[ppi] [ppiindia] EU inquiry links 1,000 flights to CIA

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      EU inquiry links 1,000 flights to CIA  
      By Dan Bilefsky International Herald Tribune

      THURSDAY, APRIL 27, 2006

     


     
      BRUSSELS Investigators for the European Parliament said Wednesday that 
data gathered from air safety regulators showed that the CIA had flown 1,000 
undeclared flights over Europe since 2001, sometimes stopping on the Continent 
to transport terrorism suspects kidnapped inside the European Union to 
countries using torture. 

      The operation used the same group of U.S. agents and the same fleet of 
secret planes over and over, the investigators said. It also concluded that 
European countries, including Italy, Sweden, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, had 
been aware of CIA abductions or handovers in their territory and therefore may 
have been complicit in allowing human rights to be breached. 

      "The European Parliament deplores the fact that the CIA has, on several 
occasions, clearly been responsible for kidnapping and illegally detaining 
alleged terrorists on the territory of member states, as well for extraordinary 
renditions" to third countries, wrote Giovanni Fava of Italy in a nine-page 
document. Fava, a Socialist, wrote the report for the multiparty investigation. 

      The CIA declined to comment on the specifics of the report, but an agency 
spokesman in Washington defended the practice of renditions. "Renditions are an 
anti-terror tool that the United States has used for years, consistent with its 
laws and treaty obligations," said Paul Gimigliano. "The CIA does not condone 
or tolerate torture, transport individuals to other countries for the purpose 
of torture, or knowingly receive intelligence obtained by torture." 

      The report released Wednesday - the first of several planned by the 
Parliament - grew out of three months of hearings and more than 50 hours of 
testimony by human rights advocates and individuals who said they had been 
kidnapped by U.S. agents and flown to other countries, including Egypt and 
Afghanistan, where they were tortured. 

      As for the question of secret CIA prisons on EU territory, the report 
offered no hard evidence. 

      Its conclusion of 1,000 undeclared flights exceeds numbers previously 
discussed, including an analysis by The New York Times late last year that the 
CIA operated about 300 flights in Europe from November 2001 to the summer of 
2005. 

      The report's conclusions could heighten trans-Atlantic tensions at a time 
when Europe and the United States are already at odds over how to balance civil 
liberties with the fight against terrorism. Fava said the committee planned to 
voice its concerns in a trip to Washington in May, where legislators hope to 
meet Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; the head of the CIA, Porter Goss; and 
members of Congress. 

      Legislators said the lack of a cohesive EU-wide terrorism policy was 
undermining counterterrorism cooperation in Europe and allowing abuses. 

      The investigation was opened in January after The Washington Post 
reported that the CIA hid and interrogated Al Qaeda suspects at secret prisons 
in Eastern Europe. 

      Fava said the committee hoped to send a fact-finding mission to Poland 
and Romania in September. Both countries have been cited as possible locations 
for the alleged CIA prisons. Poland is a member of the European Union and 
Romania hopes to join soon. 

      "Condoleezza Rice says rendition programs save lives, and we don't accept 
this," said a Green party member of Parliament from the Netherlands, Kathalijne 
Buitenweg, referring to the flying of suspects to third countries without 
judicial process. "In Europe, we will seize cocaine if we find it on a plane, 
but we are turning a blind eye to the transport of human beings to be tortured, 
and this is unacceptable." 

      Fava said the investigation showed that CIA planes had made several 
secret stopovers on European territory, violating a treaty that requires 
airlines to declare routes and stopovers for planes with police missions. 

      He emphasized that in some cases it was very unlikely that the European 
authorities had been unaware of suspects being arrested on their territory. He 
pointed to testimony by a Milan prosecutor, Armando Spataro, that CIA agents 
abducted a terrorism suspect, Abu Omar, in February 2003 on a Milan street in 
broad daylight and flown him to Egypt. He was interrogated there and, he has 
asserted, tortured. 

      Fava also criticized Sweden for handing over two Egyptian terror suspects 
- Muhammed Al Zary and Ahmed Agiza - to U.S. agents who flew them to Egypt on a 
U.S. government-leased plane in December 2001 after allegedly giving them 
suppositories and clothing them in diapers. Human Rights Watch has said there 
is credible evidence that they were tortured while in custody. The episode was 
brought to light by a Swedish investigative television program in 2004. 

      "Sweden has been criticized for this on numerous occasions and we have 
taken a number of steps in order for it not to happen again," said Barbro 
Holmberg, the minister for migration and asylum policy, in a phone interview. 

      Fava said the European Parliament also condemned the Bosnian authorities 
for handing over six suspected terrorists of Algerian origin to CIA agents in 
the absence of assurances that they would not be tortured and in defiance of a 
ruling by the human rights court in Bosnia and Herzogovinia. 

      European investigators said documents provided by Eurocontrol, the EU air 
safety authority, also confirmed that Khaled al-Masri, a Kuwaiti-born German, 
had been taken to Afghanistan in 2004 on a plane that originated in Algeria and 
flew via Spain, Macedonia and Iraq before landing in Kabul. 

      Masri told the committee he was arrested by U.S. intelligence agents 
while on vacation near the Macedonian border, taken to a hotel in Skopje and 
imprisoned for several weeks before being flown to Kabul where he was 
imprisoned for five months. He said he was flown back to Europe in May 2004 and 
released in Albania. His case, which is being investigated by German 
prosecutors, was discussed in December in Berlin by Chancellor Angela Merkel 
and Rice. Merkel said the United States had acknowledged making a mistake in 
detaining Masri. 

      This month, the Council of Europe, a human rights watchdog in Strasbourg 
that is also investigating alleged CIA abuses, said at least one European 
country had admitted to handing over suspects to foreign agents. But it was 
unable to offer irrefutable proof of secret CIA prisons. 

      Fava said the investigation raised serious concerns that human rights and 
international treaties on torture had been ignored by the CIA. 

      He said that after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, "the violation of human 
and fundamental rights was not isolated or an excessive measure, but rather a 
widespread regular practice in which the majority of European countries were 
involved." He said that suggested that EU laws on the monitoring of air space 
and foreign aircraft needed to be strengthened. 

      The investigators condemned "the practice of extraordinary renditions in 
which suspects are not given due process, but are held in third countries in 
order to be interrogated or imprisoned in places under the authority of the 
United States." 

      Ivar Ekman in Stockholm and Brian Knowlton in Washington contributed 
reporting. 

     


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