Reuters: Rice defends detainee tactics before trip to Europe

in a lengthy statement before leaving on a trip to Europe, Rice did not directly address the allegation the CIA has run secret prisons in Eastern Europe, an accusation that has been a lightning rod for outrage across the continent.

"It is up to those governments and their citizens to decide if they wish to work with us to prevent terrorist attacks against their own country or other countries and decide how much sensitive information they can make public. They have a sovereign right to make that choice," Rice said in a statement she read out before leaving for Berlin, her first stop.

As Migeru pointed out , this sounds suspiciously like a protection racket: "work with us and you'll be protected, don't work with us and who knows what will happen."

Rice, speaking at Andrews Air Force Base, said the United States had carried out renditions for decades in cooperation with allies.
"Renditions take terrorists out of action, and save lives," Rice said, referring to the covert transfer of detainees to foreign states for interrogation. "Such renditions are permissible under international law," she added.

Brazen obfuscation: she mentions the cases of Ramzi Youssef, the mastermind of the World Trade Centre bombing in 1993, and of Carlos Ramirez, the "Jackal," brought from Sudan to France in 1994 , where he was tried and jailed. In both cases, these terrorists (pretty damn nasty ones) were brought back to the countries where they committed their crimes under valid international procedures (Interpol mandates or sentences in abstentia), to be tried and sentenced following due process of law. We are tlaking here about transporting people nobody knows anyrthing about to third countries, where they are never put on trial or anything, but interrogated and sometimes killed.

Rice said the United States respected the sovereignty of allies, abided by the law and did not allow torture. In addition, she said allies' intelligence agencies have worked with the United States to extract information from detainees.

A common theme we'll see again: what we're doing is legal, and you were doing it with us anyway.

Reuters: Rice says US rectifies mistakes in terror war

BERLIN (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Tuesday that Washington would work to rectify any mistakes it made in its war on terror, but declined to comment on the alleged CIA abduction of a German man.
"When and if mistakes are made, we work very hard and as quickly as possible to rectify them," Rice told a news conference in Berlin.
She noted the case of German Khaled el-Masri, allegedly abducted by the CIA to Afghanistan, was subject to litigation in the United States and declined to comment on it.

We don't torture, but when we're caught, we stop (with that particular prisoner)

Rice reiterated her defense of U.S. methods in the war on terror against 21st century militants. "If you don't get to them before they commit their crimes, they will commit mass murder," she said. "We have an obligation to defend our people and we will use every lawful means to do so."

This is one of the most amazing sentences, when you think about it: we have to "get" these people even if they are innocent, because once they are guilty, it's too late. So how do you identify people that would have been guilty if you had not stopped them???

EXCLUSIVE: Sources Tell ABC News Top Al Qaeda Figures Held in Secret CIA Prisons

Without mentioning any country by name, Rice acknowledged special handling for certain terrorists. "The captured terrorists of the 21st century do not fit easily into traditional systems of criminal or military justice, which were designed for different needs. We have had to adapt," Rice said.

WHAT THE HELL ?? How can it even be legal if it  does not fit in either of the systems of criminal or military justice? How can we claim to be defending our values if we work out of the systems that uphold them?

Condi Rice is an enemy of the Constitution - she said it in her own words, working outside the law, capturing innocents before they are guilty, racketeering the Europeans.

One last tidbit before moving on to the Europeans, from that same ABC article:

Current and former CIA officers speaking to ABC News on the condition of confidentiality say the United States scrambled to get all the suspects off European soil before Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived there today. The officers say 11 top al Qaeda suspects have now been moved to a new CIA facility in the North African desert.

The CIA declines to comment, but current and former intelligence officials tell ABC News that 11 top al Qaeda figures were all held at one point on a former Soviet air base in one Eastern European country. Several of them were later moved to a second Eastern European country.

All but one of these 11 high-value al Qaeda prisoners were subjected to the harshest interrogation techniques in the CIA's secret arsenal, the so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" authorized for use by about 14 CIA officers and first reported by ABC News on Nov. 18.

• the prisoners were in Romania and Poland - until quite recently;
  
• they were tortured;
  
• that fact was sufficiently embarrassing to eliminate that reality on the ground  quickly when the news became public;
  
• there may be an element of spin in that the US were "only" torturing supposedly "high value al Qaeda prisoners", i.e; "real" terrorists.

Financial Times; Europeans at variance in viewpoint on prisoners

European governments have generally tried to play the controversy down since the Washington Post alleged last month that the Central Intelligence Agency had maintained secret prisons in eastern Europe.

(...)

"I am not disposed to putting a government which is a friend and ally in the pillory on the basis of suppositions and rumours," said José Bono, Spain's defence minister, after the allegations emerged.

That's basically the line: playing it down, reminding everybody that the USA are an ally (yep, it probably needs reminding, these days) and that we should trust their word until proof is provide - and downplaying proof when it IS provided

The Hindu: Anger and red faces in Europe over CIA flights

While the European Union and the European Council have already announced separate investigations, there is growing pressure on individual governments also to act. In Britain, the Government has been accused of "complicity" and MPs have set up a cross-party group to press for "full disclosure."

"If, in fact, people are being moved from a jurisdiction where torture is illegal to a jurisdiction where torture is permissible, that seems to me to be wholly contrary to international law. If we are allowing facilities for aircraft carrying out those actions, then we are at the very least facilitating it, we may even be complicit in it," Menzies Campbell, the deputy leader of the Liberal Democratic Party, and a member of the group said.

(...)  critics argue that it is inconceivable that such a large number of non-commercial flights of another country could have passed through British airports without the Government's knowledge. Officials at some level -- most probably the intelligence services -- must have known what was going on, and the Government cannot absolve itself of complete responsibility just because the Ministers may not have been told about it. Indeed, in the past British civil servants are known to have deliberately withheld potentially embarrassing information from Ministers so that they are not seen to lie to Parliament when they say that the Government was not aware of it. No wonder, the House of Commons committee on foreign affairs has called the Government's claim that it had no evidence of what the CIA had been up to as one of "obfuscation."

Experts point out that it is not enough for the Government to condemn torture or claim that there was no evidence to suggest its complicity. The crucial question is: did it make any attempt to investigate the allegations when they were first made as it is obliged to do as a signatory to the Convention against Torture?

European governments seem willing to go through the motions of asking US diplomats whether they torture or render, but do not seem to be willing to go further to investigate the claims. In Germany, Poland and Romania, we have seen embarrassed non-denial denials from officials "nothing is happening right now", "to my knowledge, that base was not used by the Americans", "they did not tell us what was in the planes", etc... , but little in the way of actual investigations.

from the FT article above

But judicial investigations have opened in Germany, Spain and Italy. The most high-profile case is that of Khaled el-Masri, a German who claims to have been held illegally for five months by the CIA and to have been tortured in a prison in Afghanistan. Germany's neo-Communist Left party has sought to shed light on the previous government's knowledge about the CIA's "ghost flights".

In Italy, where Milan prosecutors have requested the extradition of 22 alleged CIA agents for involvement in the kidnapping of a radical Egyptian-born imam in February 2003, the government's position is also complicated by disenchantment with the country's role in Iraq.

We can still hope that our judicial system will get anywhere, and that the parliamentary opposition will keep up the pressure, but so far, our governments are sticking with the USA.

Condoleeza Rice has basically said that the USA torture, that it is necessary in the self-created "war on terrorism", and that Europeans can either be with the USA or with the terrorists. And our governments are falling for that trap.

Wake up! We are about to see the whole concept of the "West", our civilisation based on the rule of law and human rights being thrown down the drain. If we allow our governments to arrest people anywhere in the world and torture them without due process, without any accounting, we will have forefeited all our rights.

And yes, it can happen to all of us. Say you were unlucky to sit down next to someone with a suspicious name in a plane. To be seated in a café at the same time as a supposed suspect. To have been in the same school as a suspect, or of a family member of his/hers. To have been in a bad mood at an airport checkpoint and made a stupid joke.

If we don't give rights to the worst terrorists, we don't give any rights to ourselves. That's what makes us civilised. If we accept that arresting and torturing a number of innocent people to improve the chance to catch the genuinely guilty, we have sold our soul.

We have more than enough proof. We need to take a stand.

The Bush administration has long sold its soul, if it ever had one. Europeans now have to make the decision to go along, or fight them. There will be no middle road. "The infliction of pain is eroticised." by Chris Kulczycki
ABC: European secret prisons located by smintheus
CIA rendition flights: Rumsfeld caught lying by LodinLepp
European Breakfast
Renditions open thread