The European Union secretly allowed the United States to use transit facilities on European soil to transport "criminals" in 2003, according to a previously unpublished document. The revelation contradicts repeated EU denials that it knew of "rendition" flights by the CIA.
The EU agreed to give America access to facilities - presumably airports - in confidential talks in Athens during which the war on terror was discussed, the original minutes show. But all references to the agreement were deleted from the record before it was published.
The issue of "rendition" flights - in which terror suspects are flown to secret bases and third countries for interrogation - overshadowed last week's fence-mending visit to Europe by Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State.
Asked in Parliament last week about reports of 400 suspect flights passing through British airports, Tony Blair said: "In respect of airports, I don't know what you are referring to."
The minutes of the Athens meeting on January 22, 2003, were written by the then Greek presidency of the EU after the talks with a US delegation headed by a justice department official. EU officials confirmed that a full account was circulated to all member governments, and would have been sent to the Home Office.
Posted by: Captain America ||
12/10/2005 20:49 ||
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Well, well, well .....
the hypocrisy of Europe is breathtaking, but no longer surprising.
Posted by: too true ||
12/10/2005 20:51 Comments ||
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#2
"oops! Hey! How about that Kyoto thing?"
Posted by: Frank G ||
12/10/2005 21:53 Comments ||
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Between 40 and 60 cars are still being burned nightly in France more than three weeks after a wave of suburban violence subsided, a senior interior ministry official said Thursday.
Stephane Fratacci, the ministry's director of public liberties, was arguing against a writ brought before France highest administrative court -- the State Council -- for the country's month-long state of emergency to be suspended.
The jurists who brought the suit said that the measure was no longer needed as normality had been restored in the poor neighbourhoods where the rioting broke out on October 27.
But Fratacci said that last Saturday night 79 vehicles were burned, 46 on Sunday and 50 on Monday. And he urged "the greatest caution" ahead of the end-of-year holidays which regularly see outbursts of violence in suburbs of France's major cities.
Meanwhile a collective representing some 70 left-wing associations and unions was to present a "symbolic" petition before the country's Constitional Council Friday demanding abrogation of the state of emergency.
"This law, which is extremely dangerous for public freedoms, came into effect without ever being brought before the Constitutional Council. Another step was thus taken on the road of destruction for our state of law," the collective said in a statement.
The Constitutional Council vets new laws to ensure they are in keeping with the 1958 constitution of France's Fifth Republic. However its powers cannot be invoked by groups of private citizens.
On November 9 the government of President Jacques Chirac activated a 1955 law to declare a nationwide state of emergency in order to quell the most serious rioting in France since the student disturbances of May 1968.
The following week parliament approved a law to extend the emergency by three months.
The emergency powers enable state-appointed governors -- or prefects -- to declare curfews, ban public meetings and issue house-arrest orders.
#4
So "79" is "As many as 60"? This could have interesting implications...
Posted by: A. Einstein ||
12/10/2005 21:05 Comments ||
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Stephane Fratacci, the ministry's director of public liberties, was arguing against a writ brought before France highest administrative court -- the State Council -- for the country's month-long state of emergency to be suspended. The jurists who brought the suit said that the measure was no longer needed as normality had been restored in the poor neighbourhoods where the rioting broke out on October 27.
Wonder how'd WoT go, if --- in addition to terrorists --- western security services started targeting their tranzi allies.
Poland's prime minister announced Saturday he was ordering a "detailed" probe into allegations that the CIA ran secret prisons for terrorist suspects on Polish territory. "I am commissioning a detailed check in all places possible to precisely check if there is any proof that such an event took place in our country," Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz said in remarks shown on Poland's TVN24 television channel. "It is necessary to finally close the issue because it could be dangerous to Poland," he said.
Marcinkiewicz's spokesman, Konrad Ciesiolkiewicz, said he didn't know who would carry out the check and had no details of how the government planned to look into the allegations. More than a half-dozen investigations are under way into whether European countries may have hosted secret U.S.-run prisons in which prisoners were tortured, and whether European airports and airspace were used for alleged CIA flights transporting prisoners to countries where torture is practiced. Polish officials have repeatedly denied that their territory was used in this way.
However, Marc Garlasco, a senior military analyst for the New York-based Human Rights Watch, said in remarks published Friday that Poland was the chief CIA detention site in Europe, part of a system of clandestine prisons for interrogating al-Qaida suspects. "Poland was the main base of interrogating prisoners and Romania was more of a hub," Garlasco was quoted as saying in Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza. "This is what our sources from the CIA tell us and what is shown from the documents we gathered." Poland's outgoing President Aleksander Kwasniewski reiterated this week that "there are no such prisons or such prisoners on Polish territory." On November 28, he went further, saying, "there never have been" such jails. The Council of Europe, the continent's top human rights watchdog, has also launched an investigation. EU leaders say any member states found to have been involved in such prisons could have their voting rights suspended. In an interview for a Polish newspaper, ex-CIA analyst and State Dept. counterterrorism official Larry Johnson has a theory that after Abu Ghraib, CIA agents do not trust the Bush administration to protect people who simply carry out orders. Hence they are raising alarms about these secret prisons to avoid becoming scapegoats.
Posted by: Rafael ||
12/10/2005 14:33 ||
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Larry Johnson should stay off crack. At Abu Ghraib, they were disobeying orders -- despite their claims to have been ordered, they were unable to produce the names of anyone who gave them orders.
And, honestly, anyone whose resume includes the CIA and State is about as trustworthy as Saddam himself.
Posted by: Robert Crawford ||
12/10/2005 17:06 Comments ||
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Valerie Plame was an undercover operations officer until outed in the press by Robert Novak. Novak's column was not an isolated attack. It was in fact part of a coordinated, orchestrated smear that we now know includes at least Karl Rove.
Police have arrested at least seven people suspected of financing and giving logistical support to an Islamic extremist group with links to al-Qaida, officials said Friday.
Interior Minister Jose Antonio Alonso said police who made the arrests late Thursday and early Friday in the Costa del Sol region had turned up no evidence that the detainees were planning an imminent attack in Spain.
Alonso said the detainees were suspected of aiding an Algeria-based Islamic extremist organization, the Salafist Group for Call and Combat.
Police made the arrests in apartments in the cities of Malaga, Marbella and Torremolinos and continued to carry out searches Friday, news reports said.
Alonso did not specify the nationalities of the detainees but news reports said the seven were Algerian and included one woman.
On Nov. 23, Spanish police arrested 11 Algerians suspected of providing financing and logistical support to the same Algerian group, which is also known as GSPC. The arrests were in the eastern cities of Alicante and Murcia and in Granada in the south.
A week later, a judge charged four of the suspects with belonging to a terror cell but released the other seven on the condition that they surrender their passports and check in with the court weekly.
Posted by: Dan Darling ||
12/10/2005 01:11 ||
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"killed", not "arrested", please
Posted by: Frank G ||
12/10/2005 9:40 Comments ||
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The Italian Intelligence and Security Services (SISDE) is warning against the strong influence of Islamic terrorists in Albania, BTA news agency reported. Its concerns were voiced in a report prepared by SISDE for the Italian parliament and cited by the Greek "Ethnos" newspaper. The report claims that a new Islamic organization called "Jihad al Jadid", a cell of Al Qaeda, which is linked to Greece, has recently appeared in Albania. Jadid al-Jihad is one of the aliases used by the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, so it's likely them. They've been active in Albania for sometime now.
Posted by: Dan Darling ||
12/10/2005 00:51 ||
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I'm sorry, 2b -- that should read, "All y'all." I didn't mean to imply that it was just you that was confusing me (not that it's a difficult task at the moment. Sorry again.).
The German Foreign Ministry said on Friday it had summoned Iran's ambassador to protest against suggestions by Iran's president that the Holocaust might not have happened and that Israel should be moved to Europe. Ministry spokesman Martin Jaeger said at a government news conference the decision to deliver a formal protest to Iran's envoy in Berlin was meant to show that Berlin was taking the president's comments very seriously.
The remarks by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, at a news conference in the Saudia Arabian city of Mecca, follow his call in October for Israel to be "wiped off the map", which sparked widespread international condemnation. German Jewish leaders called for political sanctions against the Islamic republic over Ahmadinejad's remarks. Holocaust denial is a crime in Germany.
BERLIN - The UN ombudsman in Kosovo has said that the US Bondsteel military base in the province holds a prison that brings to mind the one in Guantanamo Bay, a German daily reported on Friday. âThere can be no doubt that for years there has been a prison in the Bondsteel base with no external civilian or judicial oversight. The prison looks like the pictures we have seen of Guantanamo Bay,â Marek Antoni Nowicki told Berliner Zeitung.
Marek apparently has never seen a prison before. They all pretty much the same, I'm told. An Illinois medium-security prison looks like a similar prison in France which looks like Gitmo which looks like Kosovo.
It backs up a statement by Council of Europe human rights commissioner Alvaro Gil-Robles in November that the US military ran a Guantanamo-type detention centre in Camp Bondsteel.
Gil-Robles told the French daily Le Monde he had been âshockedâ by conditions at the centre, which he witnessed in 2002. The camp resembled âa smaller version of Guantanamoâ, he said, referring to the US prison in Cuba, where hundreds of terror suspects are detained without trial.
"Why, it had WALLS! And guard towers! And a fence! Just like Guantanamo! How can they do that?"
Silly person! They do it by utilizing the corps of engineers, of course. Unless it's a USAF base, in which case the airwing brings their construction specialists along with them to build runways etc. and they just throw up the prison too.... heh
Gil-Roblesâ claims were vigorously denied by the US military in Kosovo.
Posted by: Steve White ||
12/10/2005 00:00 ||
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Prisons also look a lot like high security military compounds,double fences,concertina wire walls,guard towers,etc.
#2
All Military Bases have Prisons, unless they're very, very small, say a single building or such.
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
12/10/2005 8:11 Comments ||
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Forgot to mention that even Military Ships have Prisons (The Brig)
Posted by: Redneck Jim ||
12/10/2005 8:13 Comments ||
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I see prison's everywhere. The US has secret prisons at the UN, in Nashville - Elvis is there you know, and under my house! Oh wait, I forgot my foil hat, ahh much better, the prisons are gone. Sorry for the interuption
It is starting to look as if the UN is yet again going on a PR campaign against the US over prisons, to discredit us in world opinion. Time for Bolton to get tough on these asshats, again.
Posted by: 49 pan ||
12/10/2005 9:57 Comments ||
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A carrier-deployed Marine air group would be better. Not only can it "change some minds" at the UN, it can give the City of New York a taste of what war is REALLY like, so they can get off their high horse. It'll also eliminate the need for that hugely-expensive remodelling contract that the US is expected to foot. It will also give the rest of the world an idea of why it's not nice to piss on the United States.
Give john Bolton a half-hour to get out of the building, and go for it.
Posted by: Old Patriot ||
12/10/2005 17:02 Comments ||
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Would free up some useful real estate too.
Posted by: too true ||
12/10/2005 17:35 Comments ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
BERLIN - The UN ombudsman in Kosovo has said that the US Bondsteel military base in the province holds a prison that brings to mind the one in Guantanamo Bay, a German daily reported on Friday. âThere can be no doubt that for years there has been a prison in the Bondsteel base with no external civilian or judicial oversight. The prison looks like the pictures we have seen of Guantanamo Bay,â Marek Antoni Nowicki told Berliner Zeitung.
