By Dan Bilefsky International Herald Tribune
THURSDAY, APRIL 27, 2006
BRUSSELS Investigators for the European Parliament said Wednesday that data gathered from air safety regulators showed that the CIA had flown 1,000 undeclared flights over Europe since 2001, sometimes stopping on the Continent to transport terrorism suspects kidnapped inside the European Union to countries using torture.
The operation used the same group of U.S. agents and the same fleet of secret planes over and over, the investigators said. It also concluded that European countries, including Italy, Sweden, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, had been aware of CIA abductions or handovers in their territory and therefore may have been complicit in allowing human rights to be breached.
"The European Parliament deplores the fact that the CIA has, on several occasions, clearly been responsible for kidnapping and illegally detaining alleged terrorists on the territory of member states, as well for extraordinary renditions" to third countries, wrote Giovanni Fava of Italy in a nine-page document. Fava, a Socialist, wrote the report for the multiparty investigation.
The CIA declined to comment on the specifics of the report, but an agency spokesman in Washington defended the practice of renditions. "Renditions are an anti-terror tool that the United States has used for years, consistent with its laws and treaty obligations," said Paul Gimigliano. "The CIA does not condone or tolerate torture, transport individuals to other countries for the purpose of torture, or knowingly receive intelligence obtained by torture."
The report released Wednesday - the first of several planned by the Parliament - grew out of three months of hearings and more than 50 hours of testimony by human rights advocates and individuals who said they had been kidnapped by U.S. agents and flown to other countries, including Egypt and Afghanistan, where they were tortured.
As for the question of secret CIA prisons on EU territory, the report offered no hard evidence.
Its conclusion of 1,000 undeclared flights exceeds numbers previously discussed, including an analysis by The New York Times late last year that the CIA operated about 300 flights in Europe from November 2001 to the summer of 2005.
The report's conclusions could heighten trans-Atlantic tensions at a time when Europe and the United States are already at odds over how to balance civil liberties with the fight against terrorism. Fava said the committee planned to voice its concerns in a trip to Washington in May, where legislators hope to meet Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; the head of the CIA, Porter Goss; and members of Congress.
Legislators said the lack of a cohesive EU-wide terrorism policy was undermining counterterrorism cooperation in Europe and allowing abuses.
The investigation was opened in January after The Washington Post reported that the CIA hid and interrogated Al Qaeda suspects at secret prisons in Eastern Europe.
Fava said the committee hoped to send a fact-finding mission to Poland and Romania in September. Both countries have been cited as possible locations for the alleged CIA prisons. Poland is a member of the European Union and Romania hopes to join soon.
"Condoleezza Rice says rendition programs save lives, and we don't accept this," said a Green party member of Parliament from the Netherlands, Kathalijne Buitenweg, referring to the flying of suspects to third countries without judicial process. "In Europe, we will seize cocaine if we find it on a plane, but we are turning a blind eye to the transport of human beings to be tortured, and this is unacceptable."
Fava said the investigation showed that CIA planes had made several secret stopovers on European territory, violating a treaty that requires airlines to declare routes and stopovers for planes with police missions.
He emphasized that in some cases it was very unlikely that the European authorities had been unaware of suspects being arrested on their territory. He pointed to testimony by a Milan prosecutor, Armando Spataro, that CIA agents abducted a terrorism suspect, Abu Omar, in February 2003 on a Milan street in broad daylight and flown him to Egypt. He was interrogated there and, he has asserted, tortured.
Fava also criticized Sweden for handing over two Egyptian terror suspects - Muhammed Al Zary and Ahmed Agiza - to U.S. agents who flew them to Egypt on a U.S. government-leased plane in December 2001 after allegedly giving them suppositories and clothing them in diapers. Human Rights Watch has said there is credible evidence that they were tortured while in custody. The episode was brought to light by a Swedish investigative television program in 2004.
"Sweden has been criticized for this on numerous occasions and we have taken a number of steps in order for it not to happen again," said Barbro Holmberg, the minister for migration and asylum policy, in a phone interview.
Fava said the European Parliament also condemned the Bosnian authorities for handing over six suspected terrorists of Algerian origin to CIA agents in the absence of assurances that they would not be tortured and in defiance of a ruling by the human rights court in Bosnia and Herzogovinia.
European investigators said documents provided by Eurocontrol, the EU air safety authority, also confirmed that Khaled al-Masri, a Kuwaiti-born German, had been taken to Afghanistan in 2004 on a plane that originated in Algeria and flew via Spain, Macedonia and Iraq before landing in Kabul.
Masri told the committee he was arrested by U.S. intelligence agents while on vacation near the Macedonian border, taken to a hotel in Skopje and imprisoned for several weeks before being flown to Kabul where he was imprisoned for five months. He said he was flown back to Europe in May 2004 and released in Albania. His case, which is being investigated by German prosecutors, was discussed in December in Berlin by Chancellor Angela Merkel and Rice. Merkel said the United States had acknowledged making a mistake in detaining Masri.
This month, the Council of Europe, a human rights watchdog in Strasbourg that is also investigating alleged CIA abuses, said at least one European country had admitted to handing over suspects to foreign agents. But it was unable to offer irrefutable proof of secret CIA prisons.
Fava said the investigation raised serious concerns that human rights and international treaties on torture had been ignored by the CIA.
He said that after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, "the violation of human and fundamental rights was not isolated or an excessive measure, but rather a widespread regular practice in which the majority of European countries were involved." He said that suggested that EU laws on the monitoring of air space and foreign aircraft needed to be strengthened.
The investigators condemned "the practice of extraordinary renditions in which suspects are not given due process, but are held in third countries in order to be interrogated or imprisoned in places under the authority of the United States."
Ivar Ekman in Stockholm and Brian Knowlton in Washington contributed reporting.
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