By Timothy Heritage
PARIS (Reuters) - A European human rights watchdog criticized the United States on Tuesday for failing to come clean over allegations that the CIA ran a network of secret prisons in Europe.
Dick Marty, who heads up a Council of Europe investigation into the scandal, added that European states faced accusations of a serious breach of their human rights obligations if they had cooperated with the underground network.
Pressure has grown on Washington and European governments to explain dozens of flights criss-crossing the continent by CIA planes, some suspected of delivering prisoners to jails in third countries where they may have been mistreated or tortured.
The United States had never formally denied the allegations, Marty said in a statement handed to reporters, and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had failed to rebut them during a recent trip to Europe.
"The rapporteur ... deplores the fact that no information or explanation had been provided on this point by Ms Rice during her visit to Europe," said Marty, the Swiss rapporteur of the Council of Europe investigation.
"While it was still too early to assert that there had been any involvement or complicity of member states in illegal actions, the seriousness of the allegations and the consistency of the information gathered to date justified the continuation of an in-depth inquiry," he said.
"If the allegations proved correct the member states would stand accused of having seriously breached their human rights obligations to the Council of Europe."
He said his investigation to date had "reinforced the credibility of the allegations concerning the transfer and temporary detention of individuals, without any judicial involvement in European countries".
Marty told a news conference he believed European secret services had known what had been going on and that their collaboration had gone beyond simply exchanging information.
"I think it would have been difficult for these actions to have taken place without a degree of collaboration," he said, but added: "It is possible that secret services did not inform their governments."
The European Union and at least eight member states said last month they were seeking answers from the United States over the use of bases on the continent for such secret transfers, known as "renditions".
The Council of Europe has set governments a three-month deadline to reveal what they know about the mystery flights and about a Washington Post report saying the CIA ran secret prisons in Eastern Europe.
http://today.reuters.com/News/newsArticle.aspx?...US-SECURITY-CIA-EUROPE.xml
Tuesday, December 13, 2005
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