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The CIA in Europe

Secrets Flights Investigation Raises the Veil

Europe wants answers, and an ongoing investigation into secret CIA flights provided some on Wednesday. Fully 1,000 clandestine flights criss-crossed the continent a new report says. In response, EU parliamentarians are headed to Macedonia.

The uproar took Europe by storm last autumn. Suddenly, everyone wanted to know just how the CIA was using European airstrips and airspace. The suspicion was that Europe had become an unwitting accomplice to the US practice of "extraordinary rendition" -- ferrying terror suspects to third countries for torture.

Now, the first fruits of a comprehensive European Union investigation into the flights have been borne. On Thursday, members of the European Parliament flew to Macedonia to learn more about a German citizen's claim that he was abducted there by the CIA in early 2004 -- one day after EU lawmaker Claudio Fava presented an interim report on the EU investigation. More than 1,000 CIA flights, he said, have criss-crossed Europe since 2001.

The Fava report -- based on data from Eurocontrol, the EU's air safety agency, and more than 50 hours of testimony by EU officials and people who claimed to be victims of American kidnapping and torture -- accused not just the CIA of coordinating the flights, but also EU member governments of cooperating. "After 9/11," he said Wednesday, "within the framework of the fight against terrorism, the violation of human and fundamental rights was not isolated or an excessive measure confined to a short period of time, but rather a widespread regular practice in which the majority of European countries were involved."

Ever since a Washington Post report last November about secret CIA prisons -- so-called "black sites" where terrorist suspects were questioned and allegedly tortured -- located in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, the EU has mounted a series of investigations. Fava's interim report this week is the most wide-reaching so far. "This committee deplores the fact that, as established during the committee's investigation, the CIA has used aircraft registered under fictitious company names or with private companies to secretly transfer terror suspects to other countries including Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Afghanistan," the paper says.

The Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote Thursday that 437 of the illegal flights had moved through or across Germany. The Fava report specifically accused the German military of helping the CIA transfer six Algerians from Bosnia-Herzegovina to Guantanamo Bay via the US airbase in Ramstein.

So far German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier has remained silent about the report. Steinmeier was chief of staff for ex-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and might have known about the CIA project. The Fava report has refreshed criticism from conservative members of the German parliament who want to know what Schröder's cabinet knew. "If there is really a secret dossier on this case," a CDU parliamentarian told the German news service dpa, referring to the six Algerians, "the Foreign Ministry has to make it available to us."

Another EU delegation wants to fly to Washington in early May to ask US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and CIA chief Porter Goss about the flights.

The Thursday EU mission to Macedonia is to look into the CIA abduction of Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent. El-Masri has sued the CIA for kidnapping him and says US agents arrested him on the Macedonian border while he was on vacation, detained him at a Skopje hotel for several weeks and then flew him to an Afghanistan jail -- where, he says, he was tortured. The CIA denies torturing el-Masri but admits it rounded up the wrong man.

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