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Anger and red faces in Europe over CIA flights

Hasan Suroor

The Blair Government especially is under pressure over allegations that it allowed CIA covert flights to ferry suspected terrorists to secret interrogation centres.

NOT SINCE the uproar over Guantanamo Bay and the Abu Ghraib prison scandals has there been such outrage in Europe over American actions. The current row was sparked by allegations that, in the wake of 9/11, the CIA operated hundreds of covert flights, using European airports, to ferry suspected terrorists to secret interrogation centres where they might have been tortured to extract information.

Under international law, it is illegal to send prisoners to places where they are likely to face torture. Inevitably, questions are being asked whether countries whose airspace was used by the CIA for this purpose were aware of it. And, if so, did they do anything to stop it?

Britain was one of them and, according to reports that have not been denied, more than 200 such flights — dubbed the "torture" flights — landed at various British airports. Indeed, Britain has been described as the second biggest "transit hub" for CIA planes, next only to Germany. Others whose airports or airspace were utilised for transferring prisoners to torture chambers in third countries include France, Italy, Spain, Ireland, Portugal, the Netherlands, Hungary, Poland, and Romania.

At least two East European countries are suspected to have allowed the CIA to set up secret jails on their territory in violation of the European Union's founding principles of democracy, rule of law, and human rights. Both have denied this, but the European Council has set up an inquiry and the EU Justice Commissioner, Franco Frattini, has warned of "extremely serious" consequences if the allegations are proved.

Allegations about secret flights and "American gulags" first surfaced in September following a report in The Guardian. The full scale of the alleged CIA operation has emerged only in recent weeks with details of the flights — including names of the countries and the airports where they landed — being published in the media after independent investigations by human rights campaigners and plane-spotters.

Governments on both sides of the Atlantic have been accused of evading the issue, and of resorting to "stone-walling" and "obfuscation." The U.S. Government has refused to confirm or deny the allegations. The British Foreign Office has claimed that it is "not aware" that U.K. territory or airspace might have been used for the purpose of "extraordinary rendition" (the euphemism used by Americans to send prisoners to third countries for interrogation).

Straw writes to Rice

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has been forced to write to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice seeking details after MPs insisted on being told all the facts. The human rights group Liberty set a two-week deadline for the Government to investigate the allegations failing which it threatened to take the issue to court. (The U.S. Government is facing a similar threat from an American civil liberties organisation). Mr. Straw has said that in his letter he has expressed "concern" on behalf of all EU countries.

In a sign of a gathering storm ahead of Ms. Rice's visit to Europe this week, European leaders have said they plan to challenge her on the issue while members of the European Parliament have launched a campaign to get at the truth.

"The allegations are now beyond speculation. We now have sufficient evidence involving CIA flights. We need to know who was on these flights, where they went," Sarah Ludford, a British MEP, demanded amid reports that German MEPs were pressing their country's new Chancellor Angela Markel to take up the matter with President George W. Bush.

While the European Union and the European Council have already announced separate investigations, there is growing pressure on individual governments also to act. In Britain, the Government has been accused of "complicity" and MPs have set up a cross-party group to press for "full disclosure."

"If, in fact, people are being moved from a jurisdiction where torture is illegal to a jurisdiction where torture is permissible, that seems to me to be wholly contrary to international law. If we are allowing facilities for aircraft carrying out those actions, then we are at the very least facilitating it, we may even be complicit in it," Menzies Campbell, the deputy leader of the Liberal Democratic Party, and a member of the group said.

One senior Labour MP, Chris Mullen, agreed that it was important for the Government to come clean even if there was no direct evidence that it had been complicit in any illegal operation.

"There's no doubt some sort of secret gulag exists which is controlled by the Americans into which people disappear for months at a time. And there's also no doubt that the Americans have for some time been franchising out torture to countries that are rather less scrupulous than ourselves, and indeed the Americans, about the use of torture," said Mr. Mullin though he did not think that the Government had a case to answer.

But critics argue that it is inconceivable that such a large number of non-commercial flights of another country could have passed through British airports without the Government's knowledge. Officials at some level — most probably the intelligence services — must have known what was going on, and the Government cannot absolve itself of complete responsibility just because the Ministers may not have been told about it. Indeed, in the past British civil servants are known to have deliberately withheld potentially embarrassing information from Ministers so that they are not seen to lie to Parliament when they say that the Government was not aware of it. No wonder, the House of Commons committee on foreign affairs has called the Government's claim that it had no evidence of what the CIA had been up to as one of "obfuscation."

Experts point out that it is not enough for the Government to condemn torture or claim that there was no evidence to suggest its complicity. The crucial question is: did it make any attempt to investigate the allegations when they were first made as it is obliged to do as a signatory to the Convention against Torture?

They say the very fact that Mr. Straw has only now written to his American counterpart, though the allegations had been swirling for at least two months, shows the government made no effort to find out the truth. Its failure to do so may not have been a deliberate act of looking the other way while something illegal was happening on its own territory. But by not investigating, the Government had made its position vulnerable under the Torture Convention, according to legal experts.

"The Torture Convention requires states to begin an investigation wherever there is `reasonable ground' to believe that an act of torture has been committed on its territory," said Elizabeth Wilmshurst, a former Foreign Office lawyer who resigned over the legality of the Iraq war.

Even if a person was not tortured on British territory, the mere fact that he or she was being transported through Britain to a place where they could be tortured was enough to attract the provisions of the Torture Convention.

"The ban on torture applies not just to the act itself but also prohibits sending people to countries where there are substantial grounds for believing that they would be in danger of being tortured ... Even if the persons concerned never leave a plane on the tarmac at a British airport they are covered by the law," Ms. Wilmshurst pointed out. The litmus test, she wrote in The Independent, was whether there was anything that could have been done by the Government in relation to the alleged flights.

"Should the Government have known about any detainees on board and could these flights have been stopped," she asked. In other words, by keeping quiet the Government had rendered itself open to the charge of complicity.

This is not the first time, since the grand Blair-Bush alliance came into being four years ago, that the British Government finds itself in an embarrassing situation because of American actions. But what is new on this occasion is that its own role in the whole affair does not appear to be above suspicion. And if it turns out, as its critics darkly hint, that there was even a suggestion of official backing for what one newspaper described as the CIA's "vile" project it will deal another blow to Prime Minister Tony Blair's credibility and increase pressure on him to stop playing second fiddle to the Bush administration. More critically, it will diminish faith in Britain's commitment to human rights and the rule of law.

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