Friday, October 27, 2006



Complicity

According to The Guardian, the CIA tried to get Germany to silence the EU on its extraordinary rendition programme, using access to German citizens in captivity as a bagaining chip. What the headline doesn't tell you is that it worked:

After the CIA offered a deal to Germany, EU countries adopted an almost universal policy of downplaying criticism of human rights records in countries where terrorist suspects have been held. They have also sidestepped questions about secret CIA flights partly because of growing evidence of their complicity.

As Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly Rapporteur Dick Marty found, these governments deliberately looked the other way on rendition, allowing the CIA "torture plane" to stage out of their airports or US military bases on their territory, transit their airspace, and even actively cooperating in the kidnap and rendition of their own citizens - while all the while claiming to oppose torture. And they need to be held politically and legally accountable for it.

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