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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings, Torture and Big Money |
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February 22nd,
2008 - Miliband Admits Two US Rendition Flights on British Soil |
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Embarrassed
Miliband Admits Two US Rendition Flights Refuelled on British Soil By Richard Norton-Taylor & Julian Borger The Guardian February 22, 2008 British government officials
expressed embarrassment and anger at Washington last night after they were
forced to admit that US rendition flights carrying terror suspects for secret
interrogation had twice landed on British soil. In an apology to the
Commons, David Miliband, the foreign secretary, told MPs that contrary to
"earlier explicit assurances" two flights landed at Diego Garcia,
the British Indian Ocean territory where the US has a large air base, in
2002. He said the flights had been mistakenly overlooked in previous US internal
inquiries carried out at the UK's behest. A senior American official
said the renditions had come to light only when CIA flight crews were
interviewed directly. John Bellinger, chief legal adviser in the US state
department, said CIA officials were now "as confident as they can
be" that no other detainees had been flown through Britain on secret
rendition flights over the past six years of America's "war on
terror". The government's deep unease
over an issue which has strained relations between the two close allies was
made clear by Miliband's disclosure that he had asked his officials to
compile a list of all flights on which rendition had been alleged. Bellinger
said the Bush administration would look at the list "and see how we can
appropriately respond". In his statement, Miliband
said the two flights had refuelled at Diego Garcia. Each one had a single
detainee on board who did not leave the aircraft. British and US officials all
refused to give details about the two detainees in question other than that
one was in Guantánamo Bay and the other had been released. Mike Hayden, the CIA
director, said neither of the two men "was ever part of the CIA's
high-value terrorist interrogation programme" - a reference to
"waterboarding" and other techniques considered to amount to
torture, and thus be illegal, by Britain but not by the US. However, both Miliband and
Bellinger left unanswered the question of what happened to the detainees
immediately before and after they were transported through Diego Garcia. Miliband told the Commons
that despite repeated requests to the US by the British government, prompted
by repeated allegations by MPs and journalists, only now had US records
revealed the existence of the flights. Bellinger, who was in the
Commons yesterday to hear the foreign secretary's statement, said the Bush
administration had not informed Britain at the time because it was not
legally obliged to. He promised there would no future rendition flights
without UK approval, and said there were no such requests pending. Gordon Brown, who was in
Brussels yesterday, said: "It is unfortunate that this was not known ...
but it's important [to ensure] this will not happen again." Andrew Tyrie, chairman of
the all-party committee on rendition, said: "This statement [by
Miliband] will leave the British public unwilling to trust other assurances
we have received from the US. We should bear in mind that these extraordinary
renditions are probably illegal and certainly unethical." Sir Menzies Campbell, the
former Lib Dem leader, to whom Miliband apologised for having been misled,
said the situation was a gross embarrassment for the government and "a
breaching of our moral obligations and possibly of our legal
responsibilities". The government had "no effective control"
over what happened at the Diego Garcia site. Clive Stafford Smith,
director of Reprieve, the legal action charity, said: "Since January
2003, the British government has stated again and again that Diego Garcia was
never used by the CIA for its torture flights." The human rights group
Liberty called for an inquiry into what it called "UK complicity".
Shami Chakrabarti, its director, said: "It is far too easy for our
government to blame the Americans for lack of information, particularly as Liberty
has been asking the Foreign Office to investigate US torture flights for more
than two years." External link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/22/ciarendition.foreignpolicy1 EU: Poland, Romania Coy on Rendition By Jan Sliva Associated Press February 22, 2008 Brussels, Belgium - The
European Commission on Friday said Poland and Romania have been dodging
requests for clarification about allegations they were involved in
Washington's program of secretly transporting terror suspects to clandestine
prisons. Britain acknowledged on
Thursday, after years of denials, that the U.S. used one of its remote
outposts - the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia - in the secret transport
- which the U.S. calls extraordinary rendition. EU Justice and Home Affairs
Commissioner Franco Frattini sent letters to Warsaw and Bucharest in July
urging them to conduct in-depth judicial inquiries into the findings by the
European Parliament and the Council of Europe, which both said circumstantial
evidence pointed to the countries' complicity in the U.S. program. Romania and Poland have
firmly denied allegations of running secret CIA prisons or aiding the U.S. to
spirit away terror suspects to illegal detention facilities. Frattini nevertheless
demanded that the two countries provide clarification concerning
"allegations of detention centers in these countries." Neither
country has responded in an adequate manner, EU Commission spokesman Johannes
Laitenberger said. "We have not received a
reply from Poland, and the information from Romania was not considered
complete. ... Frattini sent reminders in January and we're currently awaiting
replies," Laitenberger said. He did not give any deadline
but said countries usually respond to commission requests quickly. Swiss Senator Dick Marty,
who led an inquiry into CIA activities in Europe on behalf of the Council of
Europe, a human rights watchdog, said the continent is likely to see more
admissions of complicity in the coming months. "When I implicated
Britain in my report and specifically mentioned Diego Garcia, a British MP
laughed at me and said my case was riddled with holes like Swiss
cheese," he said. "Now I have to laugh." The CIA admitted on Thursday
that previous data given to Britain "turned out to be wrong."
British Foreign Secretary David Miliband told Parliament that recent talks
with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice showed two suspects had been on
flights to Guantanamo Bay and Morocco in 2002 that landed on Diego Garcia, a
U.S. base on British soil. EU member states have been
unwilling to shed light on their possible roles in the flights to secret
detention facilities - a practice illegal under EU human rights laws. Manfred Nowak, the U.N.
special investigator on torture, said he had received allegations that the
Americans not only refueled at Diego Garcia, as Miliband said Thursday, but
also held detainees there. "I'm not saying that he
didn't tell the truth, according to his knowledge. I'm only saying that I
had, from the very beginning, allegations that suspected terrorists were held
at Diego Garcia. These are allegations, I don't have proof," he said. The European Parliament is
to evaluate how EU countries have responded to the accusations of complicity
with the CIA and what they have done to prevent illegal activities by foreign
intelligence services on their soil, officials said. The European Parliament and
the Council of Europe have accused at least 14 European nations of colluding
with U.S. intelligence in a web of rights abuses to help the CIA program,
which began after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks on the United States. Associated Press Writer
Frank Jordans in Geneva, Switzerland, contributed to this report © 2008 The Associated Press External link: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/world/5562444.html |