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Europeans “colluded” on rendition flights

Bob Morris, on Jun 7, 2006, 8:45 am

It’s official, numerous European countries colluded with the CIA, allowing kidnapped prisoners to pass through their countries on their way to being tortured elsewhere – amd maybe even to be tortured within their own country.

The UK, Germany and several other European countries illegally colluded with US extra-legal abductions in the “war against terror,” a report for the Council of Europe said on Wednesday.

The report to the Council of Europe, which brings together 46 European countries, also said there were strong indications that Poland and Romania hosted illegal US prisons – something the two countries have always denied.

Dick Marty, the Swiss politician who compiled the report, said that seven countries had violated known individuals’ human rights by participating in what he called a “spider’s web” of CIA detentions and transfers. The countries involved were the UK, Germany, Italy, Turkey, Sweden, Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.

“Authorities in several European countries actively participated with the CIA in these unlawful activities,” he said. “Other countries ignored them knowingly, or did not want to know.”

Rendition ‘massively damaging’ to counter-terrorism effort

The British government’s apparent support of CIA rendition flights is “massively damaging” in the battle against international terrorism, a former Foreign Office minister said today.

Tony Lloyd demanded that the Bush administration give “proper and definitive” answers to allegations that it has been kidnapping terrorist suspects and transferring them to countries where they could be tortured.

Tags: | Category: Torture | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)

  • http://www.radicalglasgow.me.uk John Couzin

    States have embraced torture throughout the ages, we only have to read our history. So why do we think that our present state apparatus would be anything different. Sweden is supposed to be one of the most liberal states in Europe, but there it is, doing what states always do, anything that it deems necessary to tighten its grip on power. We have to look beyond the state system if we hope to build a world of freedom and justice for all, we need to think of communities free from the corrupting profit motive and based on mutual aid, working in federation with all other communities. The nation state is a cancerous growth that will always destroy true co-operation between peoples.

  • John M.

    Like in most involved countries Swedish governmental agencies, ministries and ministers have very little to be proud of and much to answer for with respect to the U.S.-aided deportation of two Egyptian refugees, and their families, December 18th 2001. But one may say, that without the state there would be no judiciary to uphold laws, and without the nations there would be no arena for political debate. It was after all journalists that broke the story in a TV documentary two and a half year later, May 17th 2004.

    The deportees, of which none was sentenced for any terrorism-related crimes in Egypt, Mohammed Al Zery and Hafes Abu Seada would not have been served by a world without nations and states.