Wednesday, June 07, 2006

EU Aided CIA Torture Flights

The BBC is reporting that fourteen European Union countries helped the CIA with torture flights to secret prisons in Poland and Romania, according to a Swiss report.
The new report says: "It is now clear - although we are still far from having established the truth - that authorities in several European countries actively participated with the CIA in these unlawful activities.

"Other countries ignored them knowingly, or did not want to know."

Spain, Turkey, Germany and Cyprus provided "staging posts" for rendition operations, while the UK, Portugal, Ireland and Greece were "stop-off points", the report says.

It says Italy, Sweden, Macedonia and Bosnia allowed the abduction of residents from their soil.

The most serious charges are levelled at Poland and Romania, where Mr Marty says there is enough evidence to support suspicions that CIA secret prisons were established.

Although the Swiss senator says the US must bear responsibility for the flights, he says the programme could operate only with "the intentional or grossly negligent collusion of the European partners".

The "spider's web" of US rendition flights is based on an "utterly alien" approach that breaches human rights, he concludes.