Watchdog says secret CIA jails hosted by Poland and Romania

By Jon Boyle and Kerstin Gehmlich

PARIS (Reuters) - A European investigator says he has proof Poland and Romania hosted secret CIA prisons under a post-9/11 pact to hunt down “high value” terrorist suspects wanted by the United States.

In a report to be officially released on Friday, Swiss senator Dick Marty also accuses Germany and Italy of using “state secrecy” to obstruct investigations into the global network of secret transfers and detentions, known as renditions.

“There is now enough evidence to state that secret detention facilities run by the CIA did exist in Europe from 2003-2005, in particular in Poland and Romania,” Marty’s report says. The facilities were “run directly and exclusively by the CIA”.

In a separate newspaper interview he said the United States was waging a war against terrorism without rules and handing suspects to “rogue states like Syria” beyond the rule of law where they faced torture.

Marty, who has led a 19-month Council of Europe investigation into secret CIA jails, is due to hold a news conference in Paris at 1200 GMT.

Poland and Romania have previously denied the existence of any secret prisons operated on their territory.

The report said U.S. intelligence contacts and other sources confirmed both states “did host secret detention centres under a special CIA programme established by the American administration in the aftermath of 11 September 2001 to ‘kill, capture and detain’ terrorist suspects deemed of ‘high value’”.

U.S. President George W. Bush confirmed last September the CIA had run secret detention centres abroad where terrorism suspects had been interrogated, but he named no country.

CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said he had not yet seen the report, but said: “Europe has been the source of grossly inaccurate allegations about the CIA and counter-terrorism. And people should remember that Europeans have benefited from the agency’s bold, lawful work to disrupt terrorist plots.”

Spain’s Socialist government has acknowledged it might have been a stopover for secret CIA flights but said there was no evidence international law had been breached on its soil.

Marty’s report said interrogation techniques used on suspects were “tantamount to torture” and condemned European governments for passively accepting the U.S. operation.

In a preliminary report last year Marty said 20 mostly European countries colluded in a “global spider’s web” of secret CIA jails and flight transfers of terrorist suspects stretching from Asia to Guantanamo Bay.

Marty, who fought organised crime in his homeland as a prosecutor, told Friday’s Le Figaro that Washington wanted to impose on the world a war on terrorism without rules.

The U.S. authorities had exported the anti-terrorism fight beyond its borders “in order to avoid the legal constraints imposed by American law,” he said.

(Additional reporting by Dave Graham in Berlin)

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