By Martin Kreickenbaum via San Francisco Indy Media

Alleged terror suspects have been kidnapped in the European Union (EU) by the CIA and taken to third countries where they have been subjected to torture. The European governments knew of these illegal actions and were even involved in them.

This is the conclusion reached in the first interim report of the subcommittee of the European parliament examining the illegal activities of the CIA within Europe. Dick Marty, the special investigator of the Council of Europe, reached a similar conclusion in February. Forty-six European states belong to the Council of Europe; the European parliament includes representatives of the EU’s 25 member states.

The European parliament has been examining the extent of possible CIA abductions and transportation to secret prisons for four months and now has evidence of more than a thousand unregistered flights that the CIA has carried out in Europe since 2001.

The interim report arrives at the conclusion, ‘In several cases, the CIA was clearly responsible for the illegal abduction and imprisonment of supposed terrorists within the territory of the member states, as well as extraordinary transfers, and that in some cases this involved European citizens.’

These extraordinary transfers, or ‘renditions,’ are characterised as clearly breaching international law. As the report notes, they are aimed at ensuring ‘that suspects are not submitted to legal proceedings.’ The CIA has ‘secretly kidnapped, imprisoned and transferred terror suspects,’ the report finds. They were despatched to other countries (including Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Afghanistan), ‘which, as the government of the United States admits, practice torture.’

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