The Associated Press
Published: June 27, 2007
STRASBOURG, France: European governments have built “a wall of silence”
around accusations that they let the CIA abduct their residents and run
clandestine prisons on their territory, a European investigator said
Wednesday.
Swiss Sen. Dick Marty charged in a report earlier this month that the CIA
ran secret jails in Poland and Romania – with the knowledge of several
local politicians – after the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States
to interrogate key terror suspects.
Marty, a former prosecutor, has led an inquiry on behalf of the Council of
Europe into alleged CIA secret prisons in Europe.
His report, citing unidentified CIA sources, said that “high value
detainees” such as self-proclaimed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
and suspected senior al-Qaida operative Abu Zubaydah were held in Poland.
It said lesser detainees, who were still of “remarkable importance,” were
taken to Romania.
In an earlier report, Marty accused 14 European nations of colluding with
U.S. intelligence in a web of rights abuses to help the CIA spirit terror
suspects to illegal detention facilities.
“There has been a wall of silence on the part of the governments, silence
that covers illegal acts, human rights violations. Why this silence, why
this systematic refusal to respond to our questions?” Marty told the
Council of Europe’s parliamentary assembly, which asked him to investigate
CIA activities in Europe after media reports of secret prisons emerged in
2005. The assembly, comprising lawmakers from the human rights watchdog’s
47 member states, meets four times a year to debate human rights issues
and social and political trends
in Europe.
People were “spirited away without any judicial control … and that was
also the case in Europe,” Marty said.
His report, which did not give specific locations for the alleged jails,
provided graphic descriptions of conditions in the cells.
It told of prisoners being kept naked for weeks, sometimes attached to a
“shackling ring” in cells. Buckets served as toilets. Masked guards who
never spoke were the only contact for those consigned to four-month
isolation regimes, it said.
Poland and Romania have vehemently denied the allegations, and most of the
other EU countries mentioned by Marty have denied any wrongdoing.
EU Justice Commissioner Franco Frattini has complained Marty’s report only
quotes anonymous witnesses and does not name any sources.
U.S. President George W. Bush acknowledged the existence of a secret
detention program last September, but did not say where the prisons were
located.
Marty faced harsh criticism form Polish and Romanian parliamentarians –
from government and opposition parties alike – for exposing their
countries based on information provided by unnamed CIA operatives.
Polish lawmaker Urzsula Gacek, from the opposition Civic Platform, called
Marty’s report a “piece of fiction, a gripping political thriller which
fails to provide a single piece of evidence,” while Romanian Social
Democratic lawmaker Minodora Cliveti said she found some of Marty’s
accusations “rather funny.”
