Over 1,000 Secret CIA Rendition Flights

A new European report citing flight records from the air safety agency, Eurocontrol, says that over 1,000 CIA flights in connection with the secret abduction and rendition of prisoners have taken place over European territory since 2001.

The investigation, originally launched to look into allegations of secret CIA prisons in Europe, ran into a stonewall from the U.S. and Eastern European nations where those prisons were meant to be. Investigators believed in any case that the prisons were closed even before they wqere discovered and any traces covered.

However, the investigation also began looking into CIA rendition flights and has uncovered a wealth of evidence of those flights.

Data showed CIA planes made numerous undeclared stopovers on European territory, violating an international air treaty requiring airlines to declare the routes and stopovers for planes on police missions, the Italian politician Giovanni Claudio Fava, who drafted the report, said.

That treaty is ratified by the U.S. and is therefore part of U.S. law - which means the CIA, on Bush administration orders, broke the law.

Mr Fava said that, according to his investigations, the groups of agents on the flights were often the same, and it was unlikely that at least some EU governments - including those of Italy and Bosnia - would not have any information about the CIA operations investigated by the EU assembly.

The US has not made any public comments on allegations of secret renditions, and the official line by EU governments and senior EU officials is that there has been no irrefutable proof of such renditions.

European governments such as those of Blair and Berlusconni have also broken that law by their complicity and conspiracy to cover up these rendition flights. Furthermore, they have broken European human rights laws.

Clandestine detention centres, secret flights to or from Europe to countries in which suspects could face torture, or extraordinary renditions would all breach the continent's human rights treaties.

Even if fighting international terrorists, we depart from the rule of law only to become just as bad as those who we fight. It is time for those national leaders and ministers who have been complicit in these illegalities to be held to account, either by their own national judicial systems or - if those will not stand up and take action - the international community via the UN, International Court and Court of Human Rights.