EU hypocrisy on CIA secret prisons

By M. A. Saki

Allegations of secret CIA flights in Europe and the establishment of secret prisons in some European countries have seriously dogged the European Union and have put its claims of being a defender of human rights under question.

So far, the U.S. has neither dismissed nor confirmed the reports. In Washington on Monday, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice refused to answer the question of whether the United States has established CIA-operated secret prisons, but added that the extraordinary measures taken have saved European lives and emphasized that the U.S. does not permit or tolerate torture.

According to the weekly magazine Der Spiegel, the German government has a list of at least 437 flights suspected of being operated by the CIA in German airspace. The weekly said two planes alone accounted for 137 and 146 uses of airspace or landings in 2002 and 2003. However, it seems that Berlin does not want to antagonize Washington but is seeking to placate U.S. officials and patch up ties, which were strained by the former chancellor’s serious objections to the invasion of Iraq.

The Guardian newspaper also reported in September that aircraft operated by the CIA had flown in and out of civilian airports and RAF bases in the UK at least 210 times since September 11, 2001.

Quoting U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement, The Washington Post revealed on November 2 that the CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important Al-Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe. According to the Post, prisoners exist in complete isolation from the outside world. Kept in dark, sometimes underground cells, they have no recognized legal rights, and no one outside the CIA is allowed to talk with or even see them.

The existence and locations of the facilities — referred to as "black sites" in classified White House, CIA, Justice Department, and congressional documents — are known to only a handful of officials in the United States and, usually, only to the president and a few top intelligence officers in each host country.

According to several former and current intelligence officials and other U.S. government officials, it is illegal for the government to hold prisoners in such isolation in secret prisons in the United States, which is why the CIA placed them overseas. Legal experts and intelligence officials said that the CIA’s internment practices also would be considered illegal under the laws of several host countries, where detainees have rights to have a lawyer or to mount a defense against allegations of wrongdoing.

According to the Post, host countries have signed the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, as has the United States. Yet CIA interrogators in the overseas sites are permitted to use the CIA’s approved "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques", some of which are prohibited by the UN convention and by U.S. military law.

A U.S. rights group, the American Civil Liberties Union, announced this week that it would be taking the CIA to court over what it said was the violation of both U.S. and international law. The ACLU is charging the CIA with carrying out a highly secretive process known as "extraordinary rendition", whereby intelligence agencies move and interrogate terrorism suspects outside the U.S., where they have no American legal protection.

William Schulz, the chief of Amnesty International USA, has also alleged that the Guantanamo Bay detention camp is part of a worldwide network of U.S. jails, some of them secret, where prisoners are mistreated and even killed. "The U.S. is maintaining an archipelago of prisons around the world, many of them secret prisons, into which people are being literally disappeared, held in indefinite, incommunicado detention without access to lawyers or a judicial system or to their families," Schulz said.

England-based Amnesty International’s report, released May 25, cited "growing evidence of U.S. war crimes" and labeled the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay as "the gulag of our times".

In a 2004 report, the Red Cross called the psychological and physical coercion used at Guantanamo Bay "tantamount to torture". Human Rights Watch has also said U.S. interrogators have inflicted religious humiliation on Muslim detainees in Guantanamo, a violation of the Geneva Conventions.

European lawmakers accused European Union countries of failing to address allegations of CIA secret prisons and flights across the continent.

Sarah Ludford, a British member of the European Parliament’s civil liberties committee, said Thursday it was time for answers. "I am not at all reassured that there is sufficient determination by (member states) to get to the bottom of this and establish the truth," Ludford said.

"The allegations are now beyond speculation. We now have sufficient evidence involving CIA flights. We need to know who was on those flights, where they went."

It is also naive to think that the Italian secret services did not know about the abduction on a Milan street in 2003 of Egyptian cleric Osma Moustafa Hassan Nasr, who was then transferred to Egypt. Daria Pesce, the lawyer representing Robert Seldon Lady, former Milan CIA station chief and one of 22 purported CIA agents accused in the kidnapping of the Egyptian cleric, said: "I believe the (Italian) secret services knew" about the alleged kidnapping. "They should have known," she added.

"This affair hits Europe and very deeply affects the confidence of our people. Yet EU governments have little interest and will to sort this out," said German MP Johannes Vogenhuber of the Green Party.

Revelations of widespread prisoner abuse in Afghanistan and Iraq by the U.S. military is not a secret. In the winter of 2001, many prisoners kept by allied Afghan generals in cargo containers died of asphyxiation.

Recently, CIA Director Porter J. Goss and Vice President Cheney, who a former CIA director has called the “vice president for torture”, asked Congress to exempt CIA employees from legislation already endorsed by 90 senators that would bar cruel and degrading treatment of any prisoner in U.S. custody.

The world is well aware of the bleak U.S. record on human rights and its mistreatment of prisoners. The psychological humiliation of prisoners at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison shocked the world.

It has become evident that U.S. officials feel they have no legal or moral constraints in the handling of prisoners. The barbaric treatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib and the disrespect of the beliefs of detainees at Guantanamo are clear examples of this.

Ironically, the Senate’s No. 2 Republican, Mitch McConnell, told CNN: "There is no country in the world that has stood for human rights more than the United States."

It is obvious that Europe has taken a very soft approach toward the U.S. If European officials were “really” unaware of the secret flights and prisons, it can then be concluded that Washington does not believe the Europeans are very important. However, it is more likely that the Europeans have been aware of the clandestine activities but have kept mum.

When the EU ignores the Geneva Conventions and the European Convention on Human Rights, how can its warnings about human rights violations in other parts of the world be taken seriously? It is clear that the European Union does not practice what it preaches on the human rights issue, which, unfortunately, only encourages other countries to follow suit.

http://www.tehrantimes.com/Description.asp?Da=12/6/2005&Cat=14&Num=001