CIA emptied secret jails before Rice Europe trip

The CIA last month emptied two secret prisons in Eastern Europe of terrorist suspects in a frantic effort to defuse the "rendition" controversy ahead of Condoleezza Rice's visit to Europe, sources in the agency claimed this week. The suspects were reportedly hurriedly moved to a new CIA-run facility hidden in a North African desert to allow the US Secretary of State to tell her European hosts that nobody was being held on their soil. According to ABC News, 10 of the detainees were subjected to the harshest interrogation techniques allowed. Citing CIA officials, the network said the prisons shut down were believed to be in Poland and Romania. The Bush administration so far has refused to confirm or deny that the CIA runs "black sites" in Eastern Europe to hold terrorist suspects outside the reach of US law. Rice began her tour of Europe on Dec. 6 with a rare public admission that the US had made "mistakes" in the "war on terror." Rice insisted that the US did not "condone" torture. "It is against US law," she said. But she appeared to concede for the first time that the Bush administration's uncompromising policy of "rendition" against terrorist suspects had sometimes gone wrong. "We recognize that any policy will sometimes result in errors," Rice said. Her comments in Berlin came at the start of her five-day tour, which takes in Romania, Ukraine and Belgium. The visit has been accompanied by a wave of criticism from across Europe over the CIA's practice of transferring terrorist suspects to third countries for interrogation. In Britain, members of Parliament from both parties reacted with the greatest skepticism to Rice's statement, saying it had neither answered their questions nor allayed their concerns about US policy. "It's clear that the text of the speech was drafted by lawyers with the intention of misleading an audience," Andrew Tyrie, a Conservative member of British Parliament, said. Tyrie is chairman of a recently formed nonpartisan committee that plans to investigate claims that the British government has tacitly condoned torture by allowing the US to use its airspace to transport terrorist suspects to countries where they are subsequently tortured. Running through the speech, Tyrie pointed out example after example where, he said, Rice was using surgically precise language to obfuscate and distract. By asserting, for instance, that the United States does not send suspects to countries where they "will be" tortured, Rice is protecting herself, Tyrie said, leaving open the possibility that they "may be" tortured in those countries. Others pointed out that the Bush administration's definition of torture did not include practices like water-boarding–in which prisoners are strapped to a board and made to believe they are about to be drowned–that violate provisions of the international Convention Against Torture. Andrew Mullin, a Labor member of British Parliament, agreed with Tyrie saying that Rice's statement had been "carefully lawyered," adding: "It is a matter of record that people have been kidnapped and have been handed over to people who have tortured them. I think their experience has to be matched against the particular form of language the secretary of state is using." "I resent the fact that my country is foolishly being led into a misguided approach into combating terrorism by [the Bush] administration," Tyrie said. "European countries have a far greater experience over many decades dealing with terrorism, and many of us have learned the hard way that dealing in a muscular way can often inflame the very terrorism you're trying to suppress." Rice's unusual concession to critics about possible "errors" appears to be an attempt to deflect outrage in Germany over the case of Khalid Masri–a German national mistakenly kidnapped by the CIA in December 2003. Rice made her statements during an awkward meeting with Angela Merkel, the new German chancellor. Standing next to Rice, Merkel said that the US had "accepted" it had "erroneously taken" Masri, who spent five months in a freezing Afghan jail after the CIA grabbed him in Macedonia. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), meanwhile, announced that day that it was suing the CIA and its director at the time George Tenet over his case. The ACLU says the intelligence agency has broken both US and international law. Masri said he was beaten and threatened repeatedly in custody. He said "an American" told him that "you are now in a country with no rule of law–you might get buried here." Masri had been due to address a press conference–but was apparently unable to attend after US officials refused him permission to enter the country. There were also fresh claims in Italy that the CIA had deliberately deceived the authorities there over the whereabouts of a radical Islamic cleric whom the agency had in fact kidnapped. According to the Washington Post, the CIA seized Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, an Egyptian refugee known as Abu Omar, from a street in Milan. The agency then told Italian anti-terrorism police that they had information that he had fled to the Balkans–a piece of disinformation. The strategy worked for more than a year, until the Italians discovered that the CIA had whisked Nasr off to Egypt, where he was allegedly interrogated and tortured, the Washington Post reported. "As a matter of US policy," Rice said the United Nations Convention against Torture "extends to US personnel wherever they are, whether they are in the US or outside the US." The Bush administration has previously said the ban on cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment did not apply to US citizens working overseas. In practice, that meant CIA employees could use methods in overseas prisons that would not be allowed in the United States. The day before her remarks alongside Merkel, Rice challenged European leaders to back US anti-terrorism tactics as she robustly defended the CIA's extrajudicial seizure, transportation and interrogation of thousands of suspects. Despite the uproar in Europe, Rice also said that she expected US allies to cooperate and keep quiet about sensitive anti-terrorism operations. "We cannot discuss information that would compromise intelligence, law enforcement and military operations," Rice said. "We expect other nations share this view." The CIA is alleged to have made hundreds of secret flights over Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Sweden, Denmark and the Irish Republic. The Council of Europe, an intergovernmental human rights group, has begun an investigation. The German magazine Der Spiegel has claimed that 437 CIA flights landed in Germany or crossed German airspace. In her response to the EU request for an explanation, Rice said that the US "will use every lawful weapon to defeat these terrorists." This includes renditions, which, she argued, had been practiced for years by the US and other democratic governments. "Renditions take terrorists out of action… Such renditions are permissible under international law," Rice declared. The practice began in the mid-1990s under President Clinton, according to Michael Scheuer, a former CIA counter-terrorism analyst, who helped to set up rendition and who has written Imperial Hubris, an attack on President Bush's "war on terror." He says that Egypt (repeatedly criticized by the State Department for its use of torture) was a favorite destination. Other CIA officials have said that Bush hugely increased the practice after Sept. 11.