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Europe Doesn’t Let CIA Prisons and Rendition Issue Go
American Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice spent last week trying to convince Europeans that the CIA hasn’t been naughty in sending people it doesn’t like to some European countries for torture and other abuse. A Council of Europe report yesterday suggests that she didn’t quite get everything she hoped to get from Europe, if not support, tacit acceptance. Instead, it looks like the Europeans are going to continue to lift lids of cans of worms.
The report, by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe’s Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights, says
Legal proceedings in progress in certain countries seemed to indicate that individuals had been abducted and transferred to other countries without respect for any legal standards. It had to be noted that the allegations had never been formally denied by the United States. The rapporteur [Dick Marty the Committee Chairman] takes note of the situation and deplores the fact that no information or explanations had been provided on this point by Ms. Rice during her visit to Europe.
Since it is impossible to prove a negative, the US will never satisfy some that the extraordinary renditions and torture didn’t happen in Poland and Romania. However, if the European press and peoples push their governments enough, some positive proof may arise, with serious consequences. Mr. Marty also wrote, “If the allegations proved correct the member states would stand accused of having seriously breached their human rights obligations to the Council of Europe.” If so, a European eruption against the collaborating governments and the Bush administration (and worse against America – which is not the same thing despite the president’s beliefs to the contrary) lies ahead that will make the Iraq War dispute seem like a romantic interlude.
What is particularly troubling is this bit of the report, “While it was still too early to assert that there had been any involvement or complicity of member states in illegal actions, the seriousness of the allegations and the consistency of the information gathered to date justified the continuation of an in-depth inquiry.” This is the “where there’s smoke there’s fire” part of the report. While the Washington Post’s initial reporting on this might be dismissed as excessive exuberance of a journalistic nature, this says that the Post wrote more fact that fiction.
The Bush administration takes a Malcolm X approach here, “by any means necessary,” and if Europe isn’t with America, it must be against America. For Europeans, who still have the remains of the Nazi and Soviet Empires in their own backyards, torture is not about protecting their society so much as what that society stands for. A nation that practices torture to defend itself, many of them believe, is not a nation worth defending. It is hard to argue that they are wrong. What the Bush administration must now deal with is parliamentary inquiries across Europe, any one of which could lose it allies in the war on terror. Senator Graham was right when he said, ““If you’re going to be the good guys, you have to act like the good guys.”
© Copyright 2005 by The Kensington Review, J. Myhre, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.
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