Europe’s human-rights watchdog this week accused Washington of ”gangster tactics” by flying terrorist suspects to countries where they would face torture, and criticised European countries who appear to have done nothing to intervene.
”If a country resorts to the tactics of gangsters, I say no,” Dick Marty, a Swiss senator, said at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. ”There are different elements that allow me to say that governments were aware of what was happening.”
But critics of the report have labelled it as having ”more holes than a Swiss cheese”, with no collaborative evidence to support the claims.
Marty, who is investigating allegations of ”extraordinary rendition”, estimated that more than 100 people have been flown to prisons in third countries where they may have been tortured. ”There is a great deal of coherent, convergent evidence pointing to the existence of a system of ‘relocation’ or ‘outsourcing of torture’,” Marty told the 46-nation council. ”It is highly unlikely that European governments, or at least their intelligence services, were unaware.”
Marty highlighted two examples. One, the abduction by suspected United States agents in 2003 of Abu Omar, an Egyptian citizen who had been granted political asylum in Italy. The other is the arrest in Mace-donia of Khaled al-Masri, a German citizen who was reportedly flown to Kabul for interrogation.
Marty is frustrated with the US and some European governments for offering little cooperation as he seeks to unravel allegations, which surfaced in The Washington Post last year, that the CIA has been hiding and interrogating suspects at secret detention centres in Eastern Europe or flying suspects to countries where they are tortured.
While Marty believes that ”extraordinary renditions” do take place, he appeared to back away from allegations that the CIA has set up secret detention centres in Eastern Europe. ”There is no formal, irrefutable evidence of the existence of secret detention centres,” he said.
The United Kingdom revealed a little more this week. Jack Straw, the British Foreign Secretary, wrote to Tony Lloyd, a British member of the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly, to say that between May 1997 and this month the US asked Britain to allow four people to be transported through the UK to face trial in the US. Britain had allowed two to pass through and blocked the other two. This took place in 1998 when Bill Clinton was president of the US.
The lack of cooperation from governments prompted criticism that Marty had relied too much on press cuttings in his interim report. Mike Hancock, a British Liberal Democrat member of the assembly, said: ”This report and further reports need to have more evidence of what has happened if the truth is going to come out. Many of the issues have been clouded by myth and a desire to kick America.”
Denis MacShane, the UK’s former Europe minister who sits on the assembly, said: ”I have read the Marty report carefully and there is nothing new, no proof, no witness statement, no document that justifies the claims made.” — Â