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Europe avoids pressing US on "secret prisons"
(Reuters)
Updated: 2005-11-18 09:14
European governments have avoided pressing Washington to address allegations
it runs secret prisons in the region despite growing public concern over U.S.
detainee policies, diplomats said on Thursday.
In the face of persistent media questions, the Bush administration has
refused to confirm or deny newspaper reports and rights groups' accusations this
month it has kept Islamic militants incommunicado in Europe.
European media have increasingly delved in recent weeks into CIA flights
suspected of transferring "ghost detainees" around the continent and some
countries have begun looking into the movements.
But, apart from hand-wringing by some officials, governments have largely
remained quiet on the allegations of secret prisons and the European Union has
refused to heed rights groups' calls for investigations.
"It's not jeopardizing our relationships or, I think, negatively impacting
the broad range of our cooperation," State Department spokesman Adam Ereli told
reporters.
When they have raised the allegations with U.S. diplomats, governments have
done so only as part of wide-ranging discussions and avoided probing too deeply,
U.S. and European diplomats said.
"They don't want to find the answers to these questions," said Tom
Malinowski, advocacy director for Human Rights Watch.
"It would mean digging into relations between intelligence agencies that few
European governments want to reveal. And it could mean awkward disputes with
whichever countries hosted these prisons -- and with the United States."
The Washington Post said U.S. secret prisons were in Eastern Europe but
decided against identifying the countries at the CIA's request. Malinowski's New
York-based group has said flight records point to Poland and Romania as likely
hosts.
Rights groups say incommunicado detention is illegal and often leads to
torture.
MORAL LEADERSHIP?
The muted official response is in contrast to the public outrage in many
European nations that began with opposition to the war in Iraq and has been
stoked by abuse scandals there and at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Citing an example of one discussion, Ereli said Spanish officials mentioned
media reports about CIA flights on their territory in only a "general and brief"
way when Daniel Fried, the top U.S. diplomat for Europe, visited this week.
On his European tour, Fried acknowledged the public debate over U.S. detainee
policies, but told reporters, "I have not heard a great deal from my European
colleagues."
A U.S. official familiar with some of the bilateral conversations complained
that in countries such as Italy and Spain, some complaints were driven by local
politics.
"There's some grandstanding going on and what they say in public is quite
different to what we hear in private," said the official, who asked not to be
identified because his remarks were critical of foreign authorities.
European governments generally look for the United States to show moral
leadership and have expressed discomfort with U.S. detainee policies that
undermine the West's drive for greater freedoms worldwide.
But European diplomats in Washington said their governments could not easily
raise the secret prisons allegations because they had no substance to base any
concerns on and risked irking the Bush administration.
One diplomat, who asked not to be identified because the remarks concerned
private meetings, said: "You have to bring it up because of the noise back home.
But you do so in as low-key way as possible."
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