Brussels, Belgium – Fourteen European countries worked with the CIA in the secret transfer of terrorism suspects, and two of them – Romania and Poland – probably harbored secret CIA detention centers, the Council of Europe contends in a report issued Wednesday.
In its 67-page report, the council, which enforces the European Convention on Human Rights, said it was disingenuous for Europe to portray itself as an unwilling victim of an operation led by the United States because European countries played an active role in transfers orchestrated by the CIA.
The United States “created this reprehensible network,” the report’s author, Dick Marty, a member of the Swiss Parliament, said in the report.
“But we also believe to have established that it is only through the intentional or grossly negligent collusion of the European partners that the ‘web’ was able to spread over Europe.”
But the report concedes that the council has no hard evidence.
The report drew swift denials. Romania rejected it as “pure speculation,” while Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz of Poland dismissed it as “libel.”
“These accusations are slanderous,” he said. “They are not based on facts.”
But he said he had heard of a few cases of secret landings by CIA planes in Poland, saying it was “natural” in the global fight against terrorism.
Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain said the report contained “absolutely nothing new,” while Spain’s Foreign Ministry denied that the country had participated in prisoner transfers, also known as rendition.
The report said seven countries – Britain, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Macedonia, Bosnia- Herzegovina and Turkey – could be held responsible for violating prisoners’ rights to “varying degrees.” Others, it found, “could be held responsible for collusion – active or passive” in the matters of secret prisons and transfers. It mentioned Poland, Romania, Spain, Cyprus, Ireland, Portugal and Greece.
The report follows similar accounts from the European Parliament and the council itself.
Tracing “a global spider web” of presumed prisons and transfer points, the report suggests that European involvement was deeper than previously surmised.
Marty, a former prosecutor, describes an elaborate and organized system for the abduction and interrogation of suspected terrorists, consisting of several landing points, where civilian and military planes either stopped or refueled on their way to and from detention centers in Cuba, Afghanistan and Iraq.
The report, however, put the number of clandestine CIA flights it contends stopped on European territory since Sept. 11, 2001, at far less than the 1,000 flights previously suggested by the European Parliament.