Although this story is slowly losing prominence in much of the mainstream media, it's far from over. We'll start with yesterday's Telegraph (Britain), with an astonishing article:

The European Union secretly allowed the United States to use transit facilities on European soil to transport "criminals" in 2003, according to a previously unpublished document. The revelation contradicts repeated EU denials that it knew of "rendition" flights by the CIA.

The EU agreed to give America access to facilities - presumably airports - in confidential talks in Athens during which the war on terror was discussed, the original minutes show. But all references to the agreement were deleted from the record before it was published.

The issue of "rendition" flights - in which terror suspects are flown to secret bases and third countries for interrogation - overshadowed last week's fence-mending visit to Europe by Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State.

Asked in Parliament last week about reports of 400 suspect flights passing through British airports, Tony Blair said: "In respect of airports, I don't know what you are referring to."

The minutes of the Athens meeting on January 22, 2003, were written by the then Greek presidency of the EU after the talks with a US delegation headed by a justice department official. EU officials confirmed that a full account was circulated to all member governments, and would have been sent to the Home Office.

The document, entitled New Transatlantic Agenda, EU-US meeting on Justice and Home Affairs, details the subjects discussed by the 31 people present. The agenda included the fight against terrorism, drug trafficking and extradition agreements.

According to the full version, "Both sides agreed on areas where co-operation could be improved [inter alia] the exchange of data between border management services, increased use of European transit facilities to support the return of criminal/ inadmissible aliens, co-ordination with regard to false documents training and improving the co-operation in removals."

But this section, and others referring to US policy, were deleted - as a "courtesy" to Washington, according to a spokesman for the EU Council of Ministers.

Wow... I knew that sooner or later there would be a leak from somewhere if this story was true. And it is true, as evidenced by the lack of denials coming from Washington. So now it's only a matter of time before journalists (and bloggers) piece together the puzzle.

Nothing quite gets my hackles up than deleted passages and phrases. The wording in the quote above isn't very definitive, but the fact that it was deleted smells like trouble.

And, as I've said before, the fact that these secret jails did in fact exist yet every potential host country has denied their existance is a paradox that can't last forever. There are plenty of fingers pointing at Romania but it looks now like there will be at least some EU countries frying in the pan soon as well.

Over to Spain, where El Pais has a front-page article this morning. Translation, as always, is mine and therefore all errors are solely mine:

A CIA Flight Landed in Barcelona At The End of October

Turkey reveals that a DHC-8 landed in Istanbul, arriving from the Catalan capital [Barcelona]

Yesterday, the Turkish Foreign Minister, Abdula Gul, stated that a flight connected to the CIA landed in Barcelona on its way to Baku, the capital of the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan at the end of October. The plane, a DHC-8 with registration number N-505LL arrived at Istanbul, via Barcelona, at 4:15pm on October 31 and from there landed in Baku at 3:00pm the next day. In his testimony to Congress on November 24, 2005, the [Spanish] Foreign Minister, Miguel Angel Moratinos, only spoke about flights in the Balearic and Canary Islands.

With his statements to the partially state-run Anatolia news agency, the head of Turkish diplomacy was responding to the accusation that the CIA had used his country to interrogate terrorism suspects. "The plane was always under our control. There was no offloading or onloading of passengers nor offloading of cargo in Turkey. It is quite impossible that any interrogation or kidnapping of suspects in a civil or military Turkish airport occurred", said Gul.

Not withstanding, the minister confirmed the reports from the newspaper Hurriyet, which stated that a DHC-8 connected to the CIA landed in teh airport of Sabiha Gokcen (Istanbul) on November 15 of this year, coming from Baku. Furthermore, added Gul, the plane was on the ground less than 24 hours in Istanbul on October 31, coming from Barcelona, on its outbound flight to Baku.

The Turkish Transportation Minister, Binali Yildirim, on Friday confirmed that the plane, a DeHavilland made in Canada, and stated that only the four-person crew was on board. "We cannot know if it was a CIA plane or not," he stated.

The Dutch newspaper Volkskrant stated that the DHC-8 or Dash-8 was in the Schipol Amsterdam airport on November 17-18, before flying to Reykjavik (Iceland). On November 30, it was photographed in the airport at Daytona Beach (Florida, USA).

The plane is registered to the Path Corporation, a company based in Rehoboth Beach (Delaware, USA), considered a front company of the CIA. The plane has been seen twice in Afghanistan - in 2002 (after the fall of the Taliban) and in 2005.

The debate coincides with the visit of the CIA director, Porter Goss, who yesterday arrived in Ankara to meet with Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan and senior military and intelligence officials. Lawyers for people imprisoned in Turkey for their relation to Al-Qaeda have denounced the alleged interrogations of their clients at the hands of CIA agents.

In Spain, the general coordinator of the IU, Gaspar Llamazares, yesterday stated that his group has requested the testimony of the Interior Minister, Jose Antonio Alonso, before the Congress to explain whether the Spanish government is satisfied with the explanations given by the American Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, given last week in Brussels to her counterparts in teh EU and NATO about the CIA flights and secret prisons.

Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos testified in front of the Congressional Committee on Foreign Affairs on November 24, in which he stated that there has been "no criminal act" concerning the CIA flights. The information given by the minister was limited to the Canary and Balearic Islands and did not include airports on the mainland, which also meant he did not testify concerning the flight, according to Turkish officials, that the Dash-8 made from Barcelona during the week before his testimony.

Very interesting... English-language article on the Turkish statements here. It looks like members of the opposition are callnig for an investigation now too (by the way, the plane in question was registered to a Pegasus Technologies, Inc. which is a little weird).

Rice as we know was in Brussels last week and gave some kind of assurances to NATO and EU leaders that all was kosher. We don't know what those assurances were however, since they were given behind closed doors. However she did give a press conference after the meeting with a couple of interesting quotes:

QUESTION: (Inaudible) Financial Times. Madame Secretary, a lot of your colleagues have come out with quite supportive statements about your discussion yesterday, but do you feel that you've managed to convince European public opinion about U.S. policy on detention and on rendition? And is this something, a process that you've now closed out or do you actually see this as quite an arduous task to turn around European public opinion in the months ahead?

SECRETARY RICE: I think that it's only natural that sometimes we have these discussions. Questions or concerns arise. We should discuss them. We should discuss them in a serious way among friends. Now, whether or not it will continue to be a matter of discussion, I can't say. I am perfectly happy to continue to have the discussion because I actually think that the great democracies have, obviously, an obligation to remain a standard for the rule of law. Around the world we are talking to people about the importance of the rule of law, and so we have to also live under the rule of law.

We have an obligation also in these difficult times to protect our citizens. And I have said that intelligence and the gathering of intelligence and the use of intelligence is something that I'm quite certain is very often misunderstood because intelligence, by its very nature, is done in a closed environment. By its very nature, it has to be that way. But if we can get our citizens to understand that in this new kind of war, intelligence is the key to preventing attacks, then I think we will have accomplished something very important here. We have to do everything that we can to protect our citizens in a lawful manner. But we have to use every tool at our disposal in a lawful manner to do precisely that.

And I just want to emphasize, this is not like normal criminal activity where you wait until something has happened and then you arrest the suspects and then you try them and then you punish them. Once the crime is committed in this case, 3,000 people are dead in New York and Washington or people are dead on July 7th in the scores in Great Britain or a Palestinian wedding party has been attacked in Jordan. Intelligence is the only way that you prevent an attack and we learned after September 11th and in what I think was a very important inquiry in the United States into what happened on September 11th, that none of know if we could have prevented September 11th, but an awful lot of that focused on the need for better intelligence. And if we can have that discussion, if that has been an outcome of these questions, I think that will have been an important one.

That last line is by far the most important. Terrorism is "not like normal criminal activity where you wait until something has happened"? Are you kidding me? Talk to any law enforcement officer from the FBI down to your local sheriff, and they will tell you law enforcement is not about waiting for "something to happen". Not even close.

Yes of course law enforcement deals with crimes after they have been committed. But there are a whole host of laws on the books which criminalize planning to commit acts, whether robbing a bank, kidnapping your wife or even something as serious as terrorism. Are you kidding me? If you capture a group of people with explosives and plans for an attack, believe me you can prosecute them quite well under the law. You know, in an open court of law, with human rights respected and lawyers and the whole nine yards.

Rice is moving into 1984 territory here, saying "trust the government blindly to protect you". I thought the whole point of a democracy was that the government served at the will of the people, by the people and for the people and that the people had the right to oversee what the government was doing.

Does that mean I'm advocating the intelligence agencies have no secrets? Don't be ridiculous. But if you capture a real live terrorist, who has real, concrete plans to do someone harm, then try him/her in a court of law. It will be ten thousand times more effective in the long run at saving lives than secretly kidnapping and interrogating him.

One more odd quote from the press conference:

QUESTION: Madame Secretary, people around the world obviously are analyzing very closely your statement yesterday regarding the detainee issue. And because the Bush Administration in the past has sometimes tried to make carve-outs or exceptions on this issue, they're wondering is there a loophole. So can you assure us? Are there any loopholes, asterisks, exceptions, carve-outs to what you said?

SECRETARY RICE: Warren, I can only say what I said, which is that U.S. policy is very clear to live up to its international obligations, to live up to U.S. law and its obligations. I think what I said yesterday, which I assume has caused some of the questions, is that we recognize our obligations, our policy recognizes our obligations, whether activities are undertaken inside the United States or outside the United States. And that's the clarification that I can give.

As some readers have accurately noted, it seems Rice keeps mentioning "U.S. law and international obligations" rather than U.S. and international law. It might sound like I'm splitting hairs but splitting hairs is how 500 people got to be four plus years guests down at Guantanamo Bay without being charged with a single crime, even though many of them are 100% completely innocent of anything whatsoever.

In fact, check out Friday's State Department briefing:

QUESTION: This may be at a transition you provided, but a State Department legal advisor in Geneva is saying the United States is yet to grant the International Red Cross access to all its terrorist detainees. That's according to the Red Cross chief. Could you get into that a little bit, please?

MR. ERELI: Well, I think this is a -- should be a fairly well-known aspect of U.S. policy. It's been obviously an issue of discussion between us and the ICRC for some time. I'd say we have a -- we value that dialogue with the ICRC. We are committed to continue to working with them closely. And as -- again, as the Secretary has said and as others have said, our approach in dealing with the issue of prisoners and detainees is to act -- not our approach -- our firm policy is to act consistent with U.S. laws and international obligations. And pursuant to those laws, pursuant to those obligations, we provide access to -- we do not consider under the Geneva Convention, those members -- members of al-Qaida as covered by the Geneva Convention. But at the same time, even though we're not legally required to do so, we do provide access to the vast majority of detainees under our control. There are some, however, that we do not.

See? More of that "international obligations" stuff. And what's up with this access to the "vast majority" of detainees under U.S. control? I think that's a de facto admission by the State Department that some prisoners are being held in locations so secret that not even the Red Cross can visit them. I'm starting to believe that Amnesty Int'l was right when they called it the modern gulag.

God bless whoever this reporter was however:

MR. ERELI: -- what you're asking, frankly, is to get into a legal explanation of what a prisoner of war is and what a prisoner of war isn't. That is, frankly, something that our experts and our officials have spoken to, on the public record, extensively. And I think we've made the case quite convincingly -- it's convincing to me but -- that the detainees we're talking about are outside the scope or do not qualify as prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention.

In the vast majority of cases, however, as I said before, we are treating them consistent with the Geneva Convention, including access.

QUESTION: Well, let's -- sorry, under international law, if they're out of the scope of the Geneva Convention, are they out of the scope of any other international laws?

MR. ERELI: Good legal question. Can't answer that.

So the U.S. has firmly determined that whoever these detainees are do not warrant Geneva Convention prisoner status, and prisoner protection, which includes inspections by a neutral body like the Red Cross. And now State can't say whether or not any other international law applies.

I'd say that the U.S. has determined that no international laws apply to the detainees, which means that only the U.S. itself is determining under what conditions people can be held. Unbelievable.

Back to Britain, where yesterday's Observer had this article:

An Ethiopian student who lived in London claims that he was brutally tortured with the involvement of British and US intelligence agencies.

Binyam Mohammed, 27, says he spent nearly three years in the CIA's network of 'black sites'. In Morocco he claims he underwent the strappado torture of being hung for hours from his wrists, and scalpel cuts to his chest and penis and that a CIA officer was a regular interrogator.

After his capture in Pakistan, Mohammed says British officials warned him that he would be sent to a country where torture was used. Moroccans also asked him detailed questions about his seven years in London, which his lawyers believe came from British sources.

Whether this guy's story is accurate or not will need some time to verify, however it adds more fuel to the fire that these secret jails do or did exist. Definitely read the whole article.

A completely separate guy, Ibn Sheikh al-Libby, has reported similar treatment at the hands of American agents, saying he lied to his interrogators to avoid torture. I've said it a million times before and I'll say it again - torture does not work if what you're trying to do is gather accurate information from someone.

Over the weekend the Guardian had a great article on how planespotters have made a great contribution to this case (and to the Bout case, see my Operation Firedump article):

Paul last saw the Gulfstream V about 18 months ago. He comes down to Glasgow airport's planespotters' club most days. He had not seen the plane before so he marked the serial number down in his book. At the time, he did not think there was anything unusual about the Gulfstream being ushered to a stand away from public view, one that could not be seen from the airport terminal or the club's prime view.

But that flight this week was at the centre of a transatlantic row that saw the prime minister being put on the spot on the floor of the House of Commons and the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, forced on the defensive during a visit to Europe. The Gulfstream V has been identified as having been used by the CIA for "extraordinary renditions" - abducting terror suspects and taking them to secret prisons around the world where they may be tortured.

The recording of flights by spotters like Paul from places as far afield as Bournemouth and Karachi has unintentionally played a significant role in helping journalists and human rights groups expose the scale of the CIA's renditions system. But his impact on such international intrigue largely passes Paul by. "It's not the CIA bit that interests us. You don't even know who owns the plane when you take down the serial number," he said, already distracted as something comes in to land through the grey drizzle. "You keep accurate logs, for your own records."

Over in Poland, the new Prime Minister says his country will begin a "detailed probe" of whether the CIA held any prisoners there, even though the government has already ruled out their existance. Meanwhile the Warsaw Business Journal has an article about Stare Kiejkuty, the area of Poland where the secret jail is alleged to have been located.

And the storm is heating up in Germany:

Germany's new foreign minister on Saturday described as outrageous a suggestion that German authorities may have played a role in the abduction of a German citizen by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

In an interview published the newspaper Bild, Frank Walter Steinmeier said he learnt only afterwards of the abduction of Khaled el-Masri, who was flown to Afghanistan for interrogation as a suspected terrorist.

He was responding to remarks attributed to an unnamed security source by a German newspaper on Friday that German authorities pointed the CIA in Masri's direction.

"The anonymous allegation that German authorities were involved in the abduction of el-Masri is outrageous and irresponsible," Steinmeier said.

Steinmeier was chief of staff to former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder at the time of the abduction in December 2003 and as such had close contacts with German security services.

He is due to be questioned about the affair in parliament on Wednesday.

I'll definitely be watching the papers after his testimony later this week to see what he says.

The Boston Globe has an in-depth look at some of the private corporations who leased their planes to the CIA, possibly for the execution of those "special renditions".

As always, the investigation continues...

Peace