08 June 2006
European Report on Renditions Not Supported by Facts, Says U.S.
State Department spokesman, legal adviser say report is based on inaccuracies
Washington -- U.S. officials say that a Council of Europe report claiming that several European countries colluded with the United States in a network of international transfers and secret detentions is based on rumors and speculation and is not supported with facts.
The June 7 Council of Europe report is filled with “rumor, innuendo and inaccuracy,” the State Department’s senior legal adviser, John Bellinger, said during a June 7 interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation's Jonathan Beale.
“The tone of the report, citing a ‘spider’s web’ of renditions, reads more like a supermarket journal than a serious report on human rights,” Bellinger said.
The report claims that 14 European countries -- Britain, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Bosnia, Macedonia, Turkey, Spain, Cyprus, Ireland, Greece, Portugal, Romania and Poland -- have provided airbases and overflight rights to U.S. CIA planes that may have carried terrorism suspects. It also suggested that planes linked to the CIA “likely” dropped off detainees in Romania and Poland.
However, the report concedes that “hard evidence, at least according to the strict meaning of the word, is still not forthcoming.”
“This would appear to be a rehash of the previous efforts by this group. We don't see any new solid facts in it. There seems to be a lot of allegations but no real facts behind it,” said State Department spokesman Sean McCormack during a regular briefing June 7.
The report says that its authors “don't have all the facts here, but they have some suspicions, they have some impressions that have been left with them,” McCormack said. “What suspicions or impressions? If they have some facts, certainly we would be happy to try to address those things.”
He also pointed out that renditions -- intercountry transfers -- “are an internationally recognized legal practice.”
“There seems to be this sort of tone in the report and in some discussions that there is something inherently bad or illegal about intelligence activities. It couldn’t be further from the truth,” he said.
“Intelligence cooperation between the United States and Europe and between the United States and other countries around the world saves lives in the War on Terror," McCormack said.
Bellinger told the BBC that the practice of rendition has been used much less frequently over the past two years and added that the “vast majority of these flights are not engaged in detention and rendition activities.” (See related article.)
“Rendition is an internationally recognized legal practice,” he said, adding that without it, notorious terrorists such as the 1970s hijacking mastermind Carlos the Jackal would not have been apprehended.
One reason U.S. officials do not talk about intelligence activities is because doing so publicly might endanger those individuals engaged in it and cost innocent lives around the world, McCormack said.
Noting that the Council of Europe report talks about “thousands of CIA flights," he said there are many U.S. government flights every day that involve a variety of different purposes such as transporting U.S. government employees around the world. “There is nothing inherently sinister about any of these activities," he said.
Poland’s prime minister, Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, has called the accusations in the report “slanderous” and “not based on facts," and the Romanian government has called the report’s conclusions "pure speculation."
The Council of Europe, which has no links to the European Union, oversees the European Convention on Human Rights.
For additional information, see Detainee Issues.
The State Department June 7 briefing transcript is available on the State Department Web site.
(Distributed by the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
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