 1964 Minister Oufkir asked the US ambassador Henry J. Tosca in Rabat for US help in "bringing Ben Barka before a Moroccan court." Time reported, "Tosca relayed the request to CIA headquarters in Europe, but there is no evidence that the CIA ever accepted the invitation."

Last year, however, retired Moroccan secret policeman Ahmed Boukhari stated that three CIA agents were assigned to the Moroccan Counter-Subversion police bureau in Rabat from 1960 to 1967, during his own tenure in that unit. According to Boukhari, whose testimony was first publicized in a long exposé in the French daily Le Monde and the Moroccan weekly Le Journal Hebdomadaire on June 29, 2001, a CIA agent known to him as "Colonel Martin" followed closely the preparations to abduct Ben Barka and would have known about his death, reportedly on the night after his abduction, and the secret transport of his body to Morocco shortly thereafter. 

Mr. Boukhari's allegations about CIA agents assigned to work in the Counter-Subversion bureau are repeated in his book, 'Le Secret: Ben Barka, et le Maroc', published this month by Michel Lafon publishers in France. 

His allegations have also attracted press attention in the US. The failure to identify and punish the principal perpetrators, and the rumoured role of foreign intelligence agencies, continue to spark controversy in Morocco. 

Mr. Ben Barka was a figure well-known to the US government. In 1957, he came to the US at the invitation and expense of the US government, and met with high-level officials of the executive branch and with members of Congress, as contemporaneous State Department cables show. 

On 1 March 1976, Mehdi Ben Barka's son, Bachir Ben Barka, requested documents pertaining to his father under the Freedom of Information act. The CIA, in a reply dated 11 August 1976, referred to 1,846 pertinent documents, but later declined to release them, citing national security grounds. While a few documents were later sent to the applicant, the vast majority have never been released. 

The Executive Order on Classification recognizes that national security reasons for keeping documents classified diminish with the passage of time. "In this case, more than a quarter century since the earlier request, and thirty-six years since the events in question," Human Rights Watch note.

On 26 October 2001, Human Rights Watch sent a letter to the US Secretary of State, Colin S. Powell, requesting the release of all US documents pertaining to the Ben Barka affair. The response, dated 18 December, stated, "should the Department receive requests under the Freedom of Information Act ... the requests will be reviewed ... and a determination will be made." 

Sources: Based on HRW and afrol archives

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