CIA, Europeans weave tangled web

Published Wednesday, June 7, 2006

PARIS (AP) - Fourteen European nations colluded with U.S. intelligence in a "spider’s web" of secret flights and detention centers that violated international human rights law, the head of an investigation into alleged CIA clandestine prisons said today.

Swiss Senator Dick Marty said the nations aided the movement of 17 detainees who said they had been abducted by U.S. agents and secretly transferred to detention centers around the world.

Some said they were transferred to the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and others to alleged secret facilities in countries including Poland, Romania, Egypt and Jordan. Some said they were mistreated or tortured.

"I have chosen to adopt the metaphor of a global spider’s web, a web that has been spun out incrementally over several years using tactics and techniques that had to be developed in response to new threats of war," Marty said.

Marty provided no direct evidence but charged that most European governments "did not seem particularly eager to establish" the facts.

"Even if proof, in the classical meaning of the term, is not as yet available, a number of coherent and converging elements indicate that such secret detention centers did indeed exist in Europe," he wrote, saying this warranted further investigation.

Marty relied mostly on flight logs provided by the European Union’s air traffic agency, Eurocontrol, witness statements gathered from people who said they had been abducted by U.S. intelligence agents and judicial and parliamentary inquiries in various countries.

He concluded that several countries let the CIA abduct their residents, and others allowed the agency to use their airspace or turned a blind eye to questionable foreign intelligence activities on their territory.

He listed 14 European countries - Britain, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Bosnia, Macedonia, Turkey, Spain, Cyprus, Ireland, Greece, Portugal, Romania and Poland - as being complicit in "unlawful inter-state transfers" of people.

Sweden and Bosnia, already have acknowledged involvement.

Marty put airports in Timisoara, Romania, and Szymany, Poland, in a "detainee transfer/dropoff point" category, together with eight airports outside Europe.

The 67-page report, addressed to the 46 Council of Europe member states, likely will be used by the human rights watchdog to put pressure on the countries implicated to investigate. Marty said Romania and Poland were part of what he called a "renditions circuit." The nations denied the charges.

He said one plane arrived in Timisoara, Romania, from Kabul, Afghanistan, on the night of Jan. 25, 2004, after having picked up Khaled El-Masri, a German who said he had been abducted by foreign intelligence agents in Skopje, Macedonia.

Similarly, Marty said he believed the Szymany airport in northeastern Poland was used for a rendition flight in September 2003.

A parallel investigation by the European Parliament has said data show there have been more than 1,000 clandestine CIA flights stopping on European territory since Sept. 11, 2001.