By
Jill Lawless
LONDON:
A majority of 28 mostly European countries have failed to comply with freedom
of information requests about their involvement in secret CIA flights carrying
suspected terrorists, two human rights groups said Monday.
London-based
Reprieve and Madrid-based Access Info Europe accused European nations of
covering up their complicity in the so-called "extraordinary
rendition" program by failing to release flight-traffic data that could
show the paths of the planes.
The
groups said only seven of 28 countries had supplied the requested information.
Five countries said they no longer had the data, three refused to release it
and 13 had not replied more than 10 weeks after the requests were made.
Europe's
silence is in contrast to the United States, which handed over Federal Aviation
Authority records with data on more than 27,000 flight segments.
The
groups' report said that the U.S. had provided "by far the most
comprehensive response" and accused European countries of lagging behind
when it came to transparency.
"Is
it an access to information problem, or is it a problem with this particular issue?
It's a bit of both," said Access Info Europe executive director Helen
Darbishire. "European countries have not completely faced up to their role
here."
Human
rights campaigners have worked for years to piece together information on
hundreds of covert flights that shuttled suspected terrorists between CIA-run
overseas prisons and the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay as part of the
post-Sept. 11 "War on Terror."
The
CIA has never acknowledged specific locations, but prisons overseen by U.S.
officials reportedly operated in Thailand, Afghanistan, Lithuania, Poland and
Romania - where terror suspects including Khalid Sheik Mohammad, mastermind of
the Sept. 11 attacks, were interrogated in the basement of a government
building in the capital, Bucharest.
Human
rights advocates claim that the CIA used the program to outsource torture of
detainees to countries where it is permitted.
In
a 2007 probe, Swiss politician Dick Marty accused 14 European governments of
permitting the CIA to run detention centers or carry out rendition flights over
their territories between 2002 and 2005.
The
European prisons were closed by May 2006, and the CIA's detention and
interrogation program ended in 2009.
The
Council of Europe estimated in 2007 that 1,245 CIA-operated flights had passed
over the continent, but an accurate count may be impossible.
The
human rights groups said they had identified 54 U.S.-registered aircraft
believed to be involved in rendition flights. They submitted freedom of
information requests to 28 mostly European countries, as well as air traffic
regulator Eurocontrol, for data on the planes' movements.
Along
with the United States, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Lithuania and
Norway released the information. Five countries said they did not have it -
Britain, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia and Slovenia.
The
groups have not received a reply from Albania, Austria, Azerbaijan, Cape Verde,
Georgia, France, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Romania, Russia, Spain and Turkey.
Canada,
Portugal and Sweden declined to release the information, as did Brussels-based
Eurocontrol.
In
the cases of Canada's air navigation controller NAV Canada and Eurocontrol it
was argued that the organizations were not public bodies and so not covered by
transparency laws.
Reprieve
investigator Crofton Black said Eurocontrol's silence was "a shocking
indictment of European complacency."
"It's
equally unacceptable that countries such as Austria, France, Italy, Latvia,
Romania and Spain simply ignore requests for data relating to serious human
rights abuses," Black said.
The
haphazard compliance with freedom of information rules is in line with a major
international survey by The Associated Press, which found that while more than
100 countries have right-to-know laws, more than half do not follow them.
The
two rights groups encouraged all countries to stick to their own rules and
publish any information they held on rendition flights so the full truth could
be known.
"There has been a
systematic failure across many different countries to piece this
together," Darbishire said. "It's very, very worrying."
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/International/2011/Dec-19/157312-rights-groups-accuse-europe-of-cia-flights-coverup.ashx#axzz1gtLKaQwu
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