Read the rendition report

YESTERDAY’S report by the Council of Europe on the US seizure of terrorist suspects abroad swelled the clamour for Tony Blair and other leaders to say whether they helped.

The inquiry, by Europe’s human rights watchdog, offers a plausible account of the US programme of “extraordinary renditions”. But it lacks solid proof that the 14 governments it names actually helped the US in what it theatrically calls the global “spider’s web”.

Its main contribution — new details of flight logs — is suggestive but inconclusive. The stories of people who claim to have been seized are painful and believable but not new.

As advocacy, it lacks the hard evidence to clinch its case. Its author’s best hope may be to raise the temperature; in that, at least, he has succeeded.

Tony Blair told Parliament yesterday that “we have said all we have to say on this. The report adds nothing new.”

Andrew Tyrie, Conservative chairman of the parliamentary group on extraordinary rendition, said that there was now a “huge amount of circumstantial evidence” of a British role, adding: “We are a democracy. The truth is going to come out. For the Prime Minister just to say, ‘Oh, I’m not going to say any more,’ isn’t going to wash.”

The row erupted in November with a Washington Post report that European governments had tolerated rendition flights in their airspace, and that the CIA ran secret prisons in two countries, later said to be Poland and Romania.

The new inquiry has been led by Dick Marty, a Swiss senator who heads the human rights committee of the Council of Europe, which monitors human rights and courts in its 46 member countries.

Marty had no powers to demand evidence. His achievement is to have extracted air traffic control records from the Europe-wide Eurocontrol, as well as 20-odd countries. He tracked ten cases, involving 17 prisoners, carried on aircraft he believes belong to the CIA.

His strongest claim is that 12 governments (Britain, the Irish Republic, Portugal, Greece, Italy, Germany, Turkey, Sweden, Spain, Cyprus Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia allowed or aided the CIA renditions.

One weakness is determining whether a plane is landing for refuelling or rendition. The report brought a flurry of denials. The US dismissed it as a “rehash” but a spokesman said: “We’re disappointed at the tone.” Ireland said that it was “absolutely opposed to extraordinary rendition”. Cyprus, accused of being a “staging point” for flights, said: “We were never asked by the US. They had technical reasons to land and there were no suspicions of what kind of flights these were.”

Britain’s position is more complicated. Blair said that “rendition [has] been the policy of the US Government for a long time”. Britain has confirmed that it granted two rendition requests in June 1998 and August 1998 of men later sentenced in the US for the 1982 Pan Am bombing, and the 1998 Nairobi embassy bombing.

As Marty says, “the act of ‘rendition’ may not [in itself] constitute a breach of international human rights law” — it is torture or unfair trial that would make it so. But many of the men he interviewed said that they were tortured.

Marty’s weakest claim is that Poland and Romania permitted the CIA to run detention centres. He admits that he has no “proof, in the classical meaning of the term”. But he says that flight logs reveal “two other landing points [of ‘CIA’ aircraft] that remain to be explained”.

Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, the Polish Prime Minister, said: “This is slander and it’s not based on any facts.” Romeo Raicu, head of Romania’s parliamentary committee on foreign intelligence services, said: “There is no evidence there were such detention bases,” although he noted that US aircraft may land or use the airspace. The responsibility for what those planes transport is not Romania’s.”

Marty has made a plausible case that some governments tacitly backed the US in tactics it had adopted for years, and still did when they intensified after September 11, 2001. The number of cases he has cited may not be large enough to cause real political embarrassment, although several are the subject of lawsuits, which will not just go away. Although his report lacks proof, it will push European leaders to back or reject the US view that the War on Terror demands special techniques, outside existing law.

SPIDER'S WEB