[NYTr] Hypocrite Spanish "Socialists" Continued to Collude with US Torture Flights to Gulag

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

excerpt from the article:

"At the time flights were landing in Spain and crossing Spanish
airspace, socialist leaders there were expressing 'indignation' over
conditions in Guantanamo. Now the socialists are in government after
winning an election in March 2004 just after the Madrid train bombings
and they are being asked to defend Spain's continued collaboration with
American operations. Under international law, government and military
planes can cross another country's territory only with diplomatic
permission.

"In a statement to the European parliament on the visits of CIA planes
to Spain, the foreign minister Miguel Angel Moratinos has testified:
'Our territory may have been used not to commit crimes on it, but as a
stopover on the way to committing crime in another country.'

"Spain, it has now emerged, had a specific agreement with the US to
allow flights and visits to Spanish airbases for American planes."



The Times of London - Nov 25, 2007
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article2936782.ece

Flight logs reveal secret rendition

By Stephen Grey

THE secret flight plans of American military planes have revealed for
the first time how European countries helped send prisoners, including
British citizens, to the Guantanamo Bay prison camp.

Despite widespread criticism of alleged human rights abuses and torture
at the US base in Cuba, a Sunday Times investigation has shown that at
least five European countries gave the United States permission to fly
nearly 700 terrorist suspects across their territory.

Three years ago, The Sunday Times published flight logs of CIA civilian
jets in Europe, setting off a controversy over the whether countries
across the continent have been secretly involved in America's rendition
of terrorist suspects to countries that carry out torture.

The row is now set to be reignited. Inquiries by Ana Gomes, a
Portuguese member of the European parliament, have uncovered not only
more CIA flight logs but also more sensitive military flight plans,
which until now have remained a closely guarded secret.

he logs show how most prisoners changed planes at a Turkish military
airbase and flew across Greek, Italian and Portuguese airspace. Others
reached Cuba after touching down in Spain, whose governing socialist
party once expressed indignation at conditions in Guantanamo.

The flight logs show that three Britons — Shafiq Rasul, Jamal Udeen and
Asif Iqbal — were flown across Europe to Cuba on January 14, 2002.
Moazzam Begg, another Briton, was taken by the same route to Guantanamo
on February 2, 2003; and Binyam Mohamed, a British resident whose
release the British government is now trying to negotiate, arrived in
Cuba after crossing Europe in a special flight in September 2004.

According to the flight plans, the first 23 prisoners to arrive at
Guantanamo — including another British citizen, Feroz Abbasi, then 21,
and an Australian, David Hicks — had arrived at the American naval base
in Cuba after flying from the Moron airbase in Spain.

Abbasi has claimed in a statement that prisoners were abused within
hours of arriving. "We were made to sit on our heels, one foot over the
other, supported by one foot's toes alone, for hours. Some of us were
old, weak, fatigued, and injured — they were the ones to drop first in
the searing Caribbean heat."

Described by the Pentagon as the "worst of the worst" from Al-Qaeda and
the Taliban, the images of prisoners such as Abbasi dressed in orange
jumpsuits, their heads shaved and shackled by their wrists and ankles,
shocked the world. Within a day, Donald Rumsfeld, then US defence
secretary, announced that the Geneva conventions would not apply to
what were now called "enemy combatants".

Last week, Europe's leading watchdog on human rights alleged that
European countries had breached the international convention against
torture by giving the US secret permission to use its airspace.

Thomas Hammarberg, the Council of Europe's commissioner for human
rights, said: "What happened at Guantanamo was torture and it is
illegal to provide facilities or anything to make this torture
possible. Under the law, European governments should have intervened
and should not have given permission to let these flights happen."

Gomes added: "It's clear to me that Guantanamo could not have been
created without the involvement of European countries."

Methods used at Guantanamo Bay, condemned by Britain's Court of Appeal
as a legal "black hole" and as a "monstrous failure of justice" by one
law lord, have included the prolonged use of isolation, sleep
deprivation, and use of stress positions. "These are methods that have
been declared as unlawful by the European Court of Human Rights,"
Hammarberg said.

The military flight plans show that all key flights arriving in
Guantanamo had come across European airspace either through Spain or
the Incirlik airbase in southeastern Turkey. The Sunday Times compared
the military flight plans against a database compiled by Reprieve, the
British-based charity that represents Guantanamo prisoners, of when
prisoners first weighed in at the camp.

The investigation, cross-checked against other Pentagon documents,
shows for the first time which prisoner arrived on which flight at
Guantanamo, and by what route. At least 170 other prisoners flew over
Spanish territory, more than 700 crossed Portuguese space, and more
than 680 were transshipped at Incirlik. Most flights also crossed Greek
and Italian airspace, according to a source in European air traffic
control.

On February 2 2003, for example, a US Air Force C-17 Globemaster plane
took off from Incirlik with 27 prisoners on board for Cuba. The same
day, prisoner number 558 weighed in at 136lb (62kg) at the camp. He can
be named as Moazzam Begg, now 39, from Birmingham, who was released in
January 2005, and has never been charged with a crime.

Interviewed by phone last week, Begg recalled: "Inside the plane there
was a chain around our waist, and it connected to cuffs around my
wrists, which were tied in the back, and to my ankles. We were seated
but it was so painful not being able to speak, to hear, to breathe
properly, to look, to turn left or right, to move your hands, stretch
your legs, or anything." At the time flights were landing in Spain and
crossing Spanish airspace, socialist leaders there were expressing
"indignation" over conditions in Guantanamo. Now the socialists are in
government after winning an election in March 2004 just after the
Madrid train bombings and they are being asked to defend Spain's
continued collaboration with American operations. Under international
law, government and military planes can cross another country's
territory only with diplomatic permission.

In a statement to the European parliament on the visits of CIA planes
to Spain, the foreign minister Miguel Angel Moratinos has testified:
"Our territory may have been used not to commit crimes on it, but as a
stopover on the way to committing crime in another country."

Spain, it has now emerged, had a specific agreement with the US to
allow flights and visits to Spanish airbases for American planes.

In Portugal, the foreign minister Luis Amado has said flights across
his country's airspace took place "under the aegis of the UN and Nato
and that Portugal naturally follows the principle of good faith in the
relations with its allies". Nato's role in Guantanamo stems from a
secret agreement made in Brussels on October 4 2001 by all Nato
members, including Britain. Although never made public, Lord Robertson,
the former British defence secretary who was later Nato's
secretary-general, explained that day that Nato had agreed to provide
"blanket overflight clearances for the United States and other allies'
aircraft for military flights related to operations against terrorism".

Today, Nato is more coy about its role in helping send prisoners to
Guantanamo.

In a letter to Gomes, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the current
secretary-general, said no Nato planes had "flown to or from Guantanamo
Bay" and that Nato "as an organisation has no involvement or
co-ordinating role in providing clearance or overflight rights for
other flights". Turkey, meanwhile, has declared that its agencies had
"reached no findings regarding any unacknowledged deprivation of
liberty conducted by foreign agencies within the territory of the
republic of Turkey or any transport by aircraft or otherwise of the
persons deprived of their liberty".

In London, Clive Stafford Smith, legal director of Reprieve, said, with
America threatening that Guantanamo prisoners faced the death penalty,
European governments had made "pious statements" that they would never
send prisoners to the US without obtaining assurances they would not be
executed.

Stafford Smith added: "Some European governments, it's now clear,
systematically assisted in clandestine flights and illegal prisoner
transfers to Guantanamo Bay. We need a full investigation and Europeans
need to face their responsibility for these crimes."

See flight logs and complete list of prisoners at
http://www.ghostplane.net

[Additional reporting: Natalia Viana ]