NYT : Europeans’ Views Mixed on News of C.I.A. Camps

Europeans’ Views Mixed on News of C.I.A. Camps

By BRIAN KNOWLTON | September 8, 2006

WASHINGTON, Sept. 7 — Reaction in Europe and Afghanistan to the United States’ transfer of 14 top terror suspects from secret C.I.A. camps to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for trial has been sharply mixed, welcomed by some but termed a half-measure by others.

Disclosure of the camps’ existence last year generated widespread outrage abroad.

Several European lawmakers and human-rights groups said Thursday that while President Bush’s acknowledgment of the camps’ existence on Wednesday was helpful, it underscored concerns about clandestine practices by the United States and the complicity of some of their own governments.

Dick Marty, who led a Council of Europe investigation of the camps and of the secret transport of suspects from one foreign country to another for questioning, said President Bush had provided “just one piece of the truth.”

Manfred Nowak, the United Nations special investigator on torture, called the transfer of the 14 detainees “an improvement,” but added, “of course, there are many others.”

José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the prime minister of Spain and one of the few world leaders to offer an opinion on Thursday, bluntly criticized the practices of the Central Intelligence Agency, The Associated Press reported. The fight by democracies against terrorism, he said in Madrid, “is not compatible with the existence of secret prisons.”

Yet, European Union spokesmen insisted that there was still no proof of reports that there were secret camps on European soil, and officials in countries suspected of being hosts of such camps issued new denials. The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, said in Copenhagen that “all the information that I have is that no country in the E.U., or candidate country, as far as I know, has had secret prisons.”

In a statement from Geneva, the International Committee of the Red Cross welcomed “the transfer of these detainees from secret places of detention to an official place of detention,” and said that it planned a visit to Guantánamo soon. But it questioned whether other detainees might still be held clandestinely, condemning the practice.

Mr. Bush said Wednesday that all the C.I.A. camps were now empty, but he reserved the right to reopen them and did not disclose their locations.

Some members of a European Parliament investigating committee were harshly critical of his comments. “Bush exposes not only his own previous lies,” said Sarah Ludford, a British member. “He also exposes to ridicule those arrogant government leaders in Europe who dismissed as unfounded our fears about extraordinary rendition,” as the secret prisoner transfers are known, Reuters reported.

In Afghanistan, Ahmad Nader Nadery, spokesman for the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, welcomed the United States moves.

“We have been looking for an improvement in the treatment of detainees in Guantánamo and Bagram,” the Afghan city where an American military prison is located, The Associated Press quoted him as saying. “It will build more confidence in the war on terror.”

The president’s announcement had left European allies in an awkward position. They had denied knowledge of the camps, and in some cases of the C.I.A. flights carrying suspects to or from the camps through their airports or airspace. Yet, Mr. Bush said that information derived from the program had been shared with other countries.

The German opposition party criticized the government in Berlin for not pushing harder to unravel Germany’s role in the affair. “The Merkel government, at no time, showed a real will to seek clarification,” the deputy parliamentary leader of the Free Democratic Party, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, said in Berlin.

The government, she said, still owed an answer to the question: “What did the federal government know when about these secret prisons?”

Mark Lander contributed reporting from Berlin.