I’ve read the entire memorandum that Dick Marty presented to the Council of Europe, and it is disturbing. Not only only does Marty’s report contain serious allegations on the practice of the "outsourcing of torture" by the United States, but it condemns both the overt and tacit complicity of European governments:
Rendition" affecting Europe seems to have concerned more than a hundred persons in recent years13. Hundreds of CIA-chartered flights have passed through numerous European countries14. It is highly unlikely that European governments, or at least their intelligence services, were unaware. And a number of revelations have already been published by the press, especially in America, over the past few years. It is, to say the least, curious that media interest, especially in Europe, suddenly surged after the article in The Washington Post in early November 2005.
67. The statements made by Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, during and before her European visit of December 2005, and by her predecessor, Colin Powell, who said that the US had always respected the national sovereignty of its allies, are taken by some as both a reprimand and a warning: “stop being hypocritical”, and “do you really want us to say what happened?”.
Germany looms large in the CIA rendition program, as the US is dependent on airbases in Germany for transfer of detainees. Information from the US, however, is not forthcoming:
In answer to a question from the leftwing group, the German air traffic safety office provided a detailed list of flights by two aircraft apparently chartered by the CIA which had landed at airports in Germany in 2002 and 2003, 137 and 146 times respectively and mainly at Frankfurt, Berlin and the US Ramstein base. However, the office was unable to provide the members of parliament with information as to the identity of any passengers. On 17 January 2006 the German members of parliament decided to set up a committee of enquiry to report back as soon as possible on the role of the intelligence services (BND) in Baghdad and on certain aspects of anti-terrorist action (including allegations of flights and overflights of German territory by CIA-chartered aircraft). Discussions are still under way as there seem to be misgivings in some political circles about setting up a committee that might undermine the operational capacity of the BND.
NZZ-Online elaborates on the hypocrisy of Germany’s Interior Minister on the issue of torture:
Marty kritisiert in diesem Zusammenhang auch den neuen deutschen Innenminister Schäuble. Es sei diskutabel, wenn nicht alarmierend, wenn Schäuble die Verwendung von Informationen für akzeptabel halte, die mit dubiosen Methoden erlangt wurden, vorausgesetzt, dass der deutsche Geheimdienst selbst diese Methoden nicht anwende.
Marty’s investigation goes on, but the situation for those detainees at Guantanamo involved in a hunger strike is critical, as antifa points out in the European Tribune blog:
Among the hundreds of nameless and faceless Muslim captives at our Guantanamo penal colony, a bit over 250 are on a hunger strike, determined to starve to death rather than accept their situation.Thirty men have been on hunger strike five months now, since August. Our ultimate response has been to hold them down once a day, forcing feeding tubes down their noses into their stomachs, and pumping nutrient fluids into them.
This will not keep them alive; it only prolongs the inevitable. They’re dying, and will pass away in the days just ahead. Dozens more are determined to follow them out of Gitmo.
How will the US dispose of their emaciated corpses? Will they burn them? That practice has worked well in the past.
CIA torture Guantanamo Folter menschenrechte
