Just when you think things couldn't get any worse, today's Washington Post leads with another piece on the Bush administration's legacy of human rights atrocities. This new revelation involves "Black Sites": secret prison facilities in eastern European "democracies" where detainees are held and "interrogated" - outside the jurisdiction of US law, or any other law apparently:
The hidden global internment network is a central element in the CIA's unconventional war on terrorism. It depends on the cooperation of foreign intelligence services, and on keeping even basic information about the system secret from the public, foreign officials and nearly all members of Congress charged with overseeing the CIA's covert actions.
The existence and locations of the facilities -- referred to as "black sites" in classified White House, CIA, Justice Department and congressional documents -- are known to only a handful of officials in the United States and, usually, only to the president and a few top intelligence officers in each host country. [...]It is illegal for the government to hold prisoners in such isolation in secret prisons in the United States, which is why the CIA placed them overseas, according to several former and current intelligence officials and other U.S. government officials. Legal experts and intelligence officials said that the CIA's internment practices also would be considered illegal under the laws of several host countries, where detainees have rights to have a lawyer or to mount a defense against allegations of wrongdoing.
Andrew Sullivan takes up the issue of legality:"The assumption is that the president has authority to set up prisons that would be illegal in the U.S. and illegal in foreign countries, but legal ... according to what? No wonder Bush wants Roberts and Alito on the court."
So far, no reports on this in the German press, but the Austrian derStandard.at has a brief summary of the Post artcle.
UPDATE: Soj looks into the reports that one of the CIA secret prisons is in Romnania.
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