East European countries urged to probe roles in CIA ‘torture’

EUROPE’S human rights chief urged Lithuania, Poland and Romania yesterday to investigate the roles their governments allegedly played in the CIA’s programme of “secret detention and torture” of terrorism suspects.

“CIA rendition, detention and interrogation practices gave rise to the most serious categories of human rights violations on European soil,” said Thomas Hammarberg, the Council of Europe’s rights commissioner. “The governments concerned have favoured concealment and cover-up,” he told Associated Press.

Hammarberg alleges that officials in the three countries lied to parliament, made false statements to international organisations and used judicial channels — including the invocation of state secrecy — to keep the most damaging revelations out of the public domain.

During the past decade, hundreds of covert “extraordinary rendition” flights shuttled prisoners between CIA-run overseas prisons and the US military base at Guantanamo Bay.

In a 2007 probe, Swiss politician Dick Marty accused 14 European governments of permitting the CIA to run detention centres or carry out rendition flights over their territories between 2002 and 2005.

A panel of the Council of Europe’s parliamentary assembly is due to discuss Marty’s report and the alleged abuse of state secrecy at a meeting in Paris tomorrow .

Although the governments involved promised to thoroughly investigate the abuses, their efforts have been halfhearted at best, Hammarberg said.

“If we fail to account for these practices that systematically contradicted our common values and standards, then what is to prevent governments in future from resorting to the same abusive tactics?”

Among the interrogation techniques authorised by the US government were forced nudity, shackling in stress positions, extended sleep deprivation, dietary manipulation, slapping and waterboarding, said Hammarberg.

“The CIA’s interrogation methods routinely crossed the threshold of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, and in many cases constituted torture,” he said in a statement yesterday.

The Marty report alleged that Poland, Romania and Lithuania were particularly heavily involved in the CIA programme in total secrecy.

In Romania, which has been accused of failing to investigate a CIA site near Bucharest, the president’s office said it would not comment. In Poland, where an investigation into the allegations could result in those in office at the time being charged with crimes against humanity, there also was no immediate reaction.

There was no reaction from Lithuania.