Secret jails too useful to close, says Bush

By Michael Gawenda
Sydney Morning Herald
Sep. 07, 2006

GEORGE BUSH has acknowledged for the first time that the CIA runs secret prisons at undisclosed locations around the world.

The US President said on Wednesday that two of the alleged architects of the September 11 attacks had been transferred from these jails outside the US to Guantanamo Bay to face trial by proposed new military commissions.

Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the alleged chief planner of the attacks on New York and Washington, a key accomplice, and 12 other senior al-Qaeda operatives had allegedly given CIA interrogators information that had foiled terrorist attacks in the US and around the world, Mr Bush said. These included a plot to crash hijacked airliners into London's Heathrow Airport or Canary Wharf.

Mr Bush said the CIA's interrogation techniques in the secret prisons were tough, but the prisons would not be closed because the system was needed to get vital information that could stop major terrorist attacks.

"But the United States does not torture. It's against our laws and it's against our values. I have not authorised it and I will not authorise it."

In a speech at the White House, Mr Bush detailed some of the information the 14 al-Qaeda prisoners had revealed and the way this had led to the arrest of some of their alleged colleagues.

Following Mr Bush's comments, members of the European Parliament demanded that their governments disclose the locations of the secret CIA prisons.

A leader of the European human rights watchdog, the Council of Europe, said the revelation vindicated its investigation on secret prisons and CIA flights moving suspects around Europe. "Our work has helped to flush out the dirty nature of this secret war, which - we learn at last - has been carried out completely beyond any legal framework," said Rene van der Linden, the parliamentary assembly president of the Council of Europe.

A report last year that the CIA had run secret prisons in Europe unleashed a spate of inquiries prompting uncomfortable denials by European governments and evasions from Washington.

"The location of these prison camps must be made public," said a German legislator, Wolfgang Kreissl-Doerfler, a member of the European Parliament committee investigating the allegations. He urged the EU member Poland and the candidate country Romania to speak out about accusations that they hosted secret detention centres on their soil.

"By his admission that the CIA has indeed practised illegal kidnapping and detention, Bush exposes not only his own previous lies," said Sarah Ludford, a British member of the European Parliament. "He also exposes to ridicule those arrogant government leaders in Europe who dismissed as unfounded our fears about 'extraordinary rendition'."

The shift in US policy to transfer key terrorist suspects from jails outside the US to Guantanamo Bay to face new military commissions came as the Pentagon renounced the harsh interrogation tactics adopted since September 11. The US Defence Department on Wednesday issued directives that specifically forbids US troops from using forced nudity, hooding, military dogs and waterboarding, which simulates drowning.

For the first time there will be a uniform standard for both enemy prisoners of war and the so-called unlawful combatants linked to al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

The documents say US forces must adhere to the standards of the Geneva Conventions' common article 3, which prohibits "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment".