Did the Europeans help the CIA?

last updated 8 January 2015

Secret Prisons

“They are furious. They are disappointed. Victims of ‘speculation,’ accused on the basis of ‘mere rumors.’” We could be describing the unlucky suspects the CIA spirited off to be interrogated in secret prisons, said Switzerland’s Le Temps in an editorial. But actually, the complainers in question are the European governments that abetted the CIA. A report on the U.S.’s “extraordinary rendition” program, by the human-rights watchdog the Council of Europe, names 14 European countries as offenders. Some of them, including Poland and Romania, reportedly allowed the U.S. to keep detainees in camps on their territory. The U.K., Italy, and Germany, the report concluded, actively aided the Americans in illegal kidnappings of suspects on their territory. Still others apparently allowed the U.S. to use their airports for secret flights transporting the prisoners around the continent. These 14 states now have the gall to protest that the report “libels” them. How nice for them that they can complain.

“The detainees transported secretly, as part of the war on terror, have no voice.” They have disappeared. We’ve heard these allegations before, said Arnd Festerling in Germany’s Frankfurter Rundschau. But there’s still no proof that these transports even occurred, much less that prisoners were ever tortured. Seven months of investigations have produced nothing but the “rumors and suspicions” we started with. Even the Council of Europe’s chief investigator and author of the report, the Swiss politician Dick Marty, admits as much. He said he has no “proof in the classical meaning of the term.” Instead, he is accusing Romania and Poland based on nothing more solid than a few articles in U.S. newspapers that relied on anonymous sources. “Nice that he finds them believable,” but there isn’t any reason the rest of us should.

The charges cannot be dismissed so easily, said France’s International Herald Tribune in an editorial. Piles of “circumstantial evidence” point to European collusion in the program. If Marty lacks concrete proof, it’s only because he had no authority “to coerce any of the countries to cooperate.” Instead, he assembled his case from flight-log data, interviews with detainees, and parliamentary inquiries, and he did an impressive job. It was never the Council of Europe’s role to deliver a final verdict on guilt or innocence; it is the job of the European governments to take the information and launch their own investigations. “European leaders would do well to hold the haughty sniffs and instead to find out what really happened.”