2 Europe and Central Asia Summary of Amnesty International’s Concerns in the Region, January – June 2007 The report, coming a year after Dick Marty’s first report into rendition and secret detention, resulted from an investigation initiated in November 2005 by the Council’s Parliamentary Assembly (PACE). The 2007 report concluded that there was “now enough evidence to state that secret detention facilities run by the CIA did exist in Europe from 2003 to 2005, in particular in Poland and Romania.” The report also concluded that these countries were aware that there were CIA-run secret detention centres on their territories, and that former President Aleksander Kwasniewski of Poland and former President Ion Iliescu of Romania may have directly authorized them. The report strengthened AI’s finding that three former secret detainees, whose cases were extensively documented by AI in 2005 and 2006, had been held in an eastern European black site. Secret detainees were held incommunicado, and in solitary confinement, for years on end, and were subjected to other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. The report found that the detainees were subjected to “interrogation techniques tantamount to torture”. Among those who were allegedly held in Poland were the 14 “high-value detainees” transferred in September 2006 from secret CIA custody, where they had been held for up to fourand-a-half years, to military detention in Guantánamo. A number of these detainees have since said they were tortured in US custody. ‘Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, for example, had been identified in news reports as one of the secret detainees who had been held in Poland. At his Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) hearing in Guantánamo in March 2007, he claimed that: “From the time I was arrested five years ago, they [the CIA] have been torturing me. It happened during interviews. One time they tortured me one way and another time they tortured me in a different way.” The following exchange between the CSRT Amnesty International President and ‘Abd al-Nashiri then took place, according to the unclassified version of the transcript: “President: Please describe the methods that were used. Detainee: [Redacted]. What else do I want to say? [Redacted]. Many things happened. They were doing so many things. What else did they did? [Redacted]. They do so many things. So so many things. What else did they did? [Redacted]. After that another method of torture began [Redacted].”1 The Council of Europe report condemned the role of European governments in facilitating the CIA programme and attempting to obstruct the Council’s investigations. “Many governments have done everything to disguise the true nature and extent of their activities and are persistent in their uncooperative attitude,” the report stated. Many countries, as well as NATO, did not respond to questionnaires distributed by the Council of Europe’s investigators. “Some European governments have obstructed the search for the truth and are continuing to do so by invoking the concept of ‘state secrets’.” The report singled out the US, Poland, Romania, Macedonia, Italy and Germany for particular criticism. The report provided new information – gained from confidential interviews with more than 30 current and former members of intelligence services in the US and Europe – about how the rendition programme operated. It included details from Eurocontrol’s aviation records, showing how CIA-operated aircraft, identifying themselves as private flights, had crisscrossed European airspace, making a number of unrecorded landings at remote airstrips in Poland and Romania. A new analysis of computer “data strings” from 1 Transcript available at http://www.defenselink.mil/news/transcript_IS N10015.pdf. AI Index: EUR 01/010/2007