If you missed seeing Countdown last night, there’s a video of the first two segments here. If you’ve already seen the presser, featuring David Gregory’s beautiful moment, you can fast forward the tape to about 5:57 for remarks by Howard Fineman. I transcribed just a snip:

Fineman: It’s not just John McCain, a known maverick; it’s not just Lindsey Graham, Senator Graham, a known maverick; it’s not even Colin Powell, who is very popular in the country but sort of outside the system right now. The key guy here is Senator John Warner, the Republican of Virginia, as well as Colin Powell. The thing about Warner is he is the establishment man; he is the very symbol of the Pentagon establishment, the defense establishment, in a way the intelligence establishment over there in northern Virginia, and if HE is taking the side of the rebels on this, the Republican rebels, it’s a very serious division in the party, and one the Democrats ought to sit back and watch.

But the best part begins at 9:43, when Olbermann gets into the legal and ethical implications of President Bush’s proposed “let’s torture!” law. Olbermann interviewed Jonathan Turley, Constitutional Law professor at George Washington University. Boldface is added:

Olbermann: … is he [Bush] covering his own backside with this?

Turley: Quite frankly, I think that there is evidence to say he is. You know, the thing that is ticking here in terms of a clock, is the fact that these fourteen guys that were recently transferred, just arrived not that long ago in Gitmo, in Cuba. They are going to be or have been interviewed by the Red Cross. Most people believe that they will reveal that they were subject to waterboarding, where you are held under water until you think that you are going to drown. That is undeniably torture under the international standards. If that occurs in the coming days, the United States and specifically the President will be accused of committing a very serious violation of international law. Torture is one of the top three or four things that the international law is designed to prevent. And so the reason there is this move to try to get legislation as fast as possible is because I think I think this administration senses that there is a lot of trouble coming down this mountain.

Then Olbermann asked how the proposed law would protect Bush legally.

Turley: Well, he would retroactively define what he did not to be a violation. That’s pretty good if you are going to commit a violation of law, to go and get the legislature to retroactively say what you did was not a violation. But remember, the President stands accused of thirty felonies in the NSA controversy; many of us believe he committed felony crimes there. If now he’s going to be accused of intentionally and knowingly ordering serious violations of international law, it’s not going to go well for the United States. We’re already viewed as a rogue nation around the world. But here’s something the President most likely knew about and condoned.

Olbermann read a bit from this Washington Post editorial that explains what the Bush Administration wants:

[WaPo:] It wants authorization for the CIA to hide detainees in overseas prisons where even the International Committee of the Red Cross won’t have access. It wants permission to interrogate those detainees with abusive practices that in the past have included induced hypothermia and “waterboarding,” or simulated drowning. And it wants the right to try such detainees, and perhaps sentence them to death, on the basis of evidence that the defendants cannot see and that may have been extracted during those abusive interrogation sessions.

We might note that WaPo says “it” wants rather than “the President” wants.

The editorial is titled “A Defining Moment for America.” Olbermann asked Turley if this is indeed a defining moment, adding, “If the President gets his way, have we just become what the terrorists want us to become?”

Turley: Well, I’m afraid it would be, but this is really a redefining moment. You know, I always tell people — the president used that term as well — that our defining moment came in 1787, when we defined ourselves in a constitutional document that committed us to the rule of law. And what would happen here, if we embraced torture at the President’s invitation, would be to redefine ourselves, and we would become something that we have long fought against.

[Update: See also Billmon.]

If there is one point I would like to see written in the sky in 100-foot-high letters, it’s this: President Bush and his enablers went down this road not because they are strong, but because they are weak.

On last night’s Hardball — I believe it was last night — Jack Murtha told Chris Matthews that the fight over the proposed “permission to torture” legislation is going on between Administration civilians — the overwhelming majority of whom never served in uniform and have no personal experience with war — and the military. It’s Weenies versus Warriors, in other words, and Bush is the chief Weenie.

Most of the Bushies and the neocons generally are hothouse flowers who were either born into privilege or have been firmly entrenched in the power establishment for many years. They don’t know what real strength is; if you have power and privilege up the wazoo, bullying others around to get your way takes no strength at all. People who are physically and emotionally abusive of others are weak people who can’t control their own fears and impulses.

Bush and his followers think cruelty is “smart” and that people who hesitate to be cruel are weaklings. But time and time again, people with experience at war and intelligence; people who see the bigger picture; say that torture of prisoners and abuse of civilian populations is hurting our cause — assuming our cause is security and peace — more than helping it. I say that the torturers are the weak ones, because their actions are determined more by fear than by reason.

Bush and his followers think they are being “strong” by their cruelties and deceptions, which they hide in the dark, but in fact that is weakness. Strength involves keeping your integrity and being true to your principles no matter what the circumstances.

Indeed, if you toss your principles out the window as soon as they are less than expedient, they were never your principles to begin with.

Too many (although not all) “conservative” bloggers are siding with the torturers here. There’s something I want to say to them and to Captain Ed, in particular. He writes,

We have yet to fight against a wartime enemy that followed the GC with any consistency at all. The Germans routinely violated it even before Hitler began issuing orders to shoot captured pilots, and the massacre at Malmedy only crystallized what had been fairly brutal treatment at the hands of the Nazis for American prisoners (the Luftwaffe was one notable exception). The Japanese treatment of POWs was nothing short of barbaric, both before and after Bataan. The same is true for the North Koreans and the Chinese in the Korean War, and McCain himself is a routine example of the kind of treatment our men suffered at the hands of the Vietnamese.

I have in the past written about an uncle who was a POW of the Japanese from December 8, 1941 to August 1945. It’s true that the treatment of the POWs was cruel and barbaric. My cousin, David Faries, wrote his master’s thesis in military history about my uncle and other U.S. Marines who had been U.S. embassy guards in Peking when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. Here’s a quote:

… at the time of the Guadalcanal Invasion in 1942, much of the Japanese populace believed that Americans tortured prisoners. Rumors circulated that the barbarians churned tanks over those Japanese captured in the Solomon Islands. These of course were untrue, but they were widely believed. Japan, unlike the United States, was not bound to treat its prisoners under international law because she failed to ratify the Geneva Convention articles on prisoners of war. Japan claimed, however, she would observe its stipulations.

The Vatican, of all places, broadcast to the world Japan’s kindness to its captives. Prisoners of war in Japan and Japanese occupied territory, the Holy City reported, received ample supplies of soap, cigarettes, and money to purchase other items from their captors. Those who knew the truth but were unable to speak because of their plight meanwhile learned to avoid the wrath of an Ishihara or to “stand fast or move fast” when suddenly face to face with a “menacing bayonet or rifle butt.” Behind the cold wire walked death, hatred, and hunger. [David Oran Faries, “Home Is My Only Destination: William Harold Thomas, North China Marine, 1940-1945” (Master’s Thesis, Department of History, Western Illinois University, August 1985), pp. 69-70.]

In other words, the Japanese falsely believed Japanese prisoners were being treated barbarically by Americans, and they felt this gave them license to treat their American prisoners barbarically.

And now the American Right is following the same ghastly “logic”: They broke the rules first! Why do we have to be the ones who play by the rules? Only weaklings and children think that way.

We have to be the ones who play by the rules because that’s who we are. Or, at least, that’s who we used to be.

Update: Read Robert Kuttner in today’s Boston Globe:

My father was a machine gunner with the Army’s 28th Infantry Division, which was among the first units to march down the Champs-Elysées after the Allied liberation of Paris . In December 1944, having landed at Normandy and fought across France and Belgium, he was captured in the Battle of the Bulge, and sent hundreds of miles through northern Germany in an unheated boxcar in the dead of winter to a prison camp at Muhlberg in the east.

My father survived the war not because of the generosity of the Nazis to Jewish soldiers. The Germans must have been tempted to send captured Jewish American soldiers to Auschwitz along with Polish, German, and Dutch Jews and kindred human garbage. But they did not. My father survived because, amazingly, even the Nazis respected the reciprocal agreements on humane treatment of prisoners.

Not every enemy thinks this way, of course, but that doesn’t mean we have to become just like our worst enemies.

A tag team view of yesterday’s Gitmo news:

Editorial, Washington Post:

PRESIDENT BUSH took major steps yesterday toward cleaning up the mess his administration has made of the detention, interrogation and prosecution of those captured in the war on terrorism. …

… Yet as Mr. Bush took these constructive steps, he also undermined them. He delivered a full-throated defense of the CIA’s “alternative set of procedures” that the world properly regards as torture. With an election pending and families of Sept. 11 victims as his audience, he demanded legislative action on issues of enormous complexity in the few remaining days of the congressional session. And the bill he sent to Congress would authorize the administration to resume some of the worst excesses of the past five years….

…the detention and interrogation regime that Mr. Bush wants Congress to sanction is almost as bad as the one the Supreme Court forced him to set aside in the Hamdan case. Mr. Bush has no regrets about the interrogation tactics used on high-value detainees, which he did not name but which others have said included simulated drowning. He described the techniques as “tough” but “safe and lawful and necessary.” But they were not “lawful” — at least not as the Supreme Court has articulated the law. On the same day that U.S. generals were describing abusive techniques as ineffective and counterproductive, Mr. Bush insisted that the CIA’s program of secret detentions and coercive interrogations needs to continue.

Indeed, the bill he sent to Congress would largely authorize the system the administration created on its own after Sept. 11, 2001. It would allow military commission trials modeled principally on the ad hoc ones the military set up unilaterally. It would define compliance with Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions — which prohibits certain cruel and humiliating treatment of detainees — so as to allow categories of conduct the article clearly forbids. It would limit war crimes prosecutions for violations of Common Article 3 to certain specified serious violations. And it would eliminate most judicial review of detention policies. The administration seems to want a system in which the military keeps its hands clean while the CIA does the dirty work of violating international law and humanitarian norms.

And the president wants this system created in a matter of a few short days. “Time is of the essence,” he said. “Congress is in session just for a few more weeks, and passing this legislation ought to be the top priority.”

Editorial, New York Times:

Mr. Bush’s urgency was phony, driven by the Supreme Court’s ruling, not principle. This should all have happened long ago. If the White House had not wanted to place terror suspects beyond the reach of the law, all 14 of these men could have been tried by now, and America’s reputation would have been spared some grievous damage. And there would be no need for Congress to rush through legislation if the White House had not stymied all of its attempts to do just that before.

The nation needs laws governing Guantánamo Bay, not just for the 14 new prisoners, but also for many others who have been there for years without due process, and who may have done no wrong.

Last month, for example, The Washington Post wrote about some of the first arrivals at Guantánamo Bay in 2002: six men, born in Algeria but living in Bosnia, accused of plotting to attack the United States Embassy in Sarajevo. Two years after their capture, Bosnian officials exonerated them. Last year, the Bosnian prime minister asked Washington to release them. But The Post said the administration has decided the men will never be returned to Bosnia, only to Algeria, and then only if they are confined or kept under close watch. Even the Algerian government won’t go along with that.

Mr. Bush could have prevented this sort of miscarriage of justice if he had not insisted on creating his own system of military tribunals, which the Supreme Court ruled illegal. Even now, the legislation he is proposing to handle Guantánamo prisoners would undermine key principles of justice. It would permit the use of evidence obtained through coercion, along with hearsay evidence, and evidence that is kept secret from the accused. The military’s top lawyers have all publicly opposed these provisions.

Mr. Bush also wants to rewrite American law to create a glaring exception to the Geneva Conventions, to give ex post facto approval to abusive interrogation methods, and to bar legal challenges to the new system.

Some of the most influential Republican voices on military affairs, Senators John Warner, John McCain and Lindsey Graham, are sponsoring a more sensible bill that would bar the use of coerced testimony and secret evidence. Members of this Congress have a nasty habit of caving in to the White House on national security, and there’s a looming election, but it is vital that they stick to their principles this time.

Glenn Greenwald:

This announcement may appear superficially to constitute a reversal, or even a capitulation, by the Bush administration, but there are significant political benefits to be gained from the White House’s maneuver, including election-season pressure on lawmakers to support policies the administration has pursued all along for the “war on terror.” …

…Republican strategists have made explicitly clear that their strategy for the midterm elections, now just two months away, is to highlight the terrorist threat to the fullest extent possible. Accordingly, top Bush officials, including the president, have spent the last week giving a series of extraordinary speeches about terrorism, featuring highly charged accusations of “appeasement,” along with escalated rhetoric equating the threat from al-Qaida to that posed by the Nazis during World War II and by Communists under Lenin and Stalin. Republicans clearly want the news dominated by alarming discussions of the terrorist threat, as opposed to the highly unpopular war in Iraq, which has receded from view in recent weeks despite continued grim developments.

Publicly showcasing the most dangerous and prized al-Qaida suspects, as the White House did Wednesday, has already provoked exactly the visceral reminders of the 9/11 attacks that the administration believes will provide it the most political punch. As the so-called 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheik Mohammed is one of the best-known and most ominous terrorists of all. Virtually every news Web site and cable news program is now repeatedly displaying the photograph of a bedraggled, angry Mohammed, taken after he was dragged out of bed in Pakistan in the middle of the night and detained by American soldiers in March 2003. Short of capturing Osama bin Laden, it is difficult to imagine what could bolster the administration’s political objectives more than having such a vivid and alarming image associated with the 9/11 attacks once again filling television and computer screens everywhere.

The transfer of these detainees to Guantánamo is also certain to provide the administration with a powerful new weapon as Congress debates various legislative proposals designed to regulate military commissions and interrogation techniques in the wake of the Hamdan ruling. The Bush administration is insisting that Congress do nothing more than simply endorse, legislatively, the military commissions that the administration already created. The administration is also seeking authorization for the CIA to employ controversial interrogation techniques such as prolonged sleep deprivation and waterboarding — a policy Vice President Cheney in particular has fought for fiercely on Capitol Hill. …

… In the past, the administration has depicted such efforts to protect fundamental principles of due process as “giving rights to terrorists.” By announcing that Mohammed himself is now to be one of the detainees to be tried before a Guantánamo tribunal, the administration is sure to argue that the “mastermind” of the 9/11 attacks does not deserve such privilege. Particularly for those in Congress facing tough reelection battles, the prospect of being depicted as an advocate for Khalid Sheik Mohammed is sure to give them pause when deciding if they will insist on greater safeguards for Guantánamo detainees.

Josh Marshall:

So here’s where we are. It now seems clear to just about everyone that the other shoe has now dropped. We know the president’s final strategy to keep the subpoenas at bay in 2007 and 2008. Put the worst al Qaida bad guys at Gitmo and force a rushed debate over legislation over how they will be tried. An up or down vote, either the president’s kangaroo courts or nothing.

Dare Democrats to vote for nothing. If they do, mutilate them with 30 seconds. If they don’t, sow dissension among the opposition.

It’s hardly a surprise. This whole White House is the fruit of the poison tree. Their national security policy has always been essentially political. Nothing has changed. It’s what all of us have always predicted.

Ezra Klein:

Meanwhile, the Corner is collapsing in paroxysms of glee over Bush’s brilliant move on detainees today. For reasons I don’t quite understand, Mario Loyola seems to think Bush “stole the terms of debate from the Democrats, and rewrote them, all in a single speech. It will be delightful to watch in coming days and hours as bewildered Democrats try to understand what just hit them, and then sort through the rubble of their anti-Bush national security strategy to see what, if anything, remains.” I’m not terrifically sure what the political implications of today’s move are, but it seems to me that Bush was forced by the Supreme Court to stop holding detainees illegally, and by Congress to stop torturing people. That he’s decided to say he’ll do these things is being greeted as a victory of epic proportions by the Corner crowd. The soft bigotry of low expectations, I guess.

Marjorie Cohn, ZNet:

Bush said his administration had “largely completed our questioning of the men” and complained that “the Supreme Court’s recent decision has impaired our ability to prosecute terrorists through military commissions and has put in question the future of the CIA program.”

He was referring to Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, in which the high court recently held that Bush’s military commissions did not comply with the law. …The Court also determined that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions applies to al Qaeda detainees. That provision of Geneva prohibits “outrages upon personal dignity” and “humiliating and degrading treatment.”

Bush called on Congress to define these “vague and undefined” terms in Common Article 3 because “our military and intelligence personnel” involved in capture and interrogation “could now be at risk of prosecution under the War Crimes Act.”

Congress enacted the War Crimes Act in 1996. That act defines violations of Geneva’s Common Article 3 as war crimes. Those convicted face life imprisonment or even the death penalty if the victim dies.

The President is undoubtedly familiar with the doctrine of command responsibility, where commanders, all the way up the chain of command to the commander in chief, can be held liable for war crimes their inferiors commit if the commander knew or should have known they might be committed and did nothing to stop or prevent them.

Bush defensively denied that the United States engages in torture and foreswore authorizing it. But it has been well-documented that policies set at the highest levels of our government have resulted in the torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of U.S. prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo….

…Throughout his speech, Bush carefully denied his administration had violated any laws during its “tough” interrogations of prisoners. Yet, the very same day, the Pentagon released a new interrogation manual that prohibits techniques including “waterboarding,” which amounts to torture.

Jeremy Brecher and Brendan Smith, The Nation:

The US War Crimes Act of 1996 makes it a felony to commit grave violations of the Geneva Conventions. The Washington Post recently reported that the Bush administration is quietly circulating draft legislation to eliminate crucial parts of the War Crimes Act. Observers on The Hill say the Administration plans to slip it through Congress this fall while there still is a guaranteed Republican majority–perhaps as part of the military appropriations bill, the proposals for Guantánamo tribunals or a new catch-all “anti-terrorism” package. …

…As David Cole of the Georgetown University Law Center pointed out in the August 10 issue of The New York Review of Books, the Supreme Court’s decision in Hamdan v. Rusmfeld “suggests that President Bush has already committed a war crime, simply by establishing the [Guantánamo] military tribunals and subjecting detainees to them” because “the Court found that the tribunals violate Common Article 3–and under the War Crimes Act, any violation of Common Article 3 is a war crime.” A similar argument would indicate that top US officials have also committed war crimes by justifying interrogation methods that, according to the testimony of US military lawyers, also violate Common Article 3.

Lo and behold, the legislation the Administration has circulated on Capitol Hill would decriminalize such acts retroactively.

Maura Reynolds, Richard B. Schmitt and David G. Savage, The Los Angeles Times:

It is not clear whether the president’s plan will gain traction on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers have been working for weeks on their own proposals for military commissions to try terrorist suspects.

Two of the leading authors of a nearly complete Senate bill, Armed Services Committee Chairman John W. Warner (R-Va.) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), said their bill differs from the administration plan in key areas — including the use of classified and coerced evidence — but also said that differences may not be insurmountable.

“The goal for me is to take the committee bill and the administration bill and find middle ground so we can get commissions authorized in a way that will withstand judicial scrutiny, get congressional buy-in, and be a form we can be proud of as a nation to render justice to terrorists,” Graham said.

Details of the Senate-drafted bill are expected to be released in the next two days, Warner said.

Democrats adopted a wait-and-see posture Wednesday, indicating they were more likely to support the Warner-Graham bill than the administration’s plan. Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the committee’s top Democrat, said he had “serious concerns” about the Bush bill.

Many Democrats described the policy outlined by Bush as a retreat for the administration. “This is a major reversal from past Bush administration policy, which held that no new law was needed. It is essentially a mea culpa, cloaked in rhetoric,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.).

In the House, where Republican members largely have supported the administration’s approach to detainees, Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-El Cajon), chairman of the Armed Services Committee, planned to convene a hearing on the administration’s proposal today. The administration’s proposed system would incorporate many procedures used for U.S. military personnel in court-martial proceedings — but with several major distinctions. It would allow hearsay evidence and confessions obtained through coercive interrogations, assuming a judge found the information to be probative and credible.

Atrios:

Since this is going to get nasty very quickly let me try to write it as slowly as I can:

It’s important to respect human rights because of what it says about us, not because of what it says about some of the assholes in custody.

BBC News:

President Bush has acknowledged the existence of secret CIA prisons and said 14 key terrorist suspects have now been sent to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

These would be the same secret prisons Dana Priest wrote about, I take it.

The suspects, who include the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, have now been moved out of CIA custody and will face trial.

Mr Bush said the CIA’s interrogation programme had been “vital” in saving lives, but denied the use of torture.

Sure.

He said all suspects will be afforded protection under the Geneva Convention.

But they weren’t afforded such protection before.

In a televised address alongside families of those killed in the 11 September 2001 attacks, Mr Bush said there were now no terrorist suspects under the CIA programme.

Mr Bush said he was making a limited disclosure of the CIA programme because interrogation of the men it held was now complete and because a US Supreme Court decision had stopped the use of military commissions for trials.

I wonder what brought this on?

Update: Thanks to merciless for the tip — at Crooks and Liars, Digby writes that this is a classic Rove maneuver to trap the Dems into appearing soft on terrorists. He quotes Mario Loyola at The Corner:

The President just pulled one of the best maneuvers of his entire presidency. By transferring most major Al Qaeda terrorists to Guantanamo, and simultaneously sending Congress a bill to rescue the Military Commissions from the Supreme Court’s ruling Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the President spectacularly ambushed the Democrats on terrain they fondly thought their own. Now Democrats who oppose (and who have vociferously opposed) the Military Commissions will in effect be opposing the prosecution of the terrorists who planned and launched the attacks of September 11 for war crimes.

The military tribunals that were operating at Guantanamo were not normal trials or even normal courts martial. President Bush declared that non-citizens whom he determined were terrorists would be “tried” by a military commission, which differs from a normal court in several ways. According to Wikipedia:

The accused are not allowed access to all the evidence against them. The presiding officers are authorized to consider secret evidence the accused have no opportunity to refute.

The presiding officers are authorized to consider evidence extracted under torture.

The presiding officers are authorized to consider evidence extracted through coercive interrogation techniques.

The general in overall charge of the commissions is sitting in on them. He is authorized to shut down any commission, without warning, and without explanation.

Secretary Rumsfeld has said that even an acquittal on all charges is no guarantee of a release; that he may choose to keep any detainee.

For all the articles written about the military tribunals I haven’t found one that explains exactly how they work or who has access to the proceedings or records of the proceedings. If anyone could help me out with that I’d appreciate it.

Very simply, the Hamdan decision said that the President doesn’t have the constitutional authority to establish military tribunals. However, the ruling doesn’t prevent Congress from passing legislation allowing tribunals at Guantanamo. The plan seems to be to use tribunal legislation as a wedge issue to hurt Democrats; if they hesitate to approve whatever nonsense the Republicans come up with, Republicans will claim the Dems are “soft on terrorism.” Dumping famously bad guys like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed into Gitmo ups the ante considerably.

However, Digby says the Dems can avoid the trap by advocating public trials à la Nuremberg. Considering all the World War II rhetoric coming out of the White House lately, this is a natural. And I have a feeling the White House really does not want public trials under Nuremberg rules —

Under the Nuremberg Charter, each defendant accused of a war crime was afforded the right to be represented by an attorney of his choice. The accused war criminals were presumed innocent by the tribunal and could not be convicted until their guilt was proven beyond a reasonable doubt. In addition, the defendants were guaranteed the right to challenge incriminating evidence, cross-examine adverse witnesses, and introduce exculpatory evidence of their own.

I say if it was good enough for Hermann Goering, it’s good enough for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Anyway, back to Digby:

The Republicans are gleefully assuming that Bush has cornered the hapless Democrats once again with this clever move. I don’t think so. Bush and Rumsfeld just repealed Godwin’s law and that means this WWII analogy goes both ways. The Democrats should insist that if it was good enough for the Nazis to have public trials with normal rules of evidence, it is good enough for Al Qaeda.

Without public trials, there will never be any proof of guilt and the United States will create martyrs in a movement that reveres martyrdom — secret trials play directly into the hands of the terrorists. At the very least, these accused terrorists must be tried under rules such as those used at Nuremberg that cannot be construed as unjust by reasonable people. Without that, we will have given the terrorists another excellent recruiting tool and more reasons for the Islamic moderates we desperately need as allies to mistrust us. It seems to me that we have done quite enough of that.

So if the Republicans try to use opposition to tribunal legislation (I am assuming Dems will oppose it), all the Dems have to do is holler NUREMBERG! and HERMANN GOERING! That should do it.

Last week, even as the revelation of Mary McCarthy’s firing was leaked to the press, another story hit the news — a European Union investigator named Gijs de Vries reported he had “not turned up any proof of secret renditions of terror suspects on EU territory.”

Guess again. From today’s Guardian by Richard Norton-Taylor:

The CIA has operated more than 1,000 secret flights over EU territory in the past five years, some to transfer terror suspects in a practice known as “extraordinary rendition”, an investigation by the European parliament said yesterday.
The figure is significantly higher than previously thought. EU parliamentarians who conducted the investigation concluded that incidents when terror suspects were handed over to US agents did not appear to be isolated. They said the suspects were often transported around Europe on the same planes by agents whose names repeatedly came up in their investigation.

They accused the CIA of kidnapping terror suspects and said those responsible for monitoring air safety regulations revealed unusual flight paths to and from European airports. The report’s author, Italian MEP Claudio Fava, suggested some EU governments knew about the flights. …

… His report, the first interim report by EU parliamentarians on rendition, obtained data from Eurocontrol, the European air safety agency, and gathered information during three months of hearings and more than 50 hours of testimony by individuals who said they were kidnapped and tortured by American agents, as well as EU officials and human rights groups.

Righties will dismiss this because Fava is a member of the EU Parliament’s socialist group. However, data is data.

Data showed that CIA planes made numerous secret stopovers on European territory, violating an international air treaty that requires airlines to declare the route and stopovers for planes with a police mission, he said. “The routes for some of these flights seem to be quite suspect. … They are rather strange routes for flights to take. It is hard to imagine … those stopovers were simply for providing fuel.”…

… The Bush administration has admitted to secret rendition flights but says it does not condone torture.

The EU Parliament is still investigating the secret prisons.