Report says Europeans colluded with the CIA

Allegations of clandestine detention centers and torture surface again.
PARIS (AP) -- Fourteen European nations colluded with U.S. intelligence in a "spider's web" of human rights abuses to help the CIA spirit terror suspects to illegal detention facilities, a European investigator said Wednesday.
Swiss senator Dick Marty's report to Europe's top human rights body was thin on evidence but raises the possibility of a cover-up involving both friends and critics of Washington's war on terror. It says European governments "did not seem particularly eager to establish" the facts.
The 67-page report, addressed to the 46 Council of Europe member states, will likely be used by the rights watchdog to pressure countries to investigate their suspected role in U.S. rendition flights carrying terror suspects.
Stonewalling accusations
Marty's claims triggered a wave of angry denials but also accusations that governments are stonewalling attempts to confront Europe's role in the flights.
"This report exposes the myth that European governments had no knowledge of, or involvement in, rendition and secret detentions," said lawmaker Michael Moore, foreign affairs spokesman for Britain's second opposition party, the Liberal Democrats.
In the strongest allegations so far, Marty said evidence suggests planes linked to the CIA carrying terror suspects stopped in Romania and Poland and likely dropped off detainees there, backing up earlier news reports that identified the two countries as possible sites of clandestine detention centers.
The United States did not respond directly to the report, but officials in Romania and Poland vigorously denied the accusations.
"This is slander, and it's not based on any facts," Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, Poland's prime minister, told reporters in Warsaw.
But Filip Ilkowski, leader of Poland's "Stop War" movement protesting the Iraq war, said the Polish government was trying to thwart European Union investigators.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair also denied the collusion allegations and said Marty's report contained no new evidence.
Denies torture
White House press secretary Tony Snow stressed that the United States does not condone or practice torture, adding, "We will not agree to send anybody to a nation or place that practices torture."
Marty, investigating the flights since November, said the 14 European nations -- along with some other countries including Iraq, Morocco and Afghanistan -- aided the movement of at least 17 detainees who said they had been abducted by U.S. agents and secretly transferred to detention centers around the world.
Some former detainees said they were transferred to the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and others to alleged secret facilities in countries including Egypt and Jordan. Some said they were mistreated or tortured.