Secret CIA Jails Deepens US/EU Divide
DANIERL DOMBEY in Barcelona and
DEMETRI SEVASTOPULO in Washington
Financial Times (UK) 29nov2005
The senior European diplomat could not have been clearer: “You don’t talk about torture in the morning and then say in the afternoon: ‘Democratise yourself’.”
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His comments, on the contrast between the Bush administration’s use of intensive interrogation techniques abroad and its public message about worldwide democratisation, underlined how Iraq-war tensions have found an echo in the controversy over the CIA’s alleged “secret prisons”.
They also show how, despite President George W. Bush’s high-profile attempt this year at rapprochement with Europe, the two sides of the Atlantic are still often at odds over international law and the fight against terrorism.
The storm has steadily grown ever since the Washington Post claimed this month that Europe had hosted secret facilities used by the Central Intelligence Agency to interrogate terror suspects.
The issue is also likely to overshadow the inaugural trip to Washington on Tuesday of Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Germany’s new foreign minister, who will discuss the issue with Condoleezza Rice, US secretary of state.
Sean McCormack, State Department spokesman, on Monday said Ms Rice would be prepared to discuss the issue during her visit to Europe next week, which includes stops in Germany, Romania, Ukraine and Belgium.
“I think that the conversation will take place in the broader context of our common struggle against terrorism,” said Mr McCormack.
Poland and Romania, indicated as likely hosts of the facilities by human rights groups, have vehemently denied any such allegations. But a second line of inquiry has already yielded more concrete results: records of US aircraft stopping in countries such as Spain, Ireland and Switzerland. The suspicion is that they were carrying suspects for interrogation in places where torture is practised or where, as in Guantánamo Bay, the applicable rules are less binding than in the US or the European Union.
Judicial investigations into the affair are beginning in Italy, Spain and Germany, while Sweden and Norway have asked the US for more information about CIA flights.
Last week Jack Straw, the British foreign secretary, was asked by his EU counterparts to request an explanation from the US.
“We cannot limit ourselves solely to the ‘secret prisons’ issue,” said Dick Marty, the Swiss politician who has headed the main political investigation into the incidents under the auspices of the 46-member Council of Europe, covering countries from east and west Europe, including Russia.
He said that further investigation needed to look into “illegal detention, even of a short duration” of US prisoners on European soil, such as stops to refuel aircraft.
At heart, many European countries recoil from Washington’s approach to its “war on terrorism”, preferring instead the legalistic approach for which the Bush administration criticises its Democratic predecessor.
The controversy is strongest in the “old Europe” countries to the west of the continent, where US diplomacy is often seen as particularly heavy-handed. Despite Mr Bush’s multiple trips to Europe this year, public opinion has not warmed to his administration. A poll by the German Marshall Fund of the US found European attitudes towards the US largely unchanged.
The US and the EU have co-operated more closely this year on specific issues such as Syria and Iran, and the US has modest hopes for better relations with Germany in the wake of the election of Angela Merkel, the new Christian Democrat chancellor.
But the CIA affair has tested the relationship anew, because European governments must weigh their wish to work with Washington against domestic calls to be tough on torture.
“This is a reflection of how the two sides see the world differently and how they see terrorism differently,” says Jeremy Shapiro, director of research at the centre for US and Europe at the Brookings Institution in Europe.
“But I don’t see this as a huge problem for EU-US relations, because there’s not going to be any hugely public spat on this issue. The US won’t say that there weren’t any secret prisons in Europe, but it will give assurances that they are not there now.”
He added that a quiet US backdown was all the more likely because of the attempt by Senator John McCain to provide firmer checks against the use of torture – an initiative that has led to a public relations disaster for the White House.
But in the meantime the dispute has only served to highlight, once again, the profound difference in philosophy between the EU and the Bush administration.
source: http://news.ft.com/cms/s/06c9b3c0-6075-11da-a3a6-0000779e2340.html 29nov2005
Issue of Secret Camps Strains U.S.-EU Relations
BRIAN KNOWLTON / International Herald Tribune (France)
WASHINGTON — Rising European anger over contentions that the CIA has flown terror suspects to secret camps in Eastern Europe for interrogation and possible torture appears to have the potential to slow a warming of U.S.-European relations.
The issue also may weigh on trans-Atlantic intelligence cooperation - one area of joint endeavor that has largely survived the polarizing debate over the U.S.-led war in Iraq.
On Monday, the European Union's commissioner of justice and home affairs warned that any EU member found to have permitted the use of such a camp could lose its voting rights.
It was not immediately clear what weight the warning by the commissioner, Franco Frattini, might carry. No member's voting rights have ever been suspended.
The warning could also add to pressure on East European aspirants like Romania, which is set to accede to the EU in 2007, to demonstrate that they fully respect the Union's human rights standards.
Frederick Jones, a spokesman for the National Security Council in Washington, acknowledged that the warning had "a potential impact" on U.S.-EU intelligence cooperation. He said the United States took the matter "very seriously."
The State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, when asked about European complaints that the United States had been slow to provide information on the existence of any camps, said the administration would do its best "to reply in as forthright a manner as we possibly can."
In an interview with USA Today published Tuesday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice neither confirmed nor denied the existence of secret CIA prisons abroad.
She is expected to seek to ease growing European discomfort on a trip to Europe next week, and she defended the unlimited detention of terrorism suspects, saying it benefited the United States and the world.
"You can't allow somebody to commit the crime before you detain them, because if they commit the crime, thousands of innocent people die," she said.
Early this month, President George W. Bush responded to the latest allegations by saying repeatedly that "we do not torture." He did not address the question of secret camps.
The European Commission and several European governments are investigating the possibility of secret detention camps after a report in The Washington Post on Nov. 2.
The Post, citing unidentified U.S. and foreign officials, said the CIA had been hiding and interrogating Al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe. The report said the compound was a part of a covert CIA system set up since 2001 that at times had included sites in Thailand, Afghanistan and several East European democracies.
The Post said it had been asked not to identify the European countries, but Human Rights Watch later said it had information suggesting that Poland, a recent EU member, and Romania had secret prison sites.
Both countries have denied any involvement.
The CIA had no comment on the EU warning on voting rights. But Frattini said in Berlin that if the reports of secret CIA jails proved true, EU nations could face "serious consequences," including a recommendation of suspension.
Suspension would not come easily, however. It would first require the unanimous backing of other member states for a finding that basic European values had been violated, then a further two-thirds vote of EU heads of state and government to set sanctions, officials in Brussels said.
Still, the controversy may already have affected intelligence cooperation, said Julianne Smith, deputy director for international security at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in Washington.
"The shining star of trans-Atlantic cooperation, despite all the disputes over Iraq," Smith said, "has always been the tremendous, very positive and very fruitful cooperation on terror, law enforcement and intelligence-sharing. Now this kind of cornerstone of trans-Atlantic cooperation is under attack."
Smith said she spoke last week in Europe with a number of national-security officials there. Several of them told her, she said, that "until we get to the bottom of this, we are not going to be able to share as much with you as we have."
The new German foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, is visiting Washington to underscore the desire of the new chancellor, Angela Merkel, to end the antagonism that grew out of German opposition to the Iraq war under her predecessor, Gerhard Schröder.
The controversy over treatment of prisoners appears to have had a particularly powerful impact in Europe, becoming "one of the most politically volatile issues affecting trans-Atlantic relations," said Charles Kupchan, director of Europe studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
"Most Europeans were against the war to begin with," he said, "and then adding fuel to the flames has been Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib and now the alleged prison camps in EU countries."
Katrin Bennhold contributed reporting from Paris.
source: http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/11/29/news/cia.php
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