WP : Confirmation of CIA Prisons Leaves Europeans Mistrustful

Confirmation of CIA Prisons Leaves Europeans Mistrustful

By John Ward Anderson | Washington Post Foreign Service | September 8, 2006

PARIS, President Bush's transfer of terrorism suspects out of secret CIA prisons to the Guantanamo detention facility would do little to repair transatlantic distrust that has grown in recent years, political analysts in France and other European countries said Thursday.

"How willing a really liberal Democrat is to listen to George Bush -- that's about how willing the French are," said Nicole Bacharan, an expert on French-American relations at the Institute for Political Studies in Paris.

Bush's acknowledgment Wednesday of the CIA prisons' existence -- and his refusal to say where they were -- touched off new demands in Europe for a full accounting of the locations. The Washington Post reported last year that some were in Eastern Europe, but it did not name countries at the request of U.S. officials.

Poland and Romania, called likely locations by European investigators, issued new denials Thursday that such prisons were on their soil.

The CIA's detention of the suspects drew support from Australia, a close U.S. ally, where Foreign Minister Alexander Downer told Parliament that "a great deal has been achieved through these kinds of programs." He said that interrogations had led to the arrest of senior terrorism suspects.

U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, visiting Spain, took an opposing view. "I cannot believe that there can be a trade between the effective fight against terrorism and protection of civil liberties," he said. "If as individuals we are asked to give up our freedom, our liberties, our human rights, as protection against terrorism, do we in the end have protection?"

Asma Jehangir, chairwoman of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, demanded that the United States end the program immediately and apologize for ever bringing it into existence, the Associated Press reported.

"They have to admit that what they did was wrong," said Jehangir, who heads a U.N. panel that recently condemned the detention of suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. "They cannot justify it in the name of terrorism and frightening people."

Some analysts in Europe noted the president's statement that the CIA must use the prisons again in the future. The prisons "have not been liquidated or closed," said Michael Emerson, a senior research fellow at the Center for European Policy Studies in Brussels. If they are going to function again, "then the European body politic is not going to be entirely happy."

François Heisbourg, a military analyst at the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris, said that people in France find it astounding that U.S. troops had to be told specifically not to employ what are widely viewed here as old torture techniques, particularly the practice known as waterboarding, in which prisoners are made to feel as if they're drowning.

"This hearkens back to one of the favorite practices of the Gestapo -- the bathtub torture, which was a synonym for waterboarding," he said. "The notion that the U.S. Army has to say explicitly that you shouldn't do this is unfortunately a way of saying that it may indeed have been standard operating procedure at the time."

Bush is unlikely "to get much credit for coming clean at this late stage in the story," said Heisbourg. "It's simply being received here as confirmation of what people thought already -- that these guys are doing things they shouldn't be doing."

Rene van der Linden, president of the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe, an intergovernmental watchdog agency, said in a statement that "kidnapping people and torturing them in secret -- however tempting the short-term gain may appear to be -- is what criminals do, not democratic governments."

"In the long term, such practices create more terrorists and undermine the values we are fighting for," he said. "Europe will have no part in such a degrading system." His group conducted an investigation of the CIA prison system.

Other European critics found fault with U.S. plans for military tribunals to try prisoners.

These panels are "really not in line with international law," said Liz Lynne, a British member of the European Parliament. Bush wants to try suspects without allowing them full access to the evidence against them, she said.

"The U.S.A. would be very quick to condemn any other country that tried people without letting them see the evidence," Lynne said.

If Bush "announced that he was closing Guantanamo Bay detention camp and bringing the people there to trial according to international law, or releasing them if there is no evidence, then he would repair his credibility," Lynne said. "If he doesn't do that, then I think he's whistling in the wind."

Correspondent Kevin Sullivan in London contributed to this report.