Edinburgh Airport is claimed to have been used by the CIA
Britain's role in CIA "torture flights" was roundly condemned yesterday by the European parliament in a scathing report which for the first time named the site of a suspected secret US detention centre in the EU - at Stare Kiejkuty in Poland.
It says EU governments, including the British, knew about the practice known as extraordinary rendition - secret CIA flights transferring detainees to locations where they risked being tortured - but made a concerted attempt to obstruct investigations into it...
The report condemned the extraordinary rendition of two UK residents, Bisher al-Rawi, an Iraqi citizen , and Jamil el-Banna, a Jordanian citizen, seized in the Gambia in 2002. They were "turned over to US agents and flown to Afghanistan and then to Guantánamo, where they remain detained without trial or any form of judicial assistance", it said. The men's abduction was helped "by partly erroneous information" supplied by MI5.
It also condemned the treatment of Binyam Mohammed, an Ethiopian citizen and UK resident arrested in Pakistan and at one point held in Morocco where questions "appear to have been inspired by information supplied by the UK". His lawyer has described what the report called "horrific torture".
It referred to the rendition of Martin Mubanga, a UK citizen arrested in Zambia in 2002 and flown to Guantánamo Bay. It said he was interrogated by British officials at the US detention centre in Cuba where he was held and tortured for four years and then released without trial.
It expressed "serious concern" about 170 stopovers at British airports by CIA-operated aircraft which on many occasions came from, or were bound for, countries linked with "extraordinary rendition circuits"...
Shami Chakrabarti, director of civil rights group Liberty, said: "Our government wept hot tears for torture victims in Saddam Hussein's Iraq but adamantly refuses to investigate CIA torture flights despite growing international pressure. The silence in Whitehall is damning."
Yesterday's report described in detail how CIA Gulfstream jets landed in secret at Szymany airport in Poland. There was circumstantial evidence, it said, that there may have been a secret detention centre at the nearby intelligence training centre at Stare Kiejkuty. It disclosed that records, from a confidential source, of an EU and Nato meeting with the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, last December confirmed "member states had knowledge of the [US] programme of extraordinary renditions and secret prisons"...
At least 1,245 CIA rendition flights used European airspace or landed at European airports, the report said. It accused the former head of Italy's Sismi intelligence service, Nicolo Pollari, of "concealing the truth" when he told the committee Italian agents played no part in the CIA kidnapping of an Egyptian cleric in 2003. It says Sismi officials had an active role in the abduction of Abu Omar, who had been "held incommunicado and tortured ever since"...
Source: Guardian
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1959360,00.html
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