European Diary - Power and torture (the hypocrisy continues) - by Mark Mardell
If you are offered a cheap flight on "Stevens Express" or "Premier Executive" my advice is: don't take it. I hear the food is atrocious and in-cabin service particularly poor on "Presidential aviation". These are some of the cover names used by the CIA for flights, which the Council of Europe claims were used to move kidnapped suspected terrorists through European airspace, and European airports, to countries where they could be tortured.
"The flight log reads like the route plan of a particularly desperate budget airline. Banjul to Cairo, to Kabul, to Tashkent, to Frankfurt, to Rabat back to Kabul, sounds like a packed five days. Now the Council of Europe has voted that foreign intelligence services operating in Europe should be much more closely monitored, within a strict system of rules setting out what is legal and what is not."
the EU has weighed in with Commissioner Franco Frattini warning that if member states have persistently colluded to break human rights agreements, they could be punished, which would mean their voting rights being taken away for a while. This would certainly be entertaining - watching other states rush through laws against the interests of one member while they had the chance - but it is so unlikely as to be fantasy. Note EU-Digest: The hypocrisy continues!
No comments:
Post a Comment