01.25.06
Council of Europe Report on US-Sponsored Secret ‘Detentions’ in Europe
Read the official full text of the Jan. 22, 2006 preliminary report by Council of Europe investigator Dick Marty, Alleged secret detentions in Council of Europe member states, which is also archived at Cryptome.
The “information memorandum” is part of an ongoing investigation that US-based Human Rights Watch is publicly calling on member European nations to cooperate with. (A worthwhile visit is HRW’s index of their recent work viz. Torture and Abuse.)
The report was released simultaneously with this article in New Statesman magazine (also covered in the Guardian (UK) newspaper) revealing a leaked British government memo formulating what the Guardian calls a “hidden strategy aimed at suppressing a debate about rendition” intended to “stifle attempts by MPs to find out what it knows about CIA ‘torture flights’” even as the Foreign Ministry “privately admits that people captured by British forces could have been sent illegally to interrogation centres.” The memo was written in response to a request from Prime Minister Blair’s office on advice on how to deal with the scandal and, in particular, mounting evidence that the British government was a knowing participant in the secret US program of “extraordinary rendition.” (Hanah Arendt on the role of euphemism in fascism, anyone?)
‘Course, those of us who remember the ’80s — and were paying any attention at all at the time — remember another euphemism: disappearances. I’m just sayin’.
