CIA FLIGHTS: EUROPEAN COUNCIL INVESTIGATORS BEGIN POLAND VISIT

Members of the European Council human rights watchdog's special committee investigating alleged CIA prisons in Poland were due to arrive in the country on Tuesday for a three-day stay, the Polish Press Agency reported. The delegation had hoped to interview Polish citizens, however prime minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski has said the committee had no right to summon Polish citizens.

The Polish authorities deny that such such secret CIA jails where terrorist suspects have allegedly been interrogated. Poland is one of several east European countries fingered by reports earlier this year from European Council and from the European Parliament for allegedly hosting such facilities.

Swiss lawyer Dick Marty, a member of the European Council's parliamentary assembly, said in his July report in July that 14 European nations including Italy and Poland had agreed that CIA could transfer terrorist suspects or operate secret jails within their territories. All the countries named have denied wrongdoing.

Marty's report incriminated Germany, Turkey, Spain and Cyprus for being "staging points" for flights involving the unlawful transfer of detainees; and Ireland, Britain, Portugal, Greece, as well as Italy, for being "stopovers" for flights involving the unlawful transfer of detainees.

The report levels the most serious charges at Poland and Romania, where Marty says there is enough evidence to support suspicions that CIA secret prisons were established. Britain, Bosnia, Sweden, Macedonia, Germany and Turkey, besides Italy, were cited in relation to cases involving specific individuals.

A parallel report by a committee of MEPs is due in January to submit its final report on the alleged extra-judical abductions by CIA agents of terror suspects on European soil and their detention in secret prisons in European and other countries including Afghanistan and Thailand.

An interim report released in late April by MEP Claudio Fava who has been heading the European Parliament probe claimed the CIA has operated more than a thousand secret flights in and out of European airports since 2001, about which the local authorities did not request information. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's legal advisor, John Bellinger brushed off Fava's claim as "simply absurd".

Presenting his report, Fava suggested that flight plans and airport logs made it hard to believe that many of the stopovers were simple refuelling missions. He also said it was improbable that several European governments, including Italy's, were "unaware" of the extraordinary renditions occurring "on their territory, in their airspace and in their airports."

IInvestigators have used data from Eurocontrol, the EU's air safety agency to examine thousands of flight records, and have interviewed top EU officials, magistrates, human rights activists and people who said they were abducted by the CIA.

Media allegations on CIA jails broke in November 2005, when the Washington Post newspaper said the intelligence agency had flown more than 100 people to facilities known as "black sites" that were allegedly set up around the word - in Asia as well as Europe - following the 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States. Islamist terror suspects are alleged to have been mistreated and tortured at such prisons.

Commenting on the reports last November, Rice said only that while rendition is a useful tool, the US does not practice or condone torture.
Source:adnki.com