Closing Guantánamo is a shared responsibility

 A UN report released yesterday on the global practice of secret rendition and torture has reaffirmed that the US are not solely responsible for the mistreatment of prisoners in the so-called ‘war on terror’. Secret detention facilities have been discovered in Romania, Poland and Lithuania.

The report indicates that a number of European countries have been complicit in the violation of international human rights law and international humanitarian law as secret detention is irreconcilable with both. The report proves that Europe has a fundamental role to play in ending post 9/11 policy and beginning an era of transparency. The first step to doing this is by closing Guantánamo Bay and by agreeing to resettle fifty vulnerable prisoners who have been through unimaginable suffering.

Europe has openly condemned the use of rendition flights and secret detention facilities. Yet in 2007, in a report from the Council of Europe, Assembly Rapporteur on secret rendition, Dick Marty stated that he had enough “evidence to state that secret detention facilities run by the CIA did exist in Europe from 2003 to 2005, in particular in Poland and Romania.” Marty’s report drew on testimony from over 30 current and former members of intelligence services in the US and Europe.

In Poland, eight High Value Detainees were allegedly held between 2003 and 2005 in the village of Stare Kiejkuty, including Abu Zubayadh, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi bin al Shibh, Tawfiq [Waleed] bin Attash and Ahmed Khalfan [ al] Ghailani. In a leaked ICRC report Khalid Sheikh Mohammed stated that he knew he was in Poland when he received a bottle of water with a Polish label.

In August 2009 US intelligence officials disclosed to the New York Times, that Kyle D. Foggo, then Chief of CIA’s main European supply base in Frankfurt, oversaw the construction of three CIA detention centres, “each built to house about half a dozen detainees” and they added that one jail was a renovated building on a busy street in Bucharest, Romania.”

These secret detention facilities were not designed to be holiday camps for prisoners. They were designed to ‘induce maximum disorientation, dependence and stress in the detainee.’ Knowingly or unknowingly European states have participated in the construction of secret detention facilities. According to this report, every instance of secret detention is by definition incommunicado detention. Prolonged incommunicado detention may facilitate the use of torture and other cruel inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment and can in itself constitute such treatment.

More recently ABC news broke the story that Lithuania officials provided the CIA with a building where as many as eight terror suspects were held for more than a year. This prison was closed a result of this public disclosure. It is not known where these persons were transferred; the likelihood is that they have been moved into ‘war zone facilities’ in Iraq and Afghanistan, or to another black site, potentially in Africa.

European countries are renowned throughout the world for their commitment to the protection of fundamental rights and liberties. This is a history still being written -- unlike that of the Gulags of Soviet Russia or the enforced Latin American disappearances. Europe has an opportunity to put pen to paper and correct the wrongs which have occurred since 2001. A thorough investigation of the accusations put forward in this report must be undertaken immediately. According to the UN, the failure to effectively investigate ‘may lead to a situation of grave impunity and is injurious to the victims.’

We must also remember those who have been the victims of this cruel system. Fifty men in Guantánamo, are in need of international protection, they remain there because they have nowhere else to go. Europe these men need you! Please offer them a home.