Probe: 14 nations aided U.S. on secret flights

updated 2:18 p.m. ET June 7, 2006

PARIS - 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 Wednesday.

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.

Nations listed
He concluded that several countries let the CIA abduct their residents, while 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.

Some, including Sweden and Bosnia, already have admitted some involvement.

"The practice of renditions is an internationally legally accepted practice that some European countries have also used,” a senior State Department official told NBC News in response to the report. “The U.S. respects the legal sovereignty of our allies. Intelligence cooperation is a vital part of the war on terror." The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, added that 'Carlos the Jackal' (a notorious terrorist of the 80's) ended up in jail because of a rendition. — Andrea Mitchell, NBC News Chief Foreign Affairs correspondent

Marty put airports in Timisoara, Romania, and Szymany, Poland, in a “detainee transfer/drop-off point” category, together with eight airports outside Europe.

The 67-page report, addressed to the 46 Council of Europe member states, will likely be used by the council, a 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.”

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, and taken to the Afghan capital.

Marty said the plane with the crew that he said accompanied El-Masri stayed in Timisoara for 72 minutes before leaving for Spain.

“The most likely hypothesis of the purpose of this flight was to transport one or several detainees from Kabul to Romania,” Marty said in the report, without elaborating.

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

Officials in Romania and Poland denied the allegations Wednesday.

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