European lawmakers demanded on Thursday that their governments reveal the location of secret CIA prisons after President Bush admitted Washington held terror suspects in jails abroad.
Bush said on Wednesday the Central Intelligence Agency had interrogated dozens of suspects at undisclosed overseas locations and 14 of those held had now been sent to the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay.
A leader of Europe’s chief human rights watchdog, the Council of Europe, said the revelation vindicated the exhaustive investigation the body had conducted on secret prisons and CIA flights moving suspects around Europe.
“Our work has helped to flush out the dirty nature of this secret war, which -- we learn at last -- has been carried out completely beyond any legal framework,” said Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly president Rene van der Linden.
A Washington Post report last year that the CIA had run secret prisons in Europe and flown suspects to states where they could be tortured unleashed a spate of probes -- including one by the European Parliament -- prompting uncomfortable denials by European governments and evasions from Washington.
“The location of these prison camps must be made public,” said German lawmaker Wolfgang Kreissl-Doerfler, a member of the European Parliament committee investigating the allegations.
“We need to know if there has been any complicity in illegal acts by governments of EU countries or states seeking EU membership,” he said in a statement.
He urged EU member Poland and candidate country Romania to speak out about accusations that they hosted secret detention centers on their soil.
‘Arrogant leaders’
EU lawmakers are set to travel to these two countries as well as Britain and Germany, as part of their investigations, British EU lawmaker Sarah Ludford told Reuters.
“Bush exposes not only his own previous lies. He also exposes to ridicule those arrogant government leaders in Europe who dismissed as unfounded our fears about extraordinary rendition,” Ludford said in a statement.
Extraordinary rendition is a term used for extra-territorial transfers of suspects without legal scrutiny.
Bush’s statement overshadowed a European Parliament debate on the future of a U.S.-EU agreement on the transfer of personal data on transatlantic airline passengers to U.S. authorities to help counter terrorism, which the European Court of Justice ruled illegal in May.
The executive European Commission wants to replace it with a similar pact on a different legal basis when it expires at the end of this month.
Most lawmakers accepted this short-term expedient to avoid disrupting air travel, but many demanded the EU seek better data protection guarantees when renegotiating the deal next year.
The EU assembly’s investigating committee is set to question the Spanish foreign minister and probably his Irish counterpart on accusations that EU countries colluded with the CIA in secret flights of terror suspects, lawmakers and diplomats Reuters.
Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos will be questioned on Sept. 14, a Spanish diplomat said. He will be the first minister to agree to appear before the panel.
Irish Foreign Minister Dermot Ahern is also likely to give evidence to the committee in the next six weeks, a source in Ireland’s ruling Fianna Fail party said.
A Council of Europe report named Ireland as a key stopover in the CIA-operated rendition program.