EU Parliamentary Committee hears first testimonies in CIA case

[PhilipShore]

EuropaWorld
EU Parliamentary Committee hears first testimonies in CIA case
3/3/2006

http://www.europaworld.org/week258/euparliamentary3306.html

There is "no doubt" that the Bush administration engaged in abductions, extraordinary renditions and secret detentions, claimed Joanne Mariner --a terrorism expert at Human Rights Watch. What is important, she noted, is the extent of European governments' involvement in these practices. Evidence of such involvement, she argued, includes the case of a CIA-operated plane which flew from Kabul to north-eastern Poland on 22 September 2003, landed at a military airfield in Romania the very next day – and then took off for Guantánamo Bay, by way of Morocco.

Amnesty International's Anne Fitzgerald began her presentation to the committee by noting that her organisation has records of 800 flights around Europe, “which we suspect to be flights linked with the CIA”. This, however, “is not to say that 800 have been carrying rendition victims”. Still, she noted, we have evidence of four flights, all of them “well-documented cases”, where that has been the case. When Jas Gawronski (EPP-ED, IT) appeared sceptical about the conclusions to be drawn from such “circumstantial evidence”, Ms. Fitzgerald acknowledged that “the fact that the CIA has been flying planes in and out of Europe is not conclusive: it is indicative”.